Where this is going

What it is

A closing article, and the only one on the site that looks forward. It is placed last deliberately, and it makes no predictions, because the twentieth century's confident predictions about religion were wrong and there is no reason to think this century's are better.

Where it came from

For most of the twentieth century, sociology expected secularisation: modernity, education and prosperity would erode religion until it became a private eccentricity. Weber's disenchantment, extended into a forecast.

It did not happen as predicted. Religious practice declined sharply in Western Europe, Australia and Canada, and later and less completely in the United States. Globally, the religiously affiliated share of humanity is projected to rise through this century, driven by demography rather than conversion. Peter Berger, one of secularisation theory's principal architects, publicly abandoned it in the 1990s and wrote that the world was "as furiously religious as ever".

What has actually happened in the West is not disappearance but rearrangement: away from inherited institutional membership, toward individual, eclectic, unaffiliated practice — the territory this section has described.

How it is used

As a caution, mostly. Everything below is observation of a current state, not a forecast.

What we can and cannot say

We can say what the numbers show. Institutional affiliation is falling steeply in the English-speaking West and much of Europe. The unaffiliated are now the largest single religious category in several countries, and most of them are not atheists. Belief in an afterlife, in a higher power, in spiritual energy and in astrology remains substantial and in some measures is rising among the young. Religious practice worldwide is not in decline.

We can say what appears to be genuinely new. Not the beliefs — those are mostly old, and this site has spent two hundred and forty articles showing where they came from. What is new is structural:

• The algorithm as gatekeeper, replacing the institution, the lineage and the editor, with incentives that have nothing to do with truth or with anyone's wellbeing
• Disintermediation — anyone may teach anyone, immediately, without vetting, apprenticeship or accountability
• The loss of the local congregation as the unit, and with it the obligation to people you did not choose
• Personalisation, so that each person's spiritual environment is assembled for them by a system optimising for their attention
• Language models, arriving now, which can produce unlimited plausible spiritual text on demand and about which nothing useful can yet be said

We can say what has not changed at all. People still die, and want to know what that means. People still grieve. People still get ill in ways medicine cannot fix. People still want to be part of something, want their lives to signify, and want to know how to act. Every tradition on this site is an answer to those, and the questions have not moved.

We can say the durable finding across all of it is about community. Where research has found associations between religious involvement and wellbeing, the effect tracks participation — attendance, belonging, being known and being needed — more than belief. That is the most practically useful result in this entire section, and it cuts against the direction of travel: the newer forms are strong on content and weak on congregation.

And we can say what this site is for. Not to tell anyone what is true. Four things instead:

Know where it came from. Almost everything here has a documented history, and it is usually not the history claimed for it. Knowing that the law of attraction is from 1906 Colorado, that modern witchcraft is from 1950s England, that chakra colours are largely twentieth-century Western, does not require you to stop — it requires you to stop being told it is ancient.

Know what is settled. Some questions have answers. Lucid dreaming is real. Detox is not. Hypnosis does not improve memory. Astrology has been tested. Meditation has adverse effects as well as benefits. Where the evidence is in, this site reports it in both directions and does not hedge to seem open-minded.

Know what harm looks like. Discernment & Harm is the section that matters most, and it is deliberately not a disclaimer. The patterns — isolation, escalating demands, unfalsifiable authority, costly exit, thought-terminating language, sexual and financial exploitation — are the same across every tradition here and across none of them.

And keep the difference between belief and practice available. Very few of the people described on this site hold their practices as literal propositions about physics, and the ones who do are not usually the ones who have been at it longest. That a practice can be valuable without being true is not a concession; it is how most of human ritual life has always worked.

We cannot say what any of this will look like in twenty years, and anyone who tells you they can is selling something. What we can say is that the questions will still be there, that someone will be answering them, and that the useful skill is not deciding what to believe but knowing how to look at what you are being offered.

Further reading

• Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World (1999), on the abandonment of the theory.
• Grace Davie, Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (2015).
• Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites (2020), for the newer forms.