More people than ever before are identifying as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise nonreligious, with potentially world-changing effects.
National Geographic noticed the trend and recently wrote about the number of churches around the world that are going out of business.
In March, the U.K. Mennonites held their last collective service, a decision driven by parishioner deaths and sadly a lack of interest.
It might seem easy to predict that plain-dressing Anabaptists—who follow a faith related to the Amish—would become irrelevant in the age of smartphones, but this is part of a larger trend. Around the world, when asked about their feelings on religion, more and more people are responding with a apathy.
The religiously unaffiliated, called “nones,” are growing significantly.
They’re the second largest religious group in North America and most of Europe. In the United States, nones make up almost a quarter of the population. In the past decade, U.S. nones have overtaken Catholics, mainline protestants, and all followers of non-Christian faiths.
But nones aren’t inheriting the Earth just yet. In many parts of the world—sub-Saharan Africa, China and several former communist countries in particular—religion is growing so fast that nones’ share of the global population will actually shrink in 25 years as the world turns into what one researcher has described as “the secularizing West and the rapidly growing rest.”