Why Islam and America Resist the Global Exit from Religion
Knowledge as the Great Dissolver
Across much of the developed world, religion is not really under attack at all, it is simply evaporating. The quiet revolution of information has steadily dissolved the very soil in which faith once grew so easily. The more access people have to science, to education, and to open dialogue, the less they find themselves leaning on supernatural explanations for anything.
This is not some cultural accident that happened along the way. It is the direct and predictable outcome of an age in which knowledge has become democratic, searchable, and almost entirely borderless. The new capacity to verify a claim, cross-examine it, and challenge inherited belief has quietly dismantled the monopoly that religion once held over the very idea of truth.
Yet amid this global decline of belief, two stubborn anomalies remain standing. There is the Islamic world, where religion is woven directly into the law, and there is the United States, where religion has fused itself to politics. Both resist the gravitational pull of the information age, one of them through compulsion and the other through nostalgia. Taken together, they illustrate just how fragile faith becomes the moment it is stripped of either authority or fear.
The Global Retreat of Faith
Across Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia, formal religious affiliation has now fallen to historic lows. More than half of young adults in several of these countries identify as atheist, agnostic, or simply nothing in particular. In the United Kingdom, fewer than one in three people under the age of thirty say that religion plays any real role in their lives. In Sweden, the figure drops to fewer than one in five.
This decline is not being driven by hostility, whatever the pulpits suggest. It is being driven by exposure. The internet, popular science communication, global media, and mass education have between them lifted the old veil of mystery. The once unexplained has steadily become explainable, and whatever previously seemed to demand a divine author now yields quietly to ordinary observation.
The psychologist Susan Blackmore, who has written extensively on the theory of memes, has long argued that religions behave like any other successful idea competing to be copied and passed on. On her account, religion flourished for centuries as one of the strongest memes available, yet in an information-rich environment the weaker ideas steadily lose their hosts. Belief, in other words, struggles to keep reproducing once people can easily compare it with the alternatives.
What we are watching is a remarkably quiet extinction, and it arrives not through persecution but through plain irrelevance.
Islam: Faith Bound by Law
Nowhere is religion’s dependency on control more nakedly visible than in the Islamic world. In many nations across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, faith is not a personal option but a hard legal requirement. Apostasy, blasphemy, and any visible deviation from state-sanctioned doctrine all remain punishable offences, and in some jurisdictions the penalty is still death.
This whole machinery of enforcement quietly betrays an uncomfortable truth, which is that belief cannot survive freely when it has to be policed at gunpoint. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who risked her own life to escape a forced religiosity she never chose, has made essentially this point again and again. A faith that has to be defended with fear and punishment, she argues, has already conceded that it cannot win the argument honestly. The threat of violence is itself the confession.
In countries where internet access keeps expanding and state censorship slowly weakens, secular movements tend to surface almost immediately. Underground atheist communities in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan communicate online under careful pseudonyms, quietly sharing science texts and sceptical essays among themselves. Many of these people are young, well educated, and globally connected. The very existence of these hidden groups proves that religion’s apparent dominance there is contingent rather than natural.
Faith in these contexts functions largely as an extension of the state itself. It is political, regulatory, and openly punitive in a way that has little to do with the spirit. It cannot truly compete in a free marketplace of ideas, because its foundations are brittle and propped up by law rather than by genuine conviction.
America: Faith as Identity
If Islam represents faith held in place by law, then America represents faith by apparent choice, though one that has been steadily distorted into a political identity. The United States was conceived as a secular republic, yet it now faces an organised Christian nationalist movement that openly seeks to redefine the nation as an explicitly Christian one.
From local school boards all the way up to Congress, religious rhetoric has quietly become a shorthand for patriotism. Politicians wrap scripture around ordinary policy, and a claimed moral superiority becomes just another instrument of division. Yet beneath all the noise lies precisely the same insecurity you can see in the theocratic states, which is a deep fear of loss. They fear losing control, losing cultural dominance, and losing their assumed monopoly on moral authority.
Christopher Hitchens made the underlying point with characteristic bluntness throughout his writing on religion. He argued repeatedly that faith holds no moral capital of its own to spend, because it was never the original source of human morality in the first place. What religion actually did, on his account, was take an existing human instinct for decency and outsource it upwards to an imaginary authority, then claim the credit.
The current push for a so-called Christian nation does not signal religious strength, whatever its champions believe. It signals the erosion of influence. When faith feels compelled to reach once more for the raw power of the state, it is quietly admitting that it has failed to persuade anyone on its own merits.
The United States Constitution still stands as the firewall against all of this. Its secular architecture continues to prevent any clean fusion of church and state, even as determined religious movements keep testing the limits. The real battle is not between atheism and Christianity at all. It is between enlightenment and regression, between a governance built on evidence and a governance built on doctrine.
The Two Faces of Resistance
The Islamic states and Christian-nationalist America really represent two faces of the very same resistance to information. One defends its faith primarily through law, while the other defends it through identity. Both, in the end, are symptoms of systems that already sense, somewhere, that their influence is steadily waning.
In each case, religion has become less about a sincere belief in god and far more about the fear of life without him. In the Muslim-majority countries, that fear is imposed from above by force. In parts of America, it is carefully cultivated instead. In both, it reflects a deep anxiety about losing order in a world where knowledge, science, and rational inquiry have made old superstitions look increasingly redundant.
Simone de Beauvoir grasped this dynamic clearly, long before anyone had imagined the internet. She described faith, in its rigid form, as a way of evading the burden of human freedom altogether. It offers a ready-made answer to the mystery of existence, and in doing so it spares the believer the harder and more honest work of deciding what their own life actually means.
Once information makes that freedom genuinely accessible to ordinary people, faith quietly becomes optional rather than essential. The resistance we see is therefore not really spiritual in nature so much as administrative. It is an organised effort to preserve control across a landscape in which obedience has finally become voluntary.
The Secular Momentum Elsewhere
While the Islamic and American anomalies dominate the headlines, the rest of the world quietly continues its long exodus from religion. In the Nordic countries, churches close their doors almost weekly. In Japan, belief has become largely cultural rather than spiritual. In Canada and Western Europe, moral reasoning increasingly detaches itself from doctrine altogether. The values of compassion, justice, and equality are no longer drawn from scripture but from a shared sense of common humanity.
Education correlates almost perfectly with secularisation. The more years of schooling a population manages to complete, the lower its reported levels of absolute belief tend to fall. Countries with near-universal literacy and a strong grounding in scientific education consistently report the lowest religiosity anywhere on earth.
Margaret Atwood once put the underlying hope rather beautifully:
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 sentence sits the whole essence of secular morality, which is the steady shift from divine command towards plain human empathy. The authority moves from the book back to the person.
Science has certainly not eradicated mystery from the world, but it has quietly replaced fear with curiosity. The unknown no longer demands our worship. It simply invites our exploration. Carl Sagan made the same point when he wrote that science is not merely compatible with spirituality but is itself a profound source of it. The real difference is that one of these paths seeks understanding while the other only ever asked for submission.
The Anomaly of Faith in a Transparent World
Religion has always thrived in opacity above all else. It depends on an authority that cannot be questioned and on claims that cannot be tested by anyone. The information age has now stripped away both of those defences at once. When all knowledge becomes searchable, miracles quietly lose their power. When history is digitised, scripture becomes context. When conversations cross every border freely, dogma collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
In nations where open access to knowledge is simply the norm, the gods no longer die in any dramatic fashion. They fade gently from disuse instead. A generation raised on Wikipedia, recorded lectures, and vast digital archives does not feel any pressing need for priests to interpret reality on its behalf.
Bertrand Russell foresaw much of this shift a century ago when he offered his famous definition of a worthwhile life:
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
The combination of those two values, empathy on the one hand and evidence on the other, is more or less the whole definition of modern secularism. The resistance to that model, both in Islam and in America, reflects fragility rather than strength. Faith, once the dominant currency of entire civilisations, is steadily losing its value in the open marketplace of ideas.
The Future: Beyond Fear and Obedience
Religion is not about to disappear entirely, and it would be naive to predict otherwise. It will evolve, as it always has done, into a form of cultural memory and shared moral narrative. The scriptures themselves will certainly remain on the shelves, but their unquestioned authority will not. What genuinely changes now is the sheer necessity of belief.
In an age where answers are freely accessible, where morality can be reasoned out in the open, and where community can be found without any doctrine attached, religion no longer occupies the essential role it once did. Almost everything it used to offer can now be replicated more effectively by education, by empathy, and by honest open discourse.
Susan Jacoby made a closely related argument in The Age of American Unreason. She insisted that ignorance is never itself a virtue, and that any faith which actively demands ignorance of its followers cannot be counted as a virtue either. That distinction, more than almost any other, defines the information era we now live in. Humanity has, on the whole, outgrown obedience as a supposed moral good.
Where Islam enforces belief by statute, it traps human progress in place. Where America romanticises belief instead, it ends up politicising the truth itself. Both approaches are ultimately unsustainable against the rising tide of open information. The trajectory could hardly be clearer. Knowledge erodes unearned authority, and authority without knowledge eventually collapses under its own weight.
The quiet revolution will not arrive through clever argument so much as through sheer access. The more people genuinely come to know, the less they find they actually need to believe.
Closing Reflection
The decline of religion is not really a victory for atheism as such. It is far better understood as an outcome of literacy. The more clearly people come to understand their world, the less they find themselves afraid of it.
The future will not be a great war between belief and unbelief, whatever the loudest voices on either side might prefer. It will be a slow and surprisingly graceful retreat from dogma. Religion will persist for a while in those places where it must be enforced, and it will wither away in those places where it cannot be. The last bastions of belief still stand not because they are genuinely strong, but only because they are so heavily defended.
The rest of the world, meanwhile, is calmly and steadily moving on without them.
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