Why Islam and America Resist the Global Exit from Religion
1. Knowledge as the Great Dissolver
Across much of the developed world, religion is not under attack, it is simply evaporating. The quiet revolution of information has dissolved the soil in which faith once grew. The more access people have to science, education, and open dialogue, the less they depend on supernatural explanations.
This is not a cultural accident. It is the direct outcome of an age in which knowledge has become democratic, searchable, and borderless. The capacity to verify, cross-examine, and challenge inherited beliefs has dismantled the monopoly religion once held over truth.
Yet amid the global decline of belief, two anomalies remain. The Islamic world, where religion is law, and the United States, where religion is politics. Both resist the gravitational pull of the information age – one through compulsion, the other through nostalgia. Together they illustrate how fragile faith becomes when stripped of authority or fear.
2. The Global Retreat of Faith
Across Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia, formal religious affiliation has fallen to historic lows. More than half of young adults now identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”. In the United Kingdom, less than one in three under the age of thirty say religion plays any role in their lives. In Sweden, it is fewer than one in five.
This decline is not driven by hostility but by exposure. The internet, science communication, global media, and education have removed the veil of mystery. The unexplained has become explainable, and that which once required divine authorship now yields to observation.
Susan Blackmore, the psychologist and secular author, once wrote, “Memes, like genes, evolve to survive. Religion has long been one of the strongest memes, but in an information-rich environment, bad memes lose their hosts.”
It is a quiet extinction — not through persecution, but through irrelevance.
3. Islam: Faith Bound by Law
Nowhere is religion’s dependency on control more evident than in the Islamic world. In many nations across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, faith is not an option but a legal requirement. Apostasy, blasphemy, and deviation from state-sanctioned doctrine remain punishable offences, in some cases by death.
This system of enforcement reveals an uncomfortable truth: belief cannot survive freely when it must be policed. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who risked her life to escape forced religiosity, has written, “When faith is protected by fear, it has already lost the argument.”
In countries where internet access expands and censorship weakens, secular movements appear almost immediately. Underground atheist communities in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan communicate online under pseudonyms, sharing science texts and sceptical essays. Many are young, educated, and connected. The very existence of these hidden groups proves that religion’s dominance is contingent, not natural.
Faith in these contexts functions as an extension of the state. It is political, regulatory, and punitive. It cannot compete in a free marketplace of ideas because its foundations are brittle – propped up by law rather than conviction.
4. America: Faith as Identity
If Islam represents faith by law, America represents faith by choice — but one distorted into political identity. The United States, conceived as a secular republic, now faces an organised Christian nationalist movement that seeks to define the nation as explicitly Christian.
From school boards to Congress, religious rhetoric has become shorthand for patriotism. Politicians wrap scripture around policy, and moral superiority becomes a tool of division. Yet beneath the noise lies the same insecurity seen in theocratic states: fear of loss. Loss of control, of cultural dominance, of assumed moral authority.
Christopher Hitchens captured this in God Is Not Great:
“Religion does not have moral capital to spend. It was never the origin of morality; it was a way to outsource it.”
The current push for a “Christian nation” does not signal religious strength. It signals the erosion of influence. When faith once again seeks the power of the state, it is admitting its failure to persuade on its own.
The U.S. Constitution remains the firewall. Its secular architecture prevents the fusion of church and state, even as religious movements test the limits. The battle is not between atheism and Christianity, but between enlightenment and regression — between governance built on evidence and governance built on doctrine.
5. The Two Faces of Resistance
Islamic states and Christian-nationalist America represent two faces of the same resistance to information. One defends its faith through law, the other through identity. Both are symptoms of systems that know their influence is waning.
In both, religion has become less about belief in God and more about the fear of life without Him. In Muslim-majority countries, this fear is imposed; in parts of America, it is cultivated. In each, it reflects an anxiety about losing order in a world where knowledge, science, and rational inquiry have made superstition redundant.
Simone de Beauvoir understood this dynamic long before the internet age:
“Faith allows an evasion of freedom; it gives a ready-made answer to the mystery of existence.”
When information makes freedom accessible, faith becomes optional. The resistance is not spiritual — it is administrative. It is an effort to preserve control in a landscape where obedience has become voluntary.
6. The Secular Momentum Elsewhere
While the Islamic and American anomalies dominate headlines, the rest of the world continues its quiet exodus from religion. In the Nordic countries, churches close weekly. In Japan, belief has become cultural rather than spiritual. In Canada and Western Europe, moral reasoning increasingly detaches from doctrine. The values of compassion, justice, and equality are no longer derived from scripture but from shared humanity.
Education correlates almost perfectly with secularisation. The more years of schooling a population completes, the lower the levels of absolute belief. Countries with universal literacy and scientific education consistently report the lowest religiosity.
Margaret Atwood once noted, “I hope that people will finally come to realise that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.” In that single statement lies the essence of secular morality: the shift from divine command to human empathy.
Science has not eradicated mystery, but it has replaced fear with curiosity. The unknown no longer demands worship; it invites exploration. Carl Sagan wrote, “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” The difference is that one seeks understanding, the other submission.
7. The Anomaly of Faith in a Transparent World
Religion thrives in opacity. It depends on authority that cannot be questioned and claims that cannot be tested. The information age has stripped away both. When knowledge becomes searchable, miracles lose their power. When history is digitised, scripture becomes context. When conversations cross borders, dogma collapses under its own contradictions.
In nations where open access to knowledge is the norm, gods no longer die dramatically – they fade from disuse. A generation raised on Wikipedia, YouTube lectures, and digital archives does not need priests to interpret reality.
Bertrand Russell foresaw this shift when he wrote, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” The combination of those two values – empathy and evidence – defines modern secularism.
The resistance to that model, in Islam and in America, reflects not strength but fragility. Faith, once the dominant currency of civilisation, is losing value in the open marketplace of ideas.
8. The Future: Beyond Fear and Obedience
Religion will not disappear. It will evolve, as it always has, into cultural memory and moral narrative. The scriptures will remain, but their authority will not. What changes now is the necessity of belief.
In an age where answers are accessible, morality can be reasoned, and community can be found without doctrine, religion no longer occupies an essential role. What it offers can be replicated more effectively by education, empathy, and open discourse.
Susan Jacoby, in The Age of American Unreason, wrote, “Ignorance is not a virtue, and faith that demands it is not a virtue either.” That distinction defines the information era. Humanity has outgrown obedience as a moral good.
Where Islam enforces belief, it traps progress. Where America romanticises belief, it politicises truth. Both are unsustainable against the rising tide of open information. The trajectory is clear: knowledge erodes authority, and authority without knowledge collapses.
The quiet revolution will not come through argument but through access. The more people know, the less they need to believe.
9. Closing Reflection
The decline of religion is not a victory for atheism, it is an outcome of literacy. The more people understand their world, the less they fear it.
The future will not be a war between belief and unbelief but a slow, graceful retreat from dogma. Religion will persist where it must be enforced and wither where it cannot. The last bastions of belief stand not because they are strong, but because they are defended.
The rest of the world is moving on.