Why humanism is the future, with David Voas | Humanists UK Convention 2023

[Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] why human is the future and David is Professor of social sciences at University College London where he led the social Research Institute until 2020. he has senior roles in the European value study and various scholarly associations and serves on the editorial Boards of academic journals in his field his research is mainly concerned of religious change in modern societies based on quantitative analysis of large survey data sets please don't forget to tweet along with our hashtag humanists2023 and we look forward to hearing from David please welcome him on stage thank you good morning it's a pleasure to be here in Liverpool one of my favorite cities in the country it was actually here some 25 years ago that in midlife I returned to academic life and started my proper career and now towards the end of it it's wonderful to be back I'm going to talk about the future of humanism and the future of religion and remotely enough they're going in different directions religion is in Decline Across the Western World and that's whether we measure it by believing belonging participation and services the importance people attach to it religion is losing ground Society is being transformed and the momentum appears to be unstoppable now you might be asking yourself two questions is this actually true and even if it is could things change and my answers are going to be uh it is true and no that isn't going to change modernization has predictable uh and permanent effects and one of those is what I call the secular transition this is one of the big social transitions along with the demographic transition the movement towards gender equality for example that helped to make the modern world what it is now the key fact here is that the pattern of decline isn't the people reach the age of 30 or 40 and then suddenly decide they're not interested in religion or they don't believe in superstitious things anymore it's that they enter adulthood less religious than their parents were and then they stay that way so the consequence is that the older Generations are the most religious they die out and they're replaced in the population by younger generations and this process has been going on for several decades in some countries 100 years or more now as I said we can see this pattern however we measure religious involvement uh let's sorry there we go right direction okay uh let's just start with some examples let's take New Zealand now there's actually a census in New Zealand just a few months ago but the most recent one for which we have data came from 2018 uh but it's remarkable if you look back to census in the 1980s and that people who were born at the beginning of the 20th century virtually all of them said they had a religion and now if you look at people born towards the end of the 20th century uh we're down to 30 so that's quite a change well you can see pretty much the same picture uh however you measure it and wherever you look in the west but also actually in highly developed Societies in East Asia and Latin America and elsewhere um maybe you're thinking well okay with affiliation and attendance that uh is not unexpected but what about belief even when we look at belief and even if we look at the United States let's compare uh those who were born early in the 20th century with people who were born more recently and there's an enormous difference uh between the three quarters so who say they believe in God and have no doubts about it in the US I in the oldest generation versus uh just a third in the youngest similar story in Canada I hear the contrast is for religious or spiritual beliefs so we're broadening it out not just conventional religion and finally in Britain this is really hot off the press some of you might have seen the stories in the paper just I think it was last week or the week before from the world value survey in which I'm also involved this was a study then just last year uh and amongst people aged 75 and over uh 59 said yes to the question do you believe in God Only 17 amongst young adults said the same okay so is it the case that people are just getting more religious with age well no that's not how it works it's not an age effect it's a permanent generation gap people become reasonably settled uh in how they identify themselves what they do in terms of religious practice and Believe by about their mid-20s now of course we all know many people who have either lost faith or returned to Faith or come to Faith in adulthood but within any given generation those gains and losses pretty much balance out with the effect that you have these generational patterns of religion or non-religion so the sorts of questions uh you might be asking about this secularization thesis there's a connection between modernization and religious decline is well isn't it the case that religion seems very strong and persistent around the world and uh couldn't it be the case that it's transforming itself rather than declining well religion does seem to thrive more in some places than in others and people habitually point to the United States as one of those places where it seems to do very well but even in the US now they're very clear signs of decline likewise I think the evidence is pretty clear that religion although it may be changing is also losing ground and although people are interested in alternative spirituality and other things those gains go nowhere near making up for the losses to secularization well so far so good or so bad depending on your views about religion um but couldn't things change might the popularity of religion in the west are rebelled you know Faith you would think would promise benefits that just aren't available from the likes of us churches can promise eternal life being reunited with loved ones ultimate Justice and and that sort of thing um and indeed some people suggest that humans are just naturally religious and that secularity is a kind of phase we're going through well a lot of people are and comfortable with the idea the sort of Victorian idea of progress uh that were moving towards a destination to becoming uh the sort of people who are remarkably like us and although nothing is irreversible I'd suggest that it's pretty clear things are not going to change if we look at measures such as the human development index now this is an index that's produced by United Nations agency at the moment Switzerland is at the top South Sudan is at the bottom there's a very high correlation between the position on the human development index and levels of secularity so long as modernization persists I think that is going to be the case now there are some countries that are off the trend line typically they're on the Arabian Peninsula which have a lot of oil wealth but have modernized quite recently and socially speaking there's still very traditional societies and in discussing the impact of modernization though I really am looking at the top 40 or 50 countries in the world on this measure uh they're mostly North America Europe Australia New Zealand but also East Asia increasingly in Latin America there are great many countries though it has to be said even up to 140 150 around the world that are still not modernized to the extent that religion has lost ground significantly what is it about shouldn't that has this impact well there are all sorts of possible candidates it would take many more talks to explore them properly but some of the effects are to do with prosperity which brings Choice which brings security uh certainly mobility and our comfort with diversity has something to do with it and the corrosive impact of pluralism on specific belief systems but that as I say is in a sense of matter for another day what is crucial here I think is that it's very hard for religion to bounce back the secular transition is well my irreversible why should that be the case well I think the key reason is that once lost religion is very hard to bring back and people who have no religion find it much more difficult to acquire one than people who have been raised in a religion let me give you some examples uh think about a religion that isn't your own and I'm going to assume that most of you probably well not all of you are not Hindu if you are Hindu or if the Prime Minister has snuck into the back of the room is that possible uh then excuse me just think of a different religion that might not be the the one you subscribe to well these are some Hindu deities these are some Hindu worship practices they will probably seem very alien and maybe even a little bit scary to you now my point is not that there's anything especially odd about them it's just that they're not the ones we grew up with are they're cultural practices that we're unfamiliar with and we would find very difficult to adopt because they in a sense don't come naturally so I'm not arguing that uh there's anything peculiar especially about religious belief it's just that religion the contemporary culture isn't conducive to the kind of Revival that would be necessary to bring it back most young people in the west these days grew up without the sort of contact with churches or mainstream organized religion uh that people of my generation and many of yours are will have known uh with the results that for them Christianity is just as alien as Hinduism now again I'm not arguing that westerners are all rationalists with a naturalistic Viewpoint you know on the contrary uh half of people continue to believe in God or life after death the point is that they don't think about it very much they have no interest in being religiously active uh it isn't particularly important in their lives they don't spend time and energy on it so the secular transition is well and truly underway it works by a generational Replacements it will continue for many years to come nothing is certain when it comes to human beings but I think there's really no way back for religion in the West so now let's look specifically at Great Britain and Ian Scott the humanist events organizer was very keen that I talk about the census uh because of course the census results are just coming out uh the new and and interesting it's something that humanists have long had an interest in uh the religion question that goes back 20 years now and of course it's somewhat exciting news from our point of view that the Christian percentage according to the census has finally dropped below 50 percent well for those of us who are in the business of looking at religious statistics this is old news because the British social attitude survey which started in uh 1983 has for some time shown the Christian percentage below 50 in fact if you look at this purple line here that's the Christian proportion of the population uh it was up around two-thirds according to the PSA survey in 1983 but around 2009 or so it dropped below the 50 Mark it's down about 38 at the moment and you can see it's been overtaken by people who say they have no religion uh with the non-Christian religions uh growing steadily towards the bottom of the graph but are still a pretty small proportion of the population okay but the esteem of official statistics is such that uh The Daily Telegraph and other papers could Proclaim Christians now and minority in England and Wales for the first time that was when the religion results came out in November of last year well why should there be a difference between the census and all of these surveys or one reason is the census question what is your religion is a leading one it encourages people to choose one this is something that humanist UK have objected to for some time uh that's combined with the vagueness of the undifferentiated Christian category which seems a sort of quasi-ethnic classification but there's I think a more interesting puzzle and that is that the BSA survey shows the decline as being wholly generational so let me explain what this graph is about you have the survey years along the bottom horizontal axis vertical axis is percentage of the population and then these various colored lines represent Decades of birth so the oldest people born at the beginning of the 20th century are right up at the top and you can see in excess of 80 of those said they had a religion and each successive generation is one step down from the one before in terms of religious belonging until you get to people born in the 1990s fewer than a quarter of whom regard themselves as a belonging to a religion now the interesting thing is that these lines are more or less horizontal in terms of trends that is to say people within those Decades of birth do not change on average year to year yes there are gains and losses but those gains and losses balance each other out within each decade of birth so all of the decline as shown by the British social attitude survey is generational what does that mean well it means that change is very slow because you have to wait for these old people to die out and be replaced in the population by the younger people coming up behind but it also means that it's very difficult to reverse it's uh the kind of process where once people are introduced into adulthood not having a religion they're not going to change right they're like these people here who have gone through decades and decades all with the same average level of religiosity okay well the census is interestingly different so here now we see the three censuses for which we've had a question on religion 2000 2011 2021 again uh these uh five-year birth cohorts now and it is remarkable that even when you look at people just in five year intervals of birth you have this step-by-step generational succession uh each line lower than the one before in terms of religious affiliation but now the lines are not horizontal they're downward sloping so what that means is that people who said they were Christian 10 years ago are no longer sang their Christian right and of course there are many who are still saying they're Christian uh but it's not as many as you might have expected why is there such stability in the BSA survey measure and not in the census well it's an interesting puzzle I think the wording of the question certainly makes a difference the BSA uh the question was probably capturing people who were more strongly uh identified with the religion whereas the census was capturing people whose affiliation was sort of weak unstable uh [Music] they generally weren't so committed but it's clear whatever is going on this generational pattern is a powerful driver of future change let's turn to the Church of England now I'm we have an established church but it's increasingly a pretty unpopular church so first just a few figures again from the British social attitude survey back in 1983 40 said they belonged to the Church of England it's now down to 12 percent if we look at that by age and remember age reflects generation and generational differences of persistence uh in the 75 plus category in 2018 a third of people identify themselves as Anglican down in the young adult group it was one percent one percent said that they were belonging to the Church of England now what we see amongst young people today is the future so that's the future of the Church of England our established church this is to me an even more remarkable slide I look at the survey results so the samples are generally thousands of people so we've got 100 or 100 in any given age group in this particular age group of 18 to 24 year olds in 2014 there were five individuals in the sample who said they were Anglican that was four in 2015 three in 2016 two in 2012. there was one person one person in the entire British social attitude survey aged 18 to 24 who said that he or she was Anglican that year the numbers have got so slow so low that the national Center for social research that does the British social attitude survey doesn't even release the figures by denomination anymore because they're so low they're concerned about disclosure in other words if you said you were Anglican you would be such a freak that people could find you and that would be a bad thing okay now the the problem for churches isn't that adult adults leave is that they never joined so it's a failure if you like of religious reproduction um there are a couple of interesting points about religious socialization one is that [Music] um it doesn't always succeed in producing religious adults so there are many many adolescents who are raised in families where there is some kind of religious education but it doesn't take and so they enter adulthood not being religious but families are still extremely important in fact they're probably the most important vehicle for the transmission of religion parents who are less religious tend to produce children who are less religious they go on of course in the adult life to be less religious themselves have less religious families so there's a kind of feedback effect here and that feedback effect is uh having an impact on the future of religion in the UK now one of the there are a number of ways we can measure this I'll run through them very quickly we can ask people about how religious their mothers and fathers were and you can then come up with a scale from 0 to 12 for example of the religiosity of their parents you can compare that with their own religiosity and it's remarkably linear in other words there's a strong predictive power in knowing how religious somebody's parents were seeing how they turned out now there's a lot of regression to the mean that is to say the very unreligious parents are more at risk of having children who turn out to be a bit religious and vice versa strongly religious parents don't uh on average transmit all of that and all of these are averages but still it's interesting to see how effective that is the same is true if we look at religiosity versus religious affiliation I'm going to go quickly now because I want to leave some time for questions but um I think I can get through the remained remainder in a few minutes we can also ask people what qualities they think are most important in raising children and this is a question that's been done for many many years in fact it was first done in the United States back in the early 20th century and at that time people were saying things like obedience uh is a very important policy for children to have well these days we tend to put more stress on things like Independence and tolerance and religious faith has pretty much fallen off the charts so even amongst people who say that they're a Christian only 18 are putting religious Faith as one of five qualities they think that children really need to learn at home and even amongst people who say that religion is very important in their lives fewer than half are making it a priority for children so again more signs of decline uh how's the Church of England's faring well frankly not very well uh it's really becoming a minuscule part of the population uh other churches are also not doing particularly well religion as a whole has a rather poor reputation the it's very hard to see where Revival could come from so there are various findings from surveys including General lack of confidence in in churches uh of course there's a different picture when we look at other religious groups the religious landscape is being transformed uh partly through uh non-Christian religions and some oops um 11 or so percent of the younger stage groups are now people of Muslim heritage I think in due course many of them will have no religion but at least for the foreseeable future uh they will continue to identify as Muslim Hindu and Sikh and so we have an idea of how that's going to affect the uh the religious landscape uh and it will have some effect so here again from the world value survey that was just released uh very recently we can compare the age profile of the whole population that's on the left with the white British population so these bars represent age groups the youngest ones on the left oldest ones on the right and if you look first on the right here the white British population you'll see that the oldest age group has relatively high levels of belief in God around 59 the younger stage groups something more like 17 okay so very steep gradient there once you include all the ethno-religious minority groups that gradient is nothing like as steep so there is certainly an impact of religious change generally [Music] in the UK all right I'm conscious that I'm near the time when I wanted to hand over for questions but let me just refer to an area where humanism is particularly strong and that's in ceremonies now churches have traditionally been the place where you went for uh naming ceremonies baptisms weddings funerals all of those are on decline on decline in decline in the Church of England baptisms have pretty well gone off the cliff confirmations have totally gone off the cliff in fact confirmations will probably disappear as a ceremony it will be like the churching of women after childbirth just something that is talked about as a historical artifact uh funerals have been pretty much the Last Frontier for churches uh people traditionally have fallen into the pattern of just going along with the convention and that some priest would do the honors but even that is changing as you know so in conclusion what do we have we have a situation where religion is declining around the world that decline is generational so it's very difficult to reverse uh all forms of religion and spirituality are in Decline pretty much in Britain the Church of England is becoming a minority sect and the humanist worldview and humanist ceremonies I think have a great future before them they will gradually become the dominant Force so something we might have to look forward to is this oh yes this this will be our next coronations all right thank you very much thank you very much for that I'm sure we'll all agree that was very interesting and I know as a public affairs manager that I'll be using and I continuously use lots of that data so um let's start with some questions and some kind of ground rules I'm going to start for women first because I know that evidence shows that women do once a woman ask questions more women ask questions and then before you speak please wait for the mic to be handed to you so everyone else can hear what you're saying so I can see you put your hand up there can we get some like over there great and what we'll do is we'll collect two questions so only everyone else can raise their hands as well now and I'll come let's go for a question nearby okay two questions thank you for your very interesting talk I just wanted to ask if you've done any work comparing the increase in um mental States psychological difficulties stress that sort of thing whether you've done any comparative studies whether that increases as religion decreases another question see just behind you thanks these are very welcome findings um but I'm really a little concerned about whether the questions being asked are still relevant it seems to me questions about abstractions such as religion and Faith are becoming increasingly less useful why not include some really simple straightforward questions such as do you believe you will re-mute your loved ones after death I think that will be much more um Illuminating yeah okay so to quickly answer those um there is a good deal of research being done by psychologists of religion on issues like religion or spirituality and stress or mental health generally I'm afraid that's not my area so I'm probably not qualified to speak on it I on the second question I absolutely agree that we do need to broaden our Horizons it's not just about organized religion it's about World Views in general and particularly if you like supernaturalist World Views belief in life after death remains remarkably popular and actually a lot of young people say that they're at least open to the possibility of life after death I'm frankly not sure why that's the case I'm intrigued by it they clearly are not thinking about conventional heaven and hell they're thinking about the possibility of reincarnation or for all I know zombies and vampires and I think it's a very tentative belief system that doesn't really impinge much on their daily lives but there is something there about the persistence in interest in life after death that needs to be explored thank you all right it's hands up so I can see some of the the earrings and from this side oh we've got our humanification president Adam Rutherford has a hand up oh there we go hello uh my question is about population urban and rural whether any comparison has been made about belief in the Church of England in small rural communities as against the urban environment I've got some experience of small rural communities and they're still very centered on the CRV way of life thank you and we get another question there you've got the mic over there we're getting like to Adam as well yeah thank you um is there any correlation at all so I'm here oh yeah sorry yeah is there any correlation at all between increasing rationalism and the decline of religion I mean I'm just wondering how much evidence there is for your claim at the end that a humanist worldview is increasing um there's less religion but is there any more rationalism there's an awful lot of magical thinking at them that's going on you know when we look at the news this morning with Trump and Johnson and all their supporters yeah so that's my question yeah no it's a good question um I I think the thing I would say there is that change is very slow you know we're accustomed to thinking about periods of years maybe at most decades and a lot of these changes I take decades or centuries if we compare the kind of world view that people have now with what was common even a century ago it's hugely different I mean even the pope uh is likely to be in many respects a secularist compared to a pope from the late 19th century who could still still rail against the forces of modernity having said that I take your point there's an awful lot of superstition about and I don't think we're especially close to living in a rational secular humanist Utopia by any means and in rural community is absolutely the CV remains very strong it's socially important in many communities um you still find levels of attendance and of course the traditional rights of Passage and so on much higher there than in suburbs or or urban areas it's on the corner and we've also got Adam who's got the mic prefer me first go go ahead um thank you David that was an excellent talk um you were primarily talking about the white West where we're going through a demographic transition in which most in most Western countries birth rates and fertility rates are are dropping but of course the global birth rate and fertility races continues to increase and will do for the next hundred years or so so I'm thinking about countries in West Africa and India which maintain High degrees of religiosity so what is I wonder if you could comment on what the global picture looks like yes well it's certainly the case that worldwide non-religion is not taking over because the countries that continue to grow through natural increase are the ones that are most religious there's this close association between fertility and religiosity as their if you like patterns of traditional life that mean that I'm sub-Saharan Africa is growing fast it's also the most religious part of the world uh and so you have this sort of odd phenomenon that on the one hand at an individual country level you can see signs of secularization setting in in many many places but in global aggregate terms religion remains very strong and indeed growing um if you had asked me 20 years ago I would have just said flat out I it's only in the developed West and maybe in a couple of places in the Far East where you can see secularization now we really are seeing it on every continent so certainly in Latin America a lot of religious decline they're in a good deal of Asia are much less the case in Africa but even in Africa there are humanist and secularist associations that are you know managing to struggle along even though they're typically suppressed so I I'm I'm not pessimistic looking around the world okay we have time to pick one more question to go in the corner thank you thank you I just want to share a challenge that came came my way really which was um I went to the launch of a book um in in Leeds by a Leeds author called uh suhaima Manzo Khan and the book's called uh Tangled in Terror and it's basically about the experience of islamophobia from the point of view of a Divine Muslim which is how she introduces herself um and she makes a particular a lot of it's about the prevent strategy and other government policies and their prejudicial effects but she talks in particular about secularism which she maintains is nothing but a continuation of the same tendency of Christian evangelism from the 19th century of trying to impose what what we would think of as a superior point of view on people that we regard as backward and primitive all right and I noticed in in the talk we mentioned modernization now modernization and advanced societies and so on yeah and aren't we open to that accusation that we're just proving my point you know proven and and if you go back with yeah yeah it doesn't you're wrong because yeah so yes I think we are open to that accusation and it's an interesting one to discuss I think there are genuine effects of modernization and there are real things we can point to that suggest certain values have benefits that other values don't but it's a big topic and one that we should probably leave to another Forum thank you very much so thank you for David [Applause]

Channel: Humanists UK

Views: 7,758

Keywords: BHA, Humanism, Secularism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Education, Talks, Lectures, BritishHumanistAssociation, Non-religious, Science, Philosophy, Census, Religion and belief

Id: FfI7VgkDFMg

Length: 39min 10sec (2350 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023