Three Stages of Religious Decline

Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship comes out in just under a month. You find it for pre-order for 40% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and discounted on Amazon and Westminster Books; and at Barnes & Noble and Christianbook.com.

There is a decent time-lapse between writing a book and its publication. In this case, I submitted my manuscript in mid-January 2025 and it’s officially out 13 months later. One of the inevitabilities that occurs in that gap is the publication of something relevant that would have been really helpful to engage.

In August 2025, a group of researchers published “The three stages of religious decline around the world” in Nature Communications. The secularization transition hypothesis is that countries become less religious and more secular over a 200-year span. As nations become more industrialized and modern, the importance of religious symbols and rituals to bind the country together and present solutions to life’s problems fades, and the people gradually become less religious. This hypothesis has been criticized as being overly focused on Western, traditionally Christian nations, and the researchers sought to establish whether it could extend to non-Western, non-Christian nations.

The researchers “propose that secularization follows a consistent sequence: first, participation in public rituals declines; second, importance of religion drops, and third, people shed their formal belonging. We refer to this as the Participation–Importance–Belonging (P-I-B) sequence…