What might the future of religion look like in North America?

If you've been paying attention to the news over the past few months you might have noticed that people who say they have no religious affiliation in the US has doubled in the US since 1990 from 8 to 15 percent, and another poll from Gallup gives similar numbers. Newsweek has chosen to announce these results with a ton of hyperbole (title: The End of Christian America), but that's a bit silly for 15% - the numbers aren't yet even close to the numbers you find in Europe. It's also going to be interesting to see how the numbers change over the next four (probably eight) years with Barack Obama in the White House considering how much more "refined" his Christianity is compared to that of George Bush, making Christianity much less of a political target at the moment. That is, we now have a much more popular administration with a president who is much less obvious about his religion than the previous one, and if the church in the US is smart it will begin to adapt a more community service-oriented approach (rather than an evangelical one), not only due to the bad economy and the vast number of people that need help, but also the ability for people to say that yes, I'm a Christian, but more of an Obama-type Christian.

But let's say that the numbers of non-religious people keep increasing, and we eventually end up with a situation where a majority of people don't believe in God. What happens then?

The interesting thing is this: as can be seen with a lot of polls as well as in person when visiting a country with a less religious populace, this new population of non-religious people doesn't really resemble the current Dawkins/Hitchens/etc. type of atheists one encounters in person or online. They are usually equipped with a fair amount of basic theology to counter the religious (almost always evangelical Christian) side when an argument comes up, and those that are interested in the subject have probably noticed that there's really very little variation in these debates. There's even a site called The Arguing Atheist that goes over some of the methods used in debate - when to bring up Ockham's Razor, Pascal's Wager, burden of proof, etc.

But what actually does happen when a society becomes largely non-religious (or merely personally religious as opposed to wearing one's religion on one's sleeve) is that this new population largely has no idea how theology works, but at the same time since this isn't all that important in society anymore, a lot of people begin to hold some pretty hazy, and often contradictory ideas. Take Norway for example. Here's an article from Aftenposten on religion in Norway. The first paragraph has the following:

"The five 15-year-old tenth graders in Årvoll school have differing relationships to faith: Tobias Torstensen is Christian but doesn't believe in God, Aboli Hussein Adib is Muslim and believes that there is a God, Thany Thileepan is a humanist and believes in the human race, while Helene Kristiansen is a weak Christian but does not believe in God."

As you can imagine, a lot of the comments below the article (such as here and here) have issue with that (because it doesn't really make sense). When religion isn't that much of an issue in daily life you start to find some odd contradictions like this. Christians that don't believe in God, perhaps secular humanists that do. You'll notice this in countries like Japan as well, where not only are people not all that religious, but they also don't really have the zeal for debate over the issue that other countries do, and so everyone seems to construct a kind of personal theology that doesn't really have to follow any sort of logic as the issue almost never comes up. It seems a bit more like one's preferred brand of Linux than a well-structured kind of theology.

And in the midst of all that we also find Islam. According to the article in Norwegian, Muslims are by and large very proud of their religion while Christians in Norway are more shy about it:

Muslims are proud of the religion they belong to. Christians seem to be more shy about it. They are afraid of questioning and being met with prejudice, says the survey.

Von der Lippe believes this has something to do with how believe is a greater choice for Christians, whereas Muslims have grown into their religion from childhood.

The four students agree with this. Aboli Hussein Adib (15) puts it bluntly: "I'm proud to be Muslim."

He prays five times a day and goes to Koranic school in the mosque every weekend. The others rarely go to church.

Generally atheists are more offended by religions that claim to be the only path to truth or salvation than more moderate (Buddhism) or smaller religions (Bahai), while at the same time your average English-speaking atheist seems to be pretty ill-equipped to debate either online or in person on Islam. It's easy enough to bring up some general points about burden of proof, but usually the way to have the greatest effect on a literalist is to use their own source against them, and when arguing with a person without a basic grounding in the theology of a religion it's easy to toss their arguments aside on the assumption that they don't know what they're talking about. Sure, there's a version of the SAB devoted to the Koran and you'll often see people copy and paste a list of quotes from the Koran that seem pretty negative or violent, but on the whole this is a pretty ham-fisted method of debate compared to the one between Christianity and atheism as a great many North American atheists are former Christians and thus have at least a working knowledge of the religion they now oppose.