When dominant religions decline, do societies become less religious or do the old gods get another chance?
A conversation about atheism rising in Europe led me to look at what is actually happening elsewhere.
By 2020, roughly 25% of Europeans were religiously unaffiliated. In the United States, 29% of adults now identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” up from 16% in 2007.
But declining affiliation does not necessarily mean people have stopped wanting faith, ritual, community, or some connection to the sacred. The 2021 census of England and Wales recorded 74,000 Pagans, 13,000 Wiccans, and 8,000 people identifying with Shamanism. Those numbers remain small, but these are living religious identities not merely folklore.
If Norse, Hellenic, and other reconstructed religions continued growing, would society eventually grant them the same legitimacy as established religions or continue treating them as mythology?
If someone said, “I didn’t leave Christianity because I stopped needing faith. I left because the Norse faith gave me the meaning, community, and peace my church failed to provide,” would that be recognized as a legitimate religious conversion or dismissed as trading religion for mythology?
Would the answer differ between the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world? When a dominant faith loses cultural authority, who decides where mythology ends and religion or sacred history begins?
Sources: Pew—religion in Europe, Pew—U.S. religious landscape, and the England and Wales 2021 census.