Every technological revolution has a profound impact on the human culture around it. From Gutenberg’s press to the later innovations in newspapers, radio and television, each has impacted the human family in profound and far-reaching ways — socially, philosophically and religiously.
As people continue to grapple with the emerging impact of AI, researchers are finally getting enough historical distance from the internet’s creation to be able to offer a clearer-eyed view of its true impact on various dimensions of human experience, including faith.
A decade ago, right around the high-water mark of the New Atheist movement, more than one prominent atheist claimed, “The internet is the best thing to happen to atheism since Darwin.”
A newly published study by Slovenian sociologists at the University of Maribor, “Internet Diffusion and Religious Decline: Evidence from 81 Countries, 1990-2022,” cites this quote in introducing its investigation of the broader international impact of the internet on faith generally over the last three decades.
What did they find?
Drawing on data from the World Values Survey, the researchers examined whether a change in internet use within each of 81 countries between 1990 and 2022 led to subsequent changes in religiosity, as measured by a composite measure of religion across six items:
- Belonging to a religious denomination
- Attendance at rituals
- Importance of religion in life
- Importance of God in life
- Confidence in churches
- Whether someone identifies as a religious person
“Internet penetration is strongly and negatively associated with religiosity,” they reported. “Over time, higher internet use is consistently associated with lower religiosity.”
More specifically, institutional belonging and self-identification as a religious person appear to take the greatest hit. By comparison, internet influence on “ritual attendance and confidence in churches (is) smaller and often statistically insignificant.”
“Secularization is, of course, shaped by multiple interrelated processes,” researchers acknowledged. This includes other variables controlled for in the analysis, including education, wealth, urbanization and globalization, along with the influence of immigration and an aging population.
Although it is “statistically difficult to determine which among them are more decisive” in secularization, they argued that their analysis confirmed that “the internet-religiosity association is not simply a byproduct of rising education or income.”
The researchers note “nontrivial” measurement issues due to the survey being given “intermittently and unevenly across countries” and time periods.
Their correlation analysis also “cannot settle causality,” they admit — acknowledging the possibility of a reciprocal effect wherein people who are less religious end up using the internet more as well.
Earlier confirmatory evidence
This lines up with observations from a University of Michigan researcher in 2021 of an “overwhelming trend toward declining religiosity” from 2007 to 2020 across 42 of these same countries. This period of “religion’s sudden decline” coincides, the authors note, with a “dramatic surge in internet use.”
Up until 2007, 49 of these same countries had experienced “net increases in religious commitment,” according to that same scholar.
An earlier researcher likewise found a strong negative association between frequent internet use and affiliating with any religious tradition — proposing that the “secularizing force” of the internet could account for as much as 20% of the measurable decrease in religious affiliation in the United States between the 1980s and 2010.
Recently, BYU scholar Barbara Morgan Gardner noted the correlation between high social media usage and stepping away from faith. She emphasized the impact of broader secular culture on faith, citing Notre Dame scholar Christian Smith’s work on the particular “zeitgeist” popular among younger generations culturally.
What this isn’t saying
None of this suggests a uniform decline in religiosity across countries or faiths. There are too many surprising signs of deepening and growing faith across different age groups in recent years.
Likewise, internet penetration does not “weaken religion uniformly,” the authors acknowledge. “Online media can also extend, supplement, and sometimes intensify religious life by widening access to worship, pastoral care, devotional content, and dispersed communities of belonging.”
The question is whether the internet broadly is “more often reinforcing or eroding” faith — something that obviously varies at the individual level. For instance, the researchers again reiterate how often “digital religion can complement offline religiosity,” and acknowledge that at an individual level, people may draw strength online for their faith.