The internet isn’t killing God

First it came for Tower Records. Then Blockbuster. Then newspapers. Now researchers are claiming it is coming for God.Miran Lavric and Tibor Rutar, sociologists at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, have published a new paper in Sociology of Religion examining whether the spread of the internet has caused religious decline worldwide. The study covers 81 countries, including the United States, from 1990 through 2022, and the authors claim they have evidence that the internet is bringing atheism to the masses.Lavric and Rutar open by citing philosopher Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola’s 2015 predictions about the “Inevitable Growth of Atheism.” Their first prediction was that the internet would accelerate disengagement from religion by piercing the information “firewalls” that once sheltered religious beliefs from scrutiny. Dennett later called the internet “the best thing to happen to atheism since Darwin.”“This article examines that bold claim,” the authors claim.To do so, they use six waves of the World Values Survey and build a measure of religiosity from six questions included in those surveys: whether respondents belong to a religious denomination, how often they attend religious services, how important religion is in their lives, how important God is in their lives, how much confidence they have in churches, and whether they describe themselves as religious, not religious, or convinced atheists.They then compare changes in those measures with increases in internet use. Their models also account for other factors that could drive secularization, including income, education, urbanization, globalization, immigration, aging, inequality, government spending, and changing attitudes toward abortion, homosexuality, and divorce.The headline finding is striking: As internet penetration rises, religiosity tends to fall. The relationship remains even after the other identified variables are taken into account.But falling religiosity is not the same thing as rising atheism. Of the six factors that make up the author’s religiosity index, only religious affiliation and religious self-identification fell with the internet’s rise. Church attendance, confidence in churches, and the importance of God in people’s lives remained unchanged. If the internet is creating so many atheists, why are they all still going to church?The study’s handling of the religious identity question is also suspect. Respondents were given three choices: “religious person,” “not a religious person,” or “convinced atheist.” Lavric and Rutar assign those categories numerical values and calculate an average.But that method cannot tell us whether atheism itself is actually rising.Imagine a country where 70% of people call themselves religious, 25% say they are not religious, and 5% are convinced atheists. Years later, the religious share falls to 50% and the nonreligious share rises to 45%, while atheists remain at 5%.The authors’ religiosity score would fall substantially. Yet atheism would not have increased at all. Despite beginning with Dennett’s prediction about the “Inevitable Growth of Atheism,” the paper never separately tests whether the percentage of convinced atheists increases as internet use spreads.That does not make the study unimportant. It does mean its findings support a narrower conclusion.The internet may be associated with people abandoning religious denominations and becoming less willing to call themselves religious. But that is not the same thing as creating atheists.The late sociologist Rodney Stark spent much of his career warning against precisely this confusion. Declining church membership, he argued, does not necessarily mean declining supernatural belief. Religious institutions can weaken while belief survives in new forms.This paper may actually fit that argument better than Dennett’s.THE HAMMURABI SOLUTION TO AITower Records disappeared, but music did not. Blockbuster vanished, but movies did not. Newspapers shrank, but people did not stop consuming news.The internet may be weakening the institutions through which people traditionally encounter God, but that is not the same thing as belief disappearing.