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.” They found that this sequence played out in Western, non-Western, and traditionally Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu countries. The full sequence is at different stages in different countries, and African nations in particular generally seemed to still be hovering around the first stage. Only former Eastern-bloc nations bucked the sequence, and the researchers attribute this to the unique historical situation and combination of the USSR, Cold War, and Orthodox Church. They found that even nations that have seen religious resurgences experienced these revivals in the context of the overall P-I-B sequence being followed. No nation that experienced religious revival, the Eastern-bloc excepted, saw that revival stave off increased secularization.
The researchers note that the planet is unlikely to become predominately secular, even on the terms of the P-I-B sequence, because the nations with the highest birth rates and population bases are still highly religious and far off from the secularized increase the sequence predicted.
Commenting on the P-I-B- sequence, the researchers note “This ordering reflects the relative costliness of each behavior: public ritual attendance demands the most time and energy, while mere identity affiliation is least burdensome and thus most persistent. The P-I-B sequence normally does not occur within the lifespan of an individual but rather transpires across extended periods among cohort groups.”
This is the connection to Keeping Kids Christian. Secularization follows a multi-generational path, both in the culture and in the family. Religious people start off doing three things: participating in the life of faith; having lives shaped by the faith; identifying as part of the faith. Secularization is the sequence of one, then another, then another feature dropping off.
This isn’t just a sociological, big-picture reality, but something that happens in families. It’s easy to imagine a family that attends church twice a week with the faith organically shaping their daily lives. The kids of the family then grow up, some continue that regular attendance practice, while others think it’s a bit overkill and instead attend church 1-2 times a month. Those adult children in turn have their own kids; which set of grandkids are more likely to regular attend church themselves? The answer is obvious: the children of the the regular attenders. The children of those who attend 1-2 times a month are likely to attend even less, or perhaps not at all. They church may have a symbolic importance for them, but their regular lives are not characterized by behavior or belief in its faith. Those now-adult-grandkids are likely secularized, and their own kids are going to start off with secularism as their default. At that point even identification with the faith is unnecessary — the great-grand kids are now nones.
Secularization and dechurching can happen much more rapidly on an individual level than that, but what the researchers show is that this is how it happens on a large scale. They also demonstrate the obvious, namely that it’s a lot easier to slide down the P-I-B sequence than to go back up, whether you’re talking about nations or families. Moving from regular participation to irregular religious engagement is a key indicator that future secularization is on the verge of happening. On the other hand, maintaining regular participation in the life of faith is the best safeguard against moving further down the sequence.
Returning to our imagined family, which generation and lifestyle sets their kids up for strong personal faith? The ones who themselves have strong faith and exhibit in their belief and belonging to the faith. And what’s the best thing parents who are irregular in their faith can do for their kids? Return to the regular life of the church. Sincere faith that shapes the everyday life of parents is the most important formative power the Holy Spirit uses to help families keep their kids Christian.
