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IN a recent survey, more people in the UK ticked the ‘none of the above’ box when asked about their faith than those who chose a belief from all those mentioned. For the first time, more Britons declared themselves to be non-believers than those who asserted their belief in Christianity. This is a significant shift in a country whose official faith is identified with the Church of England.
This sharp drop in the number of practising Christians is evident in the empty pews in churches across the country. And those who attend Sunday service are more likely than not grey-haired people who come to church more out of a sense of social tradition than as a religious requirement. Couples still get married in church; babies are baptised there; and funerals are conducted by parish priests.
However, more babies are now born out of wedlock, and an increasing number of couples now have civil marriages and skip the religious ceremony. More couples live together without getting married at all. Many of these relationships last a lifetime, and in case of a break-up, both partners have the same rights as those in a formal marriage.
Clearly, then, Britain has evolved into a post-religious state where religion plays virtually no part in daily life or in the public discourse. And in this evolution, it is not alone: many Scandinavian and western European countries have similar attitudes towards organised religion. In one survey, only 16.5 per cent of Swedes out of a Christian population of over 80pc felt that religion was important to them. Surveys in Finland, Norway and Denmark reflected a similar lack of concern for faith.
Countries like Australia, New Zealand and the United States report a similar trend, with younger people more likely than their elders of declaring themselves atheists, agnostics, humanists and even Jedi knights. But this sharp decline in church attendance has not been accompanied with a corresponding breakdown in law and order or public morality. If anything, crime has fallen in recent years, and many European countries have reported a decline in alcohol consumption.
Many of the countries named here figure low down in the corruption list issued by the Transparency International, and do well in the Human Happiness Index. Unsurprisingly, they are also at the top of per capita GDP rankings. So as a rule of thumb, we can place secular states among the most highly developed in the world.
Those states that identify themselves closely with faith do not fare well in these global sweepstakes. Whether Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu, ultra-religious societies don’t do very well in worldly terms: chances are that they are poor, backward and badly educated. Those Asian states like China, Japan and South Korea that have prospered over the last few decades have done so without seeking the blessings of a higher power. None of these countries are particularly violent, and crime is well under control Indeed, China is an avowedly atheistic state.
While all religions preach peace and non-violence, it is ironic that these blessings elude those who most publicly pronounce their faith. Even Buddhism, that most pacific of all religions, has seen a sharp rise in violence in states where it is followed. Thus, Sri Lanka witnessed a terrible civil war in which thousands were killed, and where a largely Buddhist army stands accused of war crimes. In Myanmar, Buddhist monks are leading a barbaric campaign against Muslim Rohingyas. And in Thailand, a mostly Buddhist army is locked in a low-level but nasty civil war with separatist Muslims in the south of the country.
In much of the Islamic world, Muslim-on-Muslim killings are too widespread to need repeating here. Although Muslims never tire of pronouncing that theirs is a peaceful religion, the rest of the world increasingly associates Islam with violence. Saudi Arabia, the religious centre of Sunni Islam, is also home to the Wahabi/Salafi strand of the faith that has given theological justification to terrorist groups from Al Qaeda to the militant Islamic State group. The ayatollahs of Iran have forcibly imposed a theocracy on their people that is completely out of sync with the 21st century.
In India, a fierce nationalism has imbued contemporary Hinduism with a zeal and a violent streak that was unheard of for centuries. The religion had been a rather eclectic, diffuse set of beliefs in different gods, and admitted different faiths without straining its core principles. Other beliefs flourished in this tolerant milieu. This is no longer true as the Hindutva philosophy has turned millions into militants.
Given this evidence, it is fair to ask if secularism is not the way forward. The result of the ferment of ideas known as the Enlightenment, the secular ideal of the 18th century was to separate a dogmatic church from the state. The American constitution of 1789 was the first to incorporate secularism as its guiding principle. Many other democracies followed suit to the point where religion no longer features in the public life of most advanced states.
In the developing world, another scenario emerged in the post-colonial era. Here, as European states withdrew after the Second World War, the native elites who took over maintained the same secular laws, but corruption and poor governance discredited these institutions. Religious parties and ideas gained credibility as a result, and have come to occupy centre stage.
With this erosion of secularism has come a steady rise of religious extremism. Sadly, attitudes towards modern education, logic and science have been coloured by the same distrust of secularism and everything modern. More and more, rationality is equated with Western values, and seen as something to be spurned.
But emotions and sentiment apart, the statistics show that societies that can separate religious beliefs from the affairs of the state — an ideal that Jinnah believed in — do better than theocracies.
Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2016
