New study links the spread of the internet to a global decline in religious identity

The spread of the internet has fundamentally changed how people interact, work, and learn. A recent cross-national study indicates that as internet access grows within a country, religious affiliation and religious self-identification tend to decrease. These findings were published in Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review.

Sociologists have long debated the drivers of secularization, which is the historical decline in the social and personal importance of religion. Classical theories often point to modernization. As societies become wealthier, more educated, and more urban, people tend to rely less on religious institutions for basic survival and social support.

More recently, scholars have suggested that digital communication might act as its own secularizing force. The internet exposes individuals to diverse worldviews, lowers the cost of accessing scientific information, and makes it easier to question traditional authority. Online platforms can also replace local, in-person communities with digital networks, potentially weakening the social environments that usually sustain religious participation.

The concept of religiosity itself is complex and multifaceted. To understand religious decline, scientists often look at multiple dimensions of faith. For example, a 2017 study of adolescents proposed that religiosity includes distinct elements, such as personal beliefs, private practices like prayer, and how exclusive a person’s worldview is.

In the context of the internet, different parts of religious life might respond differently to digital connectivity. While earlier studies found links between individual internet use and lower religious commitment, much of this evidence was limited to single countries or snapshots in time. The research, led by Miran Lavrič, a full professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maribor, sought to test whether internet expansion acts as a broad predictor of secularization across many different countries over several decades.

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The idea that digital connectivity might erode faith has circulated for years among scholars and public intellectuals. “Years ago I heard Daniel Dennett say that the internet was the best thing to happen to atheism since Darwin,” Lavrič told PsyPost. “More recently, I was surprised to find that research on whether the internet actually has secularizing effects has remained relatively sparse and methodologically limited.”

“At the same time, a substantial field of research on digital religion has developed, showing that religious communities can be remarkably adaptive and can use the internet to their own benefit,” he added. “So my colleague Tibor Rutar and I decided to examine this question systematically across many societies and over a long period of time.”

To explore this, the researchers assembled a massive dataset covering 81 countries between 1990 and 2022. They combined national internet usage statistics with six waves of data from the World Values Survey. This survey is a long-running international project that tracks human beliefs and values across the globe.

The team constructed a six-item index to measure a country’s average religiosity. This index included rates of religious service attendance, the personal importance of God, the overall importance of religion, self-rated religious identity, confidence in churches, and formal belonging to a religious denomination. They also tracked a wide package of modernization metrics for each country, including economic output per person, average years of schooling, urbanization rates, globalization, demographic aging, and income inequality.

The researchers used statistical models designed to look at changes within each individual country over time, rather than just comparing rich countries to poor ones. They also used a time delay in their calculations. This allowed them to match a country’s internet adoption in one survey period to its religious levels in the following survey period, helping to establish the sequence of trends.

The results showed a consistent pattern. Increases in a country’s internet penetration reliably predicted later decreases in the country’s average religiosity. This negative association held up even after the researchers adjusted for the other modernization factors, suggesting that internet expansion is tied to religious decline independently of general economic or educational improvements.

“The simplest takeaway is that as societies became more connected to the internet, they also tended to become less religious,” Lavrič said. “The associations were meaningful, but not huge. A one-standard-deviation increase in internet diffusion was associated with roughly a 0.20 standard-deviation decline in overall religiosity.”

“What was particularly striking was that internet diffusion was the most robust predictor of religious decline among the standard modernization variables included in our models, while factors such as education, economic development, and globalization were much less consistent,” the researcher explained. “This suggests that, during the period we studied, internet diffusion may have been an important channel through which broader modernization translated into secularization.”

Blake Victor Kent, an associate professor of sociology at Westmont College who was not involved in the study, agreed with this assessment. “The work is robust and finds that internet diffusion correlates with lower levels of religiosity, lending some support to classic secularization arguments which argue that the spread of information and exposure to other views leads to a weakening of plausibility structures,” he told PsyPost.

Kent, who is also a research affiliate at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations, and Health Disparities and a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program, added, “I also appreciated that the researchers noted how internet use emphasizes individualization, which can threaten participation in embodied religious communities, so it’s not just intellectual structures that are affected, but time and place-bound structures as well.”

However, the associations were not uniform across all aspects of faith. The internet’s negative relationship was strongest for institutional belonging and self-identifying as a religious person. In other words, as a population spent more time online, fewer people formally affiliated with a denomination or labeled themselves as religious.

In contrast, the links between internet use and time-intensive practices, like attending religious services or rating God as highly important, were smaller and less stable. This indicates that digital connectivity might erode religious identity and formal membership more rapidly than it changes the daily habits of those who remain observant.

Kent emphasized this distinction. “It’s important to note – to put some larger context on this – that there are dozens, or even hundreds, of ways to measure religion and spirituality, and this study examines just six,” he said. “Of those six, only two show particularly strong associations: denominational belonging and religious self-identification. That these two identity markers change with internet diffusion does not necessarily mean religion is dead, and the authors acknowledge that some evidence shows it’s possible for digital religious activity to complement religious activity in real life, thereby actually reinforcing rather than reducing religiosity.”

The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2018, which found that individual internet use among American adults was tied to a lower likelihood of identifying with a specific religion, but not necessarily a decrease in actual religious activities. The new study suggests a similar pattern plays out on a global scale.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the data cannot completely untangle cause and effect. While past internet use predicted lower future religiosity, the authors also ran the numbers in reverse and found that past levels of religiosity predicted future internet adoption. This hints that religious decline and digital expansion might feed into one another in a reciprocal loop.

Another detail to consider is the nature of the data. The study looked at country-level averages, which cannot speak to the micro-level experiences of specific individuals going online and losing their faith. National averages obscure the varied ways different groups interact with technology.

Finally, the data tracked general internet usage without specifying what people were doing online. The internet hosts vibrant digital religious communities, and some religious groups use online platforms to strengthen their faith and coordinate activities. The current study could not separate secular browsing from online religious engagement, and future studies might explore how specific types of internet use shape modern belief.

“It is important to understand that our findings relate to a particular historical period of rapid internet diffusion,” Lavrič told PsyPost. “There is no reason to assume that the secularizing pattern associated with internet diffusion will persist in the future.”

“Some recent research, including my own work in Slovenia, suggests that online influencer cultures are increasingly intertwined with renewed interest in religion, particularly among young men,” he noted. “This illustrates how unpredictable the future relationship between the internet and religion may be.”

Kent pointed out that human spirituality often adapts rather than vanishes entirely. “Secularization scholars have long been predicting the death of religion, but as early secularization scholar Peter Berger told me once before he died, ‘The world is today as furiously religious as it ever was,'” Kent said.

“The difference is what we are religious about, how we measure religion and spirituality, and if we should expect these patterns to uniformly move continuously in one direction in all times and places,” he explained. “If Elon gets his way and we seed the stars with human consciousness, did religion die? Or do we simply have a new religion and we’re all transhumanists now?”

The study, “Internet Diffusion and Religious Decline: Evidence from 81 Countries, 1990–2022,” was authored by Miran Lavrič and Tibor Rutar.