Religion is Already Dead (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)

Headlines claim a religious revival is happening, but the data tells a different story. Today on the Mike Drop, we’re looking at the "Zombie Store" of global faith. Using new research from Nature Communications and the latest 2025 Pew Global Sweep, I break down the 3-stage P-I-B model (Participation, Importance, Belonging) that proves religion isn't bouncing back—it's just rotting from the inside out.

Is religion actually "leveling off" in the US, or are we just watching a generational lag? Let’s look at the math.

to see the charts head over to https://atheistville.com/2025/12/22/zombie_church/

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Chapters

• 1:49 Section 1: The P-I-B Model: How Faith Actually Fades
• 3:42 Section 2: The Myth of the Great Revival
• 4:58 Section 3: Generational Replacement: The Math of Change
• 7:01 Section 4: Why the Culture Wars are Getting Louder
• 7:56 Section 5: The Global Outliers (and why they aren't us)
• 9:29 Section 6: Patience is a Secular Virtue
• 10:23 My two cents

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Have you ever heard the word zombie industry? Think Blockbuster in the early 2000s. The stores were open, customers were still walking in, but the model was already dead. It just didn't know it. That's what we're watching with global religion right now. But if you look at the headlines, you'd think the exact opposite. You see the articles that say religious decline stalls in the US or revival among Gen Z. It makes it look like a secular wave hit a wall. But new research published in the Nature Communications and backed by massive 2025 global study from Pew shows that we aren't looking at a reversal. We're looking at a sequence, a three-stage process that takes about two centuries to play out. And we're right in the middle. If you think the nuns have plateaued, you're missing the forest for the trees. Religion doesn't vanish overnight, it rots from the inside out in a very specific order. And today I'm going to show you exactly where we are on that timeline. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Mike Smithgall, the unelected mayor of Atheistville. And this is today's Mic Drop. Now, before we dive into the data, a quick heads up. I'm referencing four specific charts today that put the zombie nature of modern religion into perspective. So if you're watching on YouTube, they're going to be on the screen. But if you're listening to the audio version, I don't want you to miss them. So head to the show notes or go to atheistville.com where I've published a full analysis entitled The Three Stage Fade, Why Religious Identity Outlasts Belief. You can review the three to one exit ratio and the secular staircase for yourself. Seeing the numbers laid out this way makes the pattern much harder to dismiss. All right, let's look at the first one. Now we've been measuring religion all wrong. We we sort of treat it like a light switch. You're either a believer or you're not. But the latest data suggests it's more like a dimmer switch being turned down by a steady generational hand. And the light is failing, the room is getting cold, and we are witnessing the final fade to black. Take a look at this model from the 2025 Nature Communications paper. Sociologists have identified what they call a PIB sequence. That's participation, importance, and belonging. In plain English, people stop doing it, then they stop valuing it, and only then do they stop calling themselves it. Now, stage one is participation. That is the first thing to go. People stop waking up early on Sundays. They stop that public ritual. In various countries, the kids still believe just as much as their parents, but they aren't showing up to church as nearly as often. That's where the feelings fade. Religion goes from being the center of your universe to a hobby you have on the shelf. You might still say you're a Christian, but it doesn't dictate who you vote for or how you raise your kids. Stage two is importance. That's where the feeling finally fades. Religion goes from being the center of your universe to a hobby you have on the shelf. You might still say you're a Christian, but it doesn't dictate who you vote for or how you raise your kids. Stage three, the very last stage, is belonging. This is when the label finally drops. This is the atheist or nun box on the census. And the mistake that we make in the US is looking at stage three data and thinking the trend has stopped. It hasn't. The belonging may be flat for the moment, but the participation and importance metrics are still trending downward. Now you're going to hear a lot this year about how the decline is leveled off. Pew's 2025 US data shows that 70% of Americans still identify with a religion. And that number hasn't budged much since 2020. The believers are doing victory laps. They think the secular surge was just a fad. But let's look at the global breakdown. Nearly 25% of the world is now unaffiliated. That is a massive slice of the pie. And here's the reality: identity is sticky. It's connected to your grandma and Christmas memories and your social circle. People cling to the label long after the engine has stalled. If you look at the 18 to 29 year olds in this latest survey, sure, half of them still claim a religion, but look at their practice. Only a quarter of them actually attend services monthly. Compare that to 80-year-olds, where half of them are in the pews. This isn't a revival. We have a massive group of people who are religiously unaffiliated in their hearts, but just they haven't really updated their Facebook profile yet. They are stage two citizens living in a stage three world. I often say that the population change does most of the work, whether anyone argues or not. We don't need to win every argument on the street to see a secular future. We really just need to wait it out. Secularization is driven by generational replacement. Every 10 years, a new cohort is born that is systematically less religious than the one before. The Pew Global Switching data from the last decade confirms this. Christianity and Buddhism are taking the biggest hits because their younger generations are simply opting out. Even in places where religion seems to be growing, like Sub-Saharan Africa, it's driven by high fertility rates, not because people are suddenly finding Jesus in record numbers. In the West, we are watching the high religion generations pass away. When an 85-year-old who prayed every day is replaced in the population by a 20-year-old who treats religion as a cultural background noise, the national religiosity drops. Even if that 20-year-old still calls himself Catholic because his mom would cry if he didn't, the functional secularism of the country has increased. All right, quick pause. If you haven't subscribed yet, I would love to have you join the community here at Atheistville. We're growing and we're building a space for honest conversation about faith and doubt and reason. Subscribing is absolutely free and it helps more people find discussions and helps keep this project going. I also want to ask you to leave a comment. I read every one of these. Whether we agree or disagree, I respond respectfully because I do value the open dialogue. And your comments really do help shape the conversation. And they tell the algorithm that this is a community worth sharing. And spread the word. Tell someone about the show if you think they'd enjoy it, or use an idea from this episode to start a thoughtful conversation. That's how we get back to talking with each other instead of shouting past each other. All right, let's get back to it. If religion is declining, then why does it feel like we're still fighting about it more than ever? Why are battles over school libraries and prayer and sports and public funding getting so toxic? The PIB model helps explain this. When society sits between stage two and stage three, belief is weakening, but identity is still holding on. That's when people get really defensive. Symbols start to matter more than practice. Fights over the Ten Commandments in classrooms aren't about reminding believers of something they already live by. They're about anxiety over a culture that no longer reinforces those values automatically. The loudness of the religious right isn't a sign of strength, it's a response to loss. Participation is slipping, so the fight shifts to belonging. When inspiration fades, the pressure moves to law. Now, to be fair, the 2025 World Values Survey does show some exceptions. Post-Soviet countries like Russia and Georgia are seeing a religious revival. But look closer at why. Look at this scatter plot. There is a clear downward curve. As countries become more economically advanced and have a higher human development index, religious affiliation drops off a cliff. Places like the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and the Netherlands are leading the charge at the bottom of that curve. The outliers at the top, they are almost all countries facing extreme political or economic instability. In those places, religion isn't about God, it's about nationalism. The Orthodox Church has become a tool of the state to signal we aren't the West. It's an identity badge used to survive political chaos. Unless the United States turns into a literal authoritarian state where the church and the military are the only functioning institutions, we aren't following the Russian model. We are following the Danish model. We are following the UK model. In Denmark, almost everyone still officially belongs to a church, but almost nobody goes, and even fewer think it's important. They've reached the end of the sequence. The label is just a tax category. That's our future. A world where Christian is just a box you check because you like the architecture of the building, not because you think a creator is watching you eat a ham sandwich. So where does this leave us? For those of us in Atheistville, the temptation is to get frustrated when the census data doesn't move as fast as we want. We want the identity stage to happen right now. But we have to be realists. This is a 200-year cycle. We are living through the long middle. This is the period where we have to defend evidence-based policy and secular neutrality against a group of people who are desperately clinging to a label they no longer practice. The transition is happening. The institutions of our society remain grounded in reason and fairness. The pews are empty. The belief is softening, and the labels will follow. It's just a matter of time. All right. That's my two cents. Unblessed, unfiltered, agree or disagree. That's what I got for you today. Religion isn't snapping back. It isn't staging a comeback. What we're watching is a very long transition. People stop showing up first, belief softens next, and identity changes last. When you understand that order, a lot of the noise around us suddenly makes sense. So if the numbers still feel frustrating, just zoom out. This isn't a sprint, it's a generational change. And the real work for secular people right now isn't forcing labels to change faster, it's protecting evidence and fairness and pluralism while society catches up to how people already live. Now, again, if any of the numbers I mentioned today sound surprising, especially the three to one exit ratio, head over to atheistfill.com and read that full analysis and review the source charts for yourself. The link is in the show notes. All right, I'm Mike Smithgull. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next one. Thanks for tuning in. I really hope you enjoyed that. If you have a question for me or any of our guests, make sure you drop a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Hey, and do me a favor like and subscribe. That really helps us out and helps us bring you more conversations from beyond belief. And in the meantime, take care and remember reason and compassion go a very long way.