For all of these reasons, I do not think society presently has good secular alternatives to religion taken as a whole. We have secular versions of pieces of it—music, psychotherapy, volunteer organizations, civic ceremonies, lectures, support groups, sports clubs, humanitarian projects—but not many institutions that gather together, in one place and over generations, family history, ancestry, ritual, moral reflection, structured weekly services, practical community support, beautiful buildings, shared songs, and common knowledge. Religion has had thousands of years to root itself in calendars, holidays, funerals, weddings, neighbourhoods, and family memory. There is an uncomfortable implication here, and I would rather name it than hide it: if the goods are real, doctrine-independent, and gathered nowhere else, then the case against the doctrines asks people to give up the one roof under which all of these goods currently live. The book's own evidence creates this tension, and it is why my conclusion will be reform rather than replacement. I do not think it is practical, or usually wise, to speak as though religion could simply be swept away, or as though it should be discouraged wholesale.
But none of this changes my main thesis. Religions and other spiritual or mystical systems still hold beliefs that are not literally true. This is where the problem lies: not that people gather, sing, grieve, serve, reflect, and care for one another, but that these healthy and meaningful practices are so often fastened to false claims about reality. These beliefs are often taken literally, and dogmatic adherence to them—public profession of them, loyalty to them—is frequently required as a sign of belonging. Some of these fictions may be inconsequential much of the time; many people can live decent lives without a precise understanding of biology, astronomy, geology, genetics, or ancient history. But the darker side has to do with the extremes of group loyalty: ingroups and outgroups form, religion becomes an emblem of identity, and mistrust, exclusion, and maltreatment of outsiders can follow. Dogmatic pronouncements can also become oppressive to the group's own members, particularly when people are pressured into literalistic interpretations of sacred texts, or when "faith" becomes a moral duty rather than an honest way of grappling with uncertainty. Furthermore, spiritual or mystical beliefs about causality can lead to dangerously poor judgment about important life decisions, yet the spiritually guided person can feel supremely confident while making these decisions.
The lack of accurate education about the way the world works is ultimately detrimental to any individual, group, or nation. It is like a pilot of an airplane who does not understand how the engines work, and assumes that planes fly by magic. Most of the time this may not seem to make much difference to the safety and navigation of the plane—until the weather changes, until something unexpected happens, until you need a sober understanding of what is real in order to respond well. A culture can coast for a long time on comforting stories. It is when conditions become difficult that false models show their true cost.
So I think it is valuable that we live lives in which we strive toward understanding deep truths, about ourselves and about the world, and that we do not settle too easily for fictional belief simply because it is comforting. I would distinguish very clearly between respecting religion as culture, and giving institutional privilege to dogma. It is particularly troubling to me for children to be indoctrinated with rigid beliefs, especially if they are not also exposed to accurate information about the world in terms of science, history, and culture. And I am equally uneasy that there should be public financial support for religious groups, in the form of tax breaks and other privileges, unless these are clearly restricted to the charitable components of religious outreach rather than the promotion of dogma or political influence.
We certainly know that holding religious belief is not necessary to be a moral, kind, loving, gentle, humble person. In some cases religious beliefs can even obstruct these positive qualities and add to the world's problems. And it is possible to face the most difficult aspects of human life—grief, loss, pain, and death—while behaving honourably, peacefully, and nobly, without requiring belief in some eternal reward. Indeed, moral behaviour done for its intrinsic good, rather than being motivated by fear of punishment or hunger for reward, seems to me a deeper ethical foundation. Such a stance does not require religion, but it does require effort: working on living well, striving to become a better person, and trying to be a stabilizing and humane influence on others.
In discussing religion, it is important to empathize with people who hold religious or spiritual beliefs. Respectful understanding of how and why people believe as they do is essential, especially if the goal is genuine dialogue rather than tribal combat, and all the more if one hopes that religious culture itself can move in a healthier direction. It is also valuable to search for common ground, particularly with regard to values. Most religious people value integrity, loyalty, compassion, truthfulness, fairness, family, hard work, and the willingness to stand up for what is right even at risk to oneself. And history suggests that the criticism that changes religion has almost always come from inside its own values. The Hebrew prophets denounced the corruption of Israel in the name of Israel's own covenant. In Nazi Germany it was not the sneering outsider who resisted the takeover of the churches but the Confessing Church—Barmen, Bonhoeffer, Niemöller—speaking scripture against the men who had wrapped themselves in it. Contempt from outside a tradition hardens it; the voice that moves believers is the one that holds their own best values up to them and asks that they be kept. This book has tried, wherever it criticizes, to speak in that register.
And that brings me back to the question that started many of these reflections: how to face transience without leaning on supernatural reassurance. I sometimes think of simple things: a firework, a meal, a fire, a cup of hot tea. These things are transient; they disappear. Yet their constituents are still present: they have merely dissolved and dispersed into the surrounding space in a different form. The structure ends; the ingredients remain, rearranged, carried away by a current of increasing entropy. We can't expect the cup of tea to survive unchanged forever, and we can't expect the firework to glitter permanently. In fact, it is normal, and even required for its enjoyment, that it be transient. A lot of religion tries to deny this, or to soften it with a story about eternity. I think there is another path: to accept that things end, to grieve honestly when they end, and still to love them fiercely while they are here.
At the same time, we should not belittle myth, ritual, reverence, or the imaginative life. We would not discourage people from reading novels or watching films. Part of what makes such art powerful is our willingness to enter into it with imagination, with a kind of suspension of disbelief, so that it can enlarge our emotional and moral life. The fact that a story is fictional does not make it worthless; often fiction contains deep truths about human nature, morality, grief, courage, and love. But we do not take a novel as a literal account of astronomy, geology, or medicine. We do not treat a play as an infallible instruction manual for public morality. And we would not normally build rigid tribes around a work of fiction, declaring outsiders corrupt, impure, or damned because they cherish a different story. I think religion is healthiest when its myths are approached in something like this spirit: as powerful cultural stories, moral frameworks, poetic language, and shared rituals—not as literal science, not as a basis for hostility to outsiders, and not as a justification for suspending critical thought.
What does the future actually hold? The demographic evidence points in two directions at once. In the prosperous democracies, affiliation is falling: roughly three in ten American adults now claim no religion at all, and worldwide, for every adult raised secular who joins a religion, more than three raised religious walk away, mostly former Christians in Europe, North America, and the Anglosphere. Yet over the decade from 2010 to 2020 the religiously unaffiliated grew only to about a quarter of humanity, because the global future is being decided less by argument than by demography. Islam grew faster than any other religion—an increase of some 347 million people, more than all other groups combined—driven not by conversion but by youth and fertility. Christianity slipped to 28.8 per cent of the world's population yet still added 122 million people, and its centre of gravity moved south: sub-Saharan Africa has overtaken Europe as home to the largest number of Christians. Secularization is real, and so is religious growth; they are happening to different populations at the same time. Whoever expects religion simply to fade has not looked at the birth rates.
I began this book in a Mennonite congregation, and I find I want to end it there. Everything I have argued was already visible in that world, though I could not have named it then: the community that gathered, the singing, the certainty, the kindness, and the boundary drawn around it all. I left the beliefs a long time ago. I have never stopped understanding why people stay. The task this book proposes—keeping the congregation while releasing the dogma, loving a transient world without a story about forever—is not one I ask of others from a distance. It is the work of my own life, and it began on those Sunday mornings.
References
Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
The goods of religion travel through a shared frame rather than through any particular doctrine. Frank and Frank argue that psychotherapy, religious and shamanic healing, and other sanctioned forms of help share one structure—a confiding relationship, a healing setting, an explanatory rationale, and a believed-in ritual—and that this common structure, not the specific theory, carries much of the effect. But no secular institution yet gathers all of these elements in one place.
Lim, C., & Putnam, R. D. (2010). Religion, social networks, and life satisfaction. American Sociological Review, 75(6), 914–933. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122410386686
Panel evidence that the well-being benefits of religion flow chiefly through congregational friendship and shared identity rather than through private belief; frequent attenders with no friends in the congregation were no better off.
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge University Press.
The "existential security" thesis: populations facing hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization. The most secular societies function at least as well as the most devout, while cautioning that the causal arrow may run from security to secularity rather than the reverse.
Paul, G. S. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: A first look. Journal of Religion & Society, 7 (open access).
A cross-national comparison finding that the more secular prosperous democracies tend to show lower rates of societal dysfunction than the more religious ones. As the author's own subtitle concedes, it is "a first look"—ecological, correlational, and sharply criticized (notably by Rodney Stark) for the ecological fallacy and for selective measures—so it cannot establish causation. But it emphasizes the fact that there is no measurable "supernatural dividend" which appears where belief is most fervent.
Pew Research Center. (2025). How the global religious landscape changed from 2010 to 2020. Pew Research Center. https://doi.org/10.58094/fj71-ny11
The second edition of Pew's global demographic accounting, built from more than 2,700 censuses and surveys across 201 countries. It is the source for the Conclusion's figures: Christians at 28.8 per cent of world population (down 1.8 points over the decade, though up 122 million in number, with sub-Saharan Africa overtaking Europe as home to the most Christians); Muslims the fastest-growing group (up 347 million, driven by age structure and fertility rather than conversion); and the religiously unaffiliated at 24.2 per cent—growing despite older age and lower fertility because, worldwide, about 3.2 adults leave the religion they were raised in for every one who joins. Projections built on demography can be bent by future changes in switching rates, in either direction.
Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.
The major contemporary defence of the contextual (common-factors) model of psychotherapy: relationship and expectancy account for a substantial share of outcome relative to specific technique. Religion's benefits, on this model, are real yet independent of doctrine.
A note on sources, handled as references rather than formal citations: the Barmen Declaration (1934) was the founding confession of the Confessing Church's resistance to the Nazi-aligned "German Christians," drafted principally by Karl Barth; Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller were among its movement's best-known voices.
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