In the West, religious affiliation keeps falling: US 'nones' are now ~28%, up from 5% in 1972 (PRRI / Pew). In India, Russia, the US, Israel, Iran, and Hungary, religious-nationalist movements are at or near governing power. 57 countries score high or very high on Pew's Government Restrictions Index, the highest count since the series began. Blasphemy and apostasy laws are actively enforced in 13+ countries (USCIRF). Secularisation and weaponised piety are happening simultaneously; both are pushing political stress upward.
Heuristic seed snapshot. Religion stress sits in the 'Severe' band but reflects two opposite movements that the composite can't fully separate. In much of the West religious affiliation has continued to decline and the 'spiritual but not religious' share has climbed; in India, Hungary, the US, Russia, and parts of the Muslim world, religious-nationalist political movements have moved to or near governing power. Religious-freedom restrictions are at multi-decade highs (Pew); blasphemy and apostasy laws are actively enforced in ~70 countries. The minority-persecution count includes high-magnitude cases (Uyghurs in China, Rohingya in Myanmar, Christians in northern Nigeria, Bahá'ís in Iran, India under Modi).
Share of adults reporting no religious affiliation. China leads on the official number (methodology contested); Western Europe and Japan show the deepest secularisation; Indonesia, India, and Saudi Arabia sit near a floor.
The classical secularisation thesis (Weber, Berger) survives in Western Europe and the Anglosphere: rising education and prosperity correlate with declining religious affiliation. The thesis failed globally because the data is regional: Latin America saw Pentecostalisation, Africa saw expansion, the Middle East saw re-Islamisation. There is no single global story.
What looks like a 'religious revival' in many countries is more precisely the political instrumentalisation of religion. RSS Hindutva in India, Christian Nationalism in the US, Russian Orthodoxy as state ideology, Religious Zionism, Iranian Velayat-e Faqih. Theologically these movements are often shallow; politically they are decisive.
From within the Christian traditions, the picture is the slow decline of cultural Christianity and the somewhat-tougher persistence of practising Christianity. Many Western churches are smaller but the people in them attend more. The mainline-to-evangelical shift in the US has plateaued; the Pentecostal expansion globally has not.
The most populous Muslim-majority countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh) report stable-to-rising religious salience. Within the Muslim world there is a contested split between Salafi/Wahhabi conservatism, the modernising Indonesian Nahdlatul Ulama tradition, the Iranian theocratic experiment, and the Turkish AKP synthesis. The future of Islamic political identity is being negotiated, not declining.
The dharmic traditions don't map onto 'religion' as Western survey instruments use the term. The Hindutva politicisation of Hinduism, the Buddhist nationalism of Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and the East-Asian Confucian-modernist syntheses each require different analytical frameworks. Treating them as instances of the same global story flattens what is meaningful about them.
Indigenous traditions are typically not called 'religion' by their practitioners; they are cosmologies that bind humans to land, ancestors, and non-human kin. The modern revival of these, at scale and with state recognition, is one of the meaningful religious developments of the 21st century, and it sits outside the secularisation-vs-revival frame entirely.
Religion's net contribution to the present moment is best assessed by its political effects: blasphemy enforcement, minority persecution, religious-nationalist mobilisation. From this perspective, the rise of the unaffiliated is one of the few clearly positive trends, especially where it is paired with civic-association alternatives.
A bespoke meaning framework drawn from yoga, mindfulness, therapy, astrology, climate activism, fitness, and Stoicism. Works for individuals; structurally fragile (no congregation that survives a generation, no obligations across class lines). The social-infrastructure deficit is real even when the meaning deficit is not.
Deliberate attempts to provide the community-and-practice scaffolding of religion without the metaphysics: Sunday Assembly, secular meditation centres, Effective Altruism groups, Stoic salons. Modest reach; durable enough in places.
Robert Bellah argued the US has always had a 'civil religion' (founding documents, holidays, civic rituals) separate from particular denominations. Where institutional religion recedes, civic religion bears more load and is also under more stress. Re-investment in civic ritual is one of the under-appreciated levers.
Meaning is found in belonging to land, kin, ancestors, ceremony. Where Indigenous traditions are practiced or revived, the loneliness and meaning deficits that obsess Western commentators are markedly less acute. The lesson is offered, not imposed.
Across multiple traditions: the answer to the meaning crisis is not bespoke spirituality but disciplined practice within an existing tradition. Mass attendance, daily prayer, fasting, congregational obligation. Anecdotal and survey data both suggest that the 'religious recommitment' cohort reports the highest meaning scores measured.
Mass internment in 're-education' camps (peak estimate >1M detained); birthrate suppression via forced sterilisation; cultural / religious erasure (mosque destruction, language suppression). Multiple Western governments (US, UK, Canada, Netherlands, France) have designated 'genocide' or 'crimes against humanity'.
Military operations beginning August 2017 forced ~750,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh; villages razed, mass rape and killing documented. ICJ genocide case (filed by The Gambia) proceeding. Refugee population in Cox's Bazar ~1M.
Systematic state persecution since the revolution: cemeteries destroyed, businesses confiscated, university access denied, arbitrary detention. Pattern intensified post-2022 protests. Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority.
Sustained Boko Haram + ISWAP attacks; Fulani-herder vs Christian-farmer violence intensified by climate-driven land competition. Open Doors records Nigeria as the country with highest Christian-faith-linked killings annually.
Pew GRI score moved from 'moderate' into 'very high' band 2014-2024. Citizenship Amendment Act, anti-conversion laws, beef-lynching impunity, demolition of Muslim-owned property as 'planning enforcement'. Muslim ~14% of population.
Long-running pattern: monastery surveillance, denial of free succession for the Dalai Lama, forced relocation of nomads, restrictions on language education. Less reported than Xinjiang; structurally similar.
Years mark the consolidation of each movement as a coalition or governing force, not necessarily its origin. The clustering at 2014-2024 is real: most contemporary religious-nationalist regimes are products of the post-2010 illiberal wave.
Khomeini's theocratic revolution. First and longest-running modern religious-nationalist regime. Has outlasted three US administrations' regime-change forecasts.
Post-Mecca-siege consolidation of Wahhabi-Salafi religious establishment as constitutive of the state. MBS reforms (2017-) have weakened the religious police but not the framework.
Putin's reconstruction of the Church-state alignment as a 'Russian World' civilisational identity. Justification scaffolding for the Ukraine war; weaponised against domestic dissent.
Erdoğan's gradual erosion of secularist (Kemalist) institutions and re-Islamicisation of public life. Hagia Sophia reverted to mosque 2020.
Orbán's 'illiberal democracy' explicitly framed as defence of Christian civilisation; constitutional preamble references God and Christian tradition.
Modi-era political project to redefine India as a Hindu nation rather than a secular republic. Citizenship Amendment Act, Article 370 abrogation, Ram Mandir construction.
Bolsonaro coalition closely aligned with Pentecostal/Evangelical movement. Defeated 2022 but the political-religious infrastructure persists; second-largest evangelical population globally.
First Israeli government with Religious Zionism / Otzma Yehudit in coalition with cabinet portfolios. Judicial reform crisis and post-Oct-7 war have hardened the alignment.
Christian Nationalist framing has moved from fringe to coalition-defining within the Republican Party. Project 2025 explicitly invokes Christian-nationalist policy framework.
Where religion has been mobilised as a national-identity project, affective polarisation runs hotter. India, Hungary, Türkiye, Brazil, and the post-2014 US sit at the high-high corner. Japan and Sweden, where religious identity is broadly absent from major-party politics, anchor the low corner. The mechanism: identity politics with sacred-stakes framing collapses the ordinary cross-cutting cleavages that buffer hostility.
The composite index is computed from the signals listed on this page, each backed by one or more named sources. Where the source publishes a public dataset or feed it is linked below; where a signal involves qualitative judgement, the LLM-assisted pass is explicitly marked on the signal card.
data/history-current/ for the calibration log.data/raw/ so a score is reproducible from its input bundle.This pillar tries to track two things moving at the same time: the political instrumentalisation of religion (religious nationalism, persecution, blasphemy enforcement) and the broader secularisation / meaning-crisis trajectory. Both feed the score; both get reported in their own terms below.
'Meaning self-report' is in here as a signal because the secularisation literature has often treated the decline of institutional religion as straightforwardly positive. The data is more mixed than that. The gap in self-reported meaning between affiliated and unaffiliated US adults is real and persistent.
Religious-minority persecution is the highest-weighted unambiguously-bad signal. The count of countries with systematic state-tolerated persecution of a minority faith has grown across recent USCIRF and Open Doors reports.