Leaving Religion: Introducing the Field

In 1968, the New York Times published the sociologist Peter Berger’s now famous prediction about the coming decline of religion worldwide. In this context, Berger stated that the remains of religion in the twenty-first century would consist of religious believers “likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture” (Berger 1968: 3). People around the world were, in short, expected to leave religion altogether as their societies became modern. It was not a question about if the change would occur, only a matter of time. More than 30 years later, in 1999, Berger revised his earlier claim and instead declared the world as desecularised (Berger 1999). He is, however, far from alone in criticising, or even dismissing, the century old secularisation thesis, where modernisation of a society goes hand in hand with secularisation.1 Even though leaving religion – that is the focus in this handbook – has, from time to time, been associated with irreligiosity, agnosticism, and atheism, and, in particular, modernised Western predominantly Christian countries, it can very well also be about leaving one religion from another, or even changing position within the same religious tradition, for example when orthodox Chassidic Jews becoming reformed, liberal Jews (see, for instance, Davidman 2015). In 2015, pew Research Center published the report The Future of World Religions, where the overall global tendencies, at least until 2050, are about growth of religion. Around the world, religious population is increasing according to the prediction – the Muslim population will grow significantly, and in 2070 Islam will be at the same size as Christianity, that is around one third of the world population – and only a small percentage of the world’s population are expected to be disaffiliated or non-religious. Leaving out a critical discussion about the accuracy of this study and its methodological problems, one of the factors analysed in the statistically based projection was “religious switching,”