Why Do Religions Decline? | History Today
‘Subjects followed their rulers, leaving no trace of spiritual agonies over the religious revolution’
Diarmaid MacCulloch is author of Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024)
The apparently simple word religion describes myriad beliefs, assertions and practices, and it is not sensible to seek simple mechanisms to account for their rise and fall. Cases need examining in their own context.
Witness Anglo-Saxon England, where a spectrum of rituals and stories about multiple gods among varied groups gave way to credally organised propositions and the increasingly centralised hierarchy of Western Latin Christianity. This represented a switch of loyalties within a ruling elite, piecemeal kingdom by kingdom, but that elite was not displaced. It was also a more complex tale than the later standardised narrative of the Christian ‘Conversion of England’ spearheaded by Augustine’s mission from Rome and welcomed by the Kentish monarchy in 597. Archaeology has revealed a wider story of preparation: a change in the goods placed in Anglo-Saxon graves reflected a switch in fashions from Germanic types to Christian Francia – but decades before Augustine’s arrival. He came to a situation already prepared.
Ruling groups conscious of origins in northern Europe now looked south to the memory of Roman imperial power. Royal families at the summit of the older religious system effectively harnessed power in a radically different way through Roman Christianity. They eventually created sacred vocations for queens and princesses who wielded spiritual power as abbesses over men and women in monastic communities, alongside military prestige enjoyed by males in the dynasty. The resulting Anglo-Saxon fusion of worldly and sacred authority was unusual and distinctive in Western Christianity and probably reflected patterns in the previous religious culture. Meanwhile, subjects followed the lead of their rulers, and have left us no trace of their spiritual agonies over the religious revolution.
This appears to be a story of an elite collectively deciding to invest in a system of power with more potential advantages than its religious predecessor, but it is not that straightforward. Anglo-Saxon Christianity proved exceptionally energetic in exporting itself to cultures in mainland Europe beyond the control of dynasties. Never underestimate the intangible in religious change.
‘Proselytising was not traditionally accepted by the Parsi community’
Alexandra Buhler is author of Zoroastrianism in India and Iran: Persians, Parsis and the Flowering of Political Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2024)
Whereas globally a decline in religious belief might be coupled with rising secularisation, in the case of the Zoroastrian community in India – known as Parsis – there is a more pressing issue for the survival of their faith: the very limited and decreasing number of individuals who can be part of the community. In contrast to religions such as Christianity and Islam, proselytising was not traditionally accepted by Parsis, although their co-religionists in Iran have historically been more open to the idea.
This reluctance to proselytise is reflected in traditional Parsi accounts of their arrival in India. According to those accounts, a group of Zoroastrians left Iran to escape religious persecution following the Arab-Islamic conquest, reaching the west coast of India sometime in the tenth century. Initially hesitant, the local Hindu ruler permitted them to stay after the Zoroastrians agreed to certain rules, such as speaking in Gujarati as well as promising not to convert local people to their faith.
Under British colonial rule, information about the population of India was collected every ten years in a census, beginning in the 1870s. The published figures revealed to the Parsis just how low their numbers were in comparison to other religious communities. This was a cause for concern. Following the 1911 census, which recorded around 100,000 Parsis, commentators highlighted that their current birth rate would not enable the community to grow, or even remain stable.
Legal rulings by the colonial court added weight to the view that being a Parsi was an identity that one was born with. An important judgment was that of the ‘Parsi Panchayat Case’ of 1908, which ruled that Suzanne Brière, the French wife of the Parsi industrialist Ratan D. Tata, was not allowed to benefit from Parsi religious institutions and funds, despite having undergone the Zoroastrian initiation ritual. Parsis were declared an ethnic as well as a religious community by the Parsi judge, D.D. Davar.
The points made during legal debates from the early 20th century, in conjunction with traditional views on conversion, continue to inform contemporary arguments concerning population decline in a community that numbered just over 57,000 in the last census of 2011.
‘Colonialism transformed Mexica life’
Molly H. Bassett is author of The Bundle: Unwrapping Aztec Religion (forthcoming, University of Texas Press)
Contact between the Spanish and Indigenous peoples, such as the Mexica (Aztec), radically altered religious traditions in the Americas. By the time Hernán Cortés and company arrived at Tenochtitlan in 1519 they had been greeted by Emperor Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin’s messengers and given lavish gifts, including the glistening attire of Mexica teteoh (deities). The Mexica venerated a number of teteoh, each of which had specific associations with elements of nature and/or culture. In Aztec texts such as the Codex Borbonicus we see examples of these teteoh, such as Chalchihuitlicue (‘Precious Greenstone, Her Skirt’), who managed earthly waters, including the lakes that surrounded the capital city, and indeed was those waters.
Mexica teteoh took physical form in teixiptlahuan (localised embodiments) that could be carved in stone, painted on paper, or presented through the human body. By contrast, tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles) were non-figural deity embodiments that contained relics wrapped in animal pelts and patterned textiles. To a non-initiate, a tlaquimilolli might have looked like an ordinary bundle of cloth or hides, but they were especially precious forms of god-bodies.
Colonialism transformed Mexica life. Along with war, the Spaniards brought illnesses that would turn into raging epidemics. Spanish friars interpreted Indigenous deaths during those epidemics as a result of the Mexica refusal to abandon traditional ways of life – conflating their death from disease with punishment for their sins, specifically idolatry.
But a focus on the decline of Mexica religion – at least as it existed before 1518 – should not overshadow the survival of Indigenous cultures in Mexico. During the first decades of colonialism and in the centuries since, Indigenous communities have learned, interpreted and adapted to elements of Spanish language and life, including Catholicism, which is now the biggest religion in Mexico. Alongside this, as the Nahua scholar of religions Abelardo de la Cruz’s study of el costumbre (folk customs) demonstrated in 2022, Nahuas – Mexico’s largest Indigenous group – continue to practise Indigenous religious traditions that maintain relations with ancestors, plants, animals and land.
‘Modernisation has not made the world less religious’
Janet Hoskins is author of The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Caodaism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism (University of Hawaiʻi
Press, 2015)
Some North Americans and Europeans tend to assume that religious belief is declining because of secularism, which in turn is related to economic prosperity, pluralism, social fragmentation and scientific education. Yet while young people in the West are increasingly unlikely to be ‘church goers’, many of them still consider themselves spiritually inclined. Major social theorists – Max Weber, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud among them – thought that religion would disappear by the late 20th century, but the ‘secularism thesis’ has been largely disproved by the resurgence of popular religion and new religious movements.
Those new movements in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries were linked to nationalism and the ‘spiritual mission’ taken on by certain groups to reconcile various beliefs into a modern synthesis. One of the largest is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormonism, founded in 1830 and which now has more than 16 million followers. The Vietnamese religion of Caodaism, founded in 1926, has around five million followers in Vietnam and the diaspora, and is now classified by the state as an indigenous religion and the third largest in the country. This after it had been prohibited by the communist regime from 1975 to 2000. Other religions with similar profiles also emerged in the 1930s: the Japanese Soka Gakkai Buddhist movement, Yiguandao in China and then Taiwan, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nation of Islam in the US and Rastafari in Jamaica. Most of these religious movements were founded following new revelations which set them apart from conventional Buddhism, Christianity and Islam – and which sharpened their localised appeal.
‘Desecularisation’ is a term that has been used to describe the Islamic revival in the Middle East and South Asia, and also the growth of new religious groups in China, the former Soviet Union, Vietnam and Cuba as the market economy has supported a new diversity in spirituality. Modernisation has not made the world less religious, it would seem, but has instead encouraged a large number of new, alternative, religions ready to compete in an increasingly competitive spiritual marketplace.
