Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

65. Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism: WIN-Gallup International 2012. The Index’s sample of countries in 2005 was smaller (thirty-nine countries) and more religious (68 percent still identifying themselves as religious in 2012, as opposed to 59 percent in the full 2012 sample). In the longitudinal subset, the percentage of atheists grew from 4 to 7 percent, a 75 percent increase in seven years. It would be dubious to generalize this multiplier to larger samples, because of the nonlinearity of the percentage scale at the low end, so in estimating the increase in atheism in the fifty-seven-country sample over this period, I assumed a more conservative 30 percent increase.

66. Secularization Thesis: Inglehart & Welzel 2005; Voas & Chaves 2016.

67. Correlation of irreligion with income and education: Barber 2011; Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg 2009; WIN-Gallup International 2012.

68. WIN-Gallup International 2012. Other minority-religious countries in the sample are Austria and the Czech Republic, and those in which the percentage just squeaks past 50 percent include Finland, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. Other secular Western countries such as Denmark, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom were not surveyed. According to a different set of surveys from around 2004 (Zuckerman 2007, reproduced in Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg 2009), more than a quarter of respondents in fifteen developed countries say they don’t believe in God, together with more than half of Czechs, Japanese, and Swedes.

69. Pew Research Center 2012a.

70. The Methodology Appendix to Pew Research Center 2012a, particularly note 85, indicates that their fertility estimates are current snapshots, and are not adjusted for anticipated changes. Muslim fertility decline: Eberstadt & Shah 2011.

71. Religious change in the Anglosphere: Voas & Chaves 2016.

72. American religious exceptionalism: Paul 2014; Voas & Chaves 2016. These numbers are from WIN-Gallup International 2012.

73. Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg 2009; Zuckerman 2007.

74. American secularization: Hout & Fischer 2014; Jones et al. 2016b; Pew Research Center 2015a; Voas & Chaves 2016.

75. The preceding figures are from Jones et al. 2016b. Another sign of the underreported decline in religion in the United States is that the proportion of white Evangelicals in the PRRI surveys fell from 20 percent in 2012 to 16 percent in 2016.

76. Younger irreligious more likely to stay irreligious: Hout & Fischer 2014; Jones et al. 2016b; Voas & Chaves 2016.

77. Blatant nonbelievers: D. Leonhard, “The Rise of Young Americans Who Don’t Believe in God,” New York Times, May 12, 2015, based on data from Pew Research Center 2015a. Little nonbelief in the 1950s: Voas & Chaves 2016, based on data from the General Social Survey.

78. Gervais & Najle 2017.

79. Jones et al. 2016b, p. 18.

80. Explanations for secularization: Hout & Fischer 2014; Inglehart & Welzel 2005; Jones et al. 2016b; Paul & Zuckerman 2007; Voas & Chaves 2016.

81. Secularization and declining trust in institutions: Twenge, Campbell, & Carter 2014. Trust in institutions peaked in the 1960s: Mueller 1999, pp. 167–68.

82. Secularization and emancipative values: Hout & Fischer 2014; Inglehart & Welzel 2005; Welzel 2013.

83. Secularization and existential security: Inglehart & Welzel 2005; Welzel 2013. Secularization and the social safety net: Barber 2011; Paul 2014; Paul & Zuckerman 2007.

84. Main reason Americans leave religion: Jones et al. 2016b. Note also that belief in the literal truth of the Bible among respondents in the Gallup poll described in note 53 above has decreased over time, from 40 percent in 1981 to 28 percent in 2014, while belief that it is a book of “fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man” rose from 10 percent to 21 percent.

85. Secularization and rising IQ: Kanazawa 2010; Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg 2009.

86. “Total eclipse”: From a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche.

87. Happiness: See chapter 18, and Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs 2016. Indicators of social well-being: See Porter, Stern, & Green 2016; chapter 21, note 42; and note 90 below. In a regression analysis of 116 countries, Keehup Yong and I found that the correlation between the Social Progress Index and the percentage of the population not believing in God (taken from Lynn, Harvey, & Nyborg 2009) was .63, which was statistically significant (p <.0001) holding constant GDP per capita.

88. Unfortunate American exceptionalism: See chapter 21, note 42; Paul 2009, 2014.

89. Religious state, dysfunctional state: Delamontagne 2010.