Abstract:
An international study covering 81 countries and spanning more than 30 years found that as the Internet becomes more popular, the overall religious belief of a country's population tends to decline. The researchers found that increases in Internet penetration reliably predict subsequent decreases in religiosity, and that this association persists after controlling for factors such as economic development, education levels, urbanization, globalization, population aging, and income inequality. The research was published in the journal Sociology of Religion.
The sociological community has long studied the phenomenon of secularization, which is the decline in the importance of religion in individual lives and society with modernization. Conventional theory generally holds that as societies become wealthier, more educated, and more urbanized, people's reliance on religious institutions to provide survival, social support, and community ties diminishes.
In recent years, researchers have begun to focus on whether the Internet might become an independent secularizing force. The Internet has given people access to a more diverse worldview, significantly reduced the cost of acquiring scientific knowledge and other information, and made it easier for people to question traditional authority. In addition, online social networks may in some cases replace local face-to-face community relationships, and religious participation is often based on these real-life social networks.
However, "religiousness" itself is not a single indicator. Previous research has noted that religiosity can encompass multiple dimensions, including personal beliefs, private religious practices such as prayer, and whether a person views their worldview as exclusive. Therefore, the Internet may have different impacts on different components of religious life.
The study was conducted by Milan Lavric, professor of sociology at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, and researcher Tibor Rutar. The research team wanted to answer the question: whether Internet expansion is not only associated with religious decline in individual countries, but also serves as a broad secularizing factor that spans different countries and decades.
The idea that the Internet may weaken religious belief has been around for years, but work to truly systematically study the issue has been relatively limited in the past, and many studies only focused on a single country or one point in time, researchers said. At the same time, another area of research also shows that religious groups are highly adaptable and can proactively use the Internet to spread their beliefs, organize activities, and maintain community connections. Therefore, the two researchers decided to re-examine this relationship using larger cross-national data.
The research team compiled data from 81 countries between 1990 and 2022, combining each country's Internet usage with data from six rounds of the World Values Survey. The World Values Survey is a long-running international research project that tracks changes in values, beliefs and social attitudes among people in different countries and regions.
To measure the overall religiosity of a country, the researchers created a composite index that included six indicators: the proportion of participants in religious services, the importance of God to the individual, the overall importance of religion, an individual's evaluation of their own religious identity, trust in religious institutions such as churches, and formal membership of a religious denomination.
At the same time, the researchers also included a series of traditional modernization indicators, including factors such as per capita economic output, average years of education, urbanization, globalization, population aging, and income inequality.
In terms of statistical methods, researchers did not simply compare the differences between rich and poor countries, but focused on observing changes in the same country over different time periods. At the same time, they also added a time lag factor, which corresponds to the Internet penetration rate in a certain period and the religious level in the next period, so as to observe the relationship between the two changes in time order.
The results show that there is a relatively stable negative correlation between an increase in a country's Internet penetration and the subsequent decrease in average religiousness. This relationship persists after controlling for other modernization factors. Researchers believe that the connection between the expansion of the Internet and the decline of religion cannot be entirely explained by traditional modernization factors such as economic development or improved education levels.
The simple conclusion is that as societies become more connected to the Internet, they tend to become less religious, said study leader Rav Rich. However, he also emphasized that the correlation between the two is not particularly huge. Statistical results show that a one standard deviation increase in a country's Internet penetration is associated with a decrease of about 0.20 standard deviations in the overall religious level.
The researchers also found that among the traditional modernization factors they included in their model, internet penetration was one of the most consistent variables in predicting declines in religiosity, while factors such as education, economic development and globalization were less consistent. This may mean that during the historical period covered by the study, the expansion of the Internet may be an important channel for further transformation of modernization into secularization.
Blake Victor Kent, an associate professor of sociology at Westmont College in the United States who was not involved in the study, also believes that this study shows a relatively robust correlation between Internet penetration and lower religious levels. He noted that greater dissemination of information and exposure to more diverse viewpoints could weaken some of the "credibility structures" that traditional religions rely on to sustain themselves.
Kent also pointed out that the impact of the Internet may not only exist at the ideological level. The online environment often emphasizes personalization, while religious activities usually rely on specific time, place, and real communities, so the Internet may also change the way people participate in these physical religious communities.
However, the study did not find that the impact of the Internet on all religious dimensions is equally significant. The strongest associations were found with formal religious affiliation and personal religious identity. In other words, as the number of people online in a society increases, the number of people who formally join a certain religious denomination may decrease, and the number of people who self-identify as religious people may also decrease.
In contrast, the correlation between Internet penetration and participation in religious activities that require more time, such as religious services, is much weaker and more unstable. Likewise, the relationship between internet penetration and a person's belief that God is very important is less clear than the first two items.
This means that the changes brought about by the Internet may first be reflected in whether people define themselves as religious people and whether they formally belong to a religious organization. It does not necessarily mean that people who still believe in religion will immediately give up specific religious practices such as praying, participating in religious ceremonies, or thinking that God is important.
Kent highlighted that there are dozens or even hundreds of different measures of religious and spiritual beliefs, and this study examined only six of them. Among these six indicators, the ones that really show a particularly strong correlation are religious affiliation and religious self-identity. Therefore, changes in religious identity are not directly equivalent to the disappearance of religion itself.
In fact, some studies have found that the Internet does not necessarily diminish religious practice. Online religious activities may complement real-life religious activities, and religious groups can also use social media, video websites and other Internet platforms to organize members, spread beliefs and even expand their scope of influence.
The results of this new study are also similar to those of previous studies of U.S. adults. A 2018 study found that the higher the level of personal Internet use among American adults, the less likely they were to identify themselves as belonging to a particular religion, but this did not necessarily mean that they actually attended religious services less frequently. This study covering 81 countries shows that similar phenomena may not be unique to the United States, but can be observed around the world.
However, the researchers emphasized that the current results still cannot prove that the popularity of the Internet directly caused the decline of religion. While statistical models show that past Internet penetration can predict future declines in religiosity, the research team reversed their analysis and found that lower past religiosity also predicts higher future Internet penetration.
This means there may be a two-way relationship between the two. The development of the Internet may promote secularization, and a society that is already more secular may also be more likely to accept and popularize the Internet. The two trends may reinforce each other.
Also, the study used average data at the national level, so it cannot directly tell whether a specific person lost his or her religious beliefs after starting to use the Internet. National averages can mask huge differences across age, education, social class and religious groups.
Research has not further differentiated what exactly people do on the Internet. The Internet contains both a vast amount of secular content and a large online religious community. Some religious groups even specifically use the Internet to strengthen connections between believers. Therefore, the current data cannot determine whether a person is gradually moving away from religion in the process of browsing secular content, or whether he is continuing or even intensifying his religious activities through the Internet.
Research leader Lavrich also reminded that these findings mainly reflect a specific historical period when the Internet was rapidly popularized, and there is no reason to believe that this trend related to secularization will continue indefinitely. He pointed out that some of his recent research in Slovenia found that Internet celebrity culture is having new connections with religious revival, especially among young men, which shows that the relationship between the Internet and religion may change completely differently in the future than in the past.
Kent also believes that human spiritual beliefs tend to be adaptive rather than simply disappearing from society. As social circumstances and technology continue to change, people's definitions of religion and spirituality themselves may change. Thus, the decline in religious identity does not necessarily mean that all forms of religious or spiritual beliefs will continue to decline in the same direction.
The core conclusion of this study is that during the historical period of rapid expansion of the Internet from 1990 to 2022, there was a stable statistical correlation between Internet penetration and the decline in religious identity and overall religiousness in a country. The correlation between formal religious affiliation and self-religious identity was particularly obvious. But the research does not prove that the Internet is the sole cause of religious decline, nor can it tell whether this relationship will continue in the future.
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