Religion declining in the Arab world

Most of Europe has been strongly secular for decades, and in the US the non-religious percentage of the population has also been growing, with the trend speeding up in the last twenty years with the rise of "New Atheism" -- though the US remains much more religious than Europe.  Some have argued that even as religion dies out in the most advanced countries, it remains vigorous in the developing world, and that secularism will always be a regional peculiarity of Europe, the US, and a few other places such as Japan.

The clearest signs that this view is wrong have come from Latin America, once the demographic heartland of the Catholic Church, where the dominant position of religion has also been faltering.  The clearest evidence of this change can be seen in the growing acceptance of gay marriage, which is being legalized in country after country, and in the willingness of national authorities to aggressively confront the Church over the issue of priestly child molestation, especially in Chile.  Strikingly, it's the least economically developed countries in Latin America where religion remains strongest.

More recently further confirmation has come from a region most Americans think of as irrevocably in thrall to religion -- the Arab world.  A survey of over 25,000 people in ten Arabic-speaking countries plus the Palestinian territories, compared with a similar survey from 2013, shows that the number of people who self-identify as non-religious is surprisingly high, and rising fast.

In the surveyed countries overall, 13% identify as non-religious, up from 8% in 2013.  This suggests that the secularization of the Arab world lags only a decade or so behind that of the US.  In Tunisia (the most secular Arab country) a third of the population is non-religious, up from less than a fifth in 2013.  In all the surveyed countries except Yemen, the non-religious percentage has increased.  In Morocco and Egypt it has more than doubled -- in just six years.

This really shouldn't be surprising.  Economic development brings material prosperity, education, literacy, and access to mass media and world culture.  Those factors drove the decline of religion in Europe and the US.  As the Arab world, like Latin America, becomes more developed, the same processes inexorably follow.  In the age of the internet, access to Western mass culture and ideas plays an especially large role.  Since 2008 the Arabic translation of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, the flagship book of New Atheism, has been available on the internet for free in PDF format, and has now been downloaded more than thirteen million times.  The interest in atheist ideas is there.  And thanks to the internet, the ideas themselves are just a mouse-click away, even though the book itself is banned in every Arab country.  Even aside from explicitly atheist texts, Western movies and music and TV all carry, however subtly, the world-view of the culture that produced them.  They are like a steady rain that gradually erodes away the seemingly indestructible rock of religion.

The survey also asked about attitudes on a variety of other issues, such as homosexuality and the equal role of women in the household.  In general, attitudes on these points are still depressingly backward (though more than 50% in most Arab countries would accept a woman as head of government).  But more enlightened attitudes on gays and the role of women lagged somewhat behind secularization in the West as well.  I can't help but feel that this, too, is just a matter of time.

It's notable that in general, the Arab countries with the most advanced attitudes are Lebanon and the Maghrib states (Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco).  In these countries, the influence of French culture has been especially strong since colonial times, and widespread fluency in the French language facilitates the spread of Western ideas into the society.  The most-religious country in the survey, Yemen, is also the poorest and most isolated.

I've observed before that the rise of militant Islamist groups in the Middle East such as al-Qâ'idah and Dâ'ish (ISIL) in some ways parallels the rise of the militant Christian Right in the US.  In both cases it's a response by the fervently-religious element to cultural changes which are clearly leading the broader society in a direction they don't like.  In the US these fanatics have turned the Republican party into an instrument through which they are trying to re-impose religious conservatism by force using the power of the state.  In the Arab world, with its weaker state structures and scarcity of real democracy, they've been able to resort to armed force and terrorism.  But in both cases it's an angry lashing out by reactionaries who can see that they're losing a culture war.

And in the long run it won't work.  Just as the real-world effects of our Christian Right's draconian hostility to gays and abortion have alarmed and revolted mainstream Americans, including less-fervent Christians, so the atrocities of Dâ'ish and al-Qâ'idah -- whose victims, remember, include far more Middle Easterners than Westerners -- have disgusted millions of people in the Arab world, including less-fervent Muslims.  They've seen what the extremists have to offer, and they don't want it.

So it really does seem that the various regions of the broader Western world are following a similar general pattern of social progress.  Economic development leads to education and greater openness to new ideas, which leads to a whole cascade of effects which erode and weaken religion until, in the countries furthest along the path, its influence withers to almost nothing.  We in the US are merely at a somewhat earlier stage in the process than Europe is, while Latin America and the Middle East are similarly lagging behind us -- though apparently not by as much as one might think.  And the internet is speeding things up.  Some of the lands which are now Arabic-speaking were among the first in which the Abrahamic blight entrenched itself, first in Christian and later in Muslim form, and they may be among the last to cast it off.  But the writing is on the wall -- or, more relevantly, on the computer monitor.

Related posts here and here.