The Failure of Secular Ideologies:

During most of the twentieth century, secular ideologies (communism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, liberal democracy and cosmopolitan secularism) competed successfully with religion.  In the developing world, native religious traditions were often seen as part of the forces holding the country back from modernity and technological success.  Arab intellectuals developed the idea of Arab nationalism as a way of creating a new, secular Arab identity that brought Christian Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Shi’a Arabs together under one big tent.  Across much of Asia, communists actively sought to destroy religious institutions that they believed were keeping their countries backward. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the situation changed.  Fascism has been on the ropes since 1945; communism and socialism were crippled after 1989.  Secular nationalism has been largely in retreat across the developing world for a variety of reasons ranging from the failure of secular regimes to generate lasting progress in much of the Islamic world (though in the Turkish case it is ironically and uniquely the success of secularism at building a new and more complex society which has led to a revival of religion in politics) to the inherent difficulties of forging strong secular nationalisms in the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural countries that characterize much of the developing world. Liberal democracy and cosmopolitan secularism are the two secular ideologies which remain as strong as they were in the twentieth century, but these ideologies have rarely done well in the ideological competition among poor people outside the areas of European settlement.
The competing secular ideologies that once held religion in check have melted; the problems of life that demand ideological or religious answers seem more acute than ever.  This is why religion is on the march.
There is another aspect to the religious renaissance of the 2010s.  While all of the world’s great religions are gaining members either by demography (believers are having children) or conversion, three religions in particular will be making news — and two of those are growing at extraordinary rates.
The three religions that will be front and center in the world’s newspapers and on its leading websites are Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  These three faiths have a great deal in common; that perhaps is why so much of world history revolves around the conflicts between them.  These religions all look back to the God of Abraham; they do not, however, agree on what their common God thinks people should do.
According to the Hebrew Scriptures, God told Abraham thousands of years ago that “all the nations of the earth will bless themselves in his [Abraham's] name.”  The name Abraham means ‘father of nations,’ and while religious demography is one of the world’s most baffling and difficult subjects, the promise appears to be coming true.  There are something like 6.7 billion people in the world today. At a (very) rough estimate, about 2.1 billion of them are Christians and 1.5 billion Muslim.  (Another 14 million are Jewish. )  It appears that the Abrahamists became a majority sometime in the last decade and just as the 2010s will see a majority of the world’s people living in cities, this will be the first full decade in which a majority of the world’s people are members of the squabbling and contentious family of this mysterious nomad.  The Abrahamic majority will grow; on present trends we can expect something like two thirds of the world’s population to hold an Abrahamic religion later in this century.
This does not, alas, mean that we are headed for a quieter and more peaceful world anytime soon.  Religious violence like the fighting that broke out in the central Nigerian city of Jos this weekend is more likely to increase than decrease in the 2010s.  The same factors that lead to increasingly strong religious commitments like urbanization and the rise of insecurity are also associated with outbreaks of communal violence.  As Muslims and Christians stream into the bulging cities of sub-Saharan Africa, and as Muslims and Hindus (along with a small but rapidly growing Christian minority) move to the city in India, religion both offers identity and stability for members of these groups; it also sets up the potential for conflict between groups often competing for jobs, housing and other resources.
These local conflicts may be more numerous; they may also be more consequential.  Given the increasingly dense and information-saturated global networks which even the poor can increasingly access, local conflicts will be more easily seen as part of regional or even global competition between the faiths.  Poor relations between Christians and Muslims in one part of the world can increasingly sour the climate in other parts of the world.  The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is not very likely to end in the new decade, will also raise the temperature between Christians and Muslims in other parts of the world from the UK and France through Nigeria and Kenya to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.  (We can hopefully note that good news will also travel faster and that progress in intercommunal relations in one part of the world can improve conditions in other places.  Unfortunately, however, bad news is more dramatic and usually gets more attention than quiet progress.)
Hot religion and the march of Abraham: look for these trends to shape the decade of the 2010s.

Posted in 2010s, Religion 

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