Irreligion

"Irreligious" redirects here. For the album by Moonspell, see Irreligious (album).

Not to be confused with secularity.

Irreligion (adjective form: non-religious or irreligious) is the absence of religion, an indifference towards religion, a rejection of religion, or hostility towards religion. When characterized as the rejection of religious belief, it encompasses explicit atheism, religious dissidence, and secular humanism. When characterized as hostility towards religion, it encompasses anticlericalism, antireligion, and antitheism.

When characterized as indifference to religion, it is known as apatheism. When characterized as the absence of religious belief, it may also include deism, implicit atheism, "spiritual but not religious", agnosticism, pandeism, ignosticism, nontheism, pantheism, panentheism, religious skepticism, and freethought, depending upon individual definitions, and the distinction between different senses of the word religion. Irreligion may include some forms of theism, depending on the religious context it is defined against; for example, in 18th-century Europe, the epitome of irreligion was deism.

According to Pew Research Center's 2012 global study of 230 countries, 16% of the world's population is not affiliated with a religion, while 84% are affiliated. Several other polls on the subject have been conducted by Gallup International: their 2012 poll from 57 countries reported that 59% of the world's population identified as religious, 23% as not religious, 13% as "convinced atheists", and also a 9% decrease in identification as "religious" when compared to the 2005 average from 39 countries. Their follow up poll in 2015 found that 63% of the globe identified as religious, 22% as not religious, and 11% as "convinced atheists". According to Pew Research Center's 2012 global study, out of the global nonreligious population, 76% reside in Asia and the Pacific, while the remainder reside in Europe (12%), North America (5%), Latin America and the Caribbean (4%), sub-Saharan Africa (2%) and the Middle East and North Africa (less than 1%). According to Pew Research Center projections, the nonreligious, though temporarily increasing, will ultimately decline significantly by 2050 because of lower reproductive rates and ageing.

Being nonreligious is not necessarily equivalent to being an atheist or agnostic. Pew Research Center's global study from 2012 noted that many of the nonreligious actually have some religious beliefs. For example, they observed that "belief in God or a higher power is shared by 7% of Chinese unaffiliated adults, 30% of French unaffiliated adults and 68% of unaffiliated U.S. adults."

Human rights

In 1993, the UN's human rights committee declared that article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights "protects theistic, non-theistic and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess any religion or belief." The committee further stated that "the freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief necessarily entails the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace one's current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views." Signatories to the convention are barred from "the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers" to recant their beliefs or convert.

Most Western democracies protect the freedom of religion, and it is largely implied in respective legal systems that those who do not believe or observe any religion are allowed freedom of thought.

A noted exception to ambiguity, explicitly allowing non-religion, is Article 36 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (as authored in 1982), which states that "No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion." Article 46 of China’s 1978 Constitution was even more explicit, stating that "Citizens enjoy freedom to believe in religion and freedom not to believe in religion and to propagate atheism."

Demographics

Main article: Irreligion by country

Although 11 countries listed below have non-religious majorities, it does not mean that majority of the populations of these countries don′t belong to any religious group. For example, 67.5% of the Swedish population belongs to Lutheran Christian Church, while 58.7% of Albanians declare themselves as Muslims. Also, though Scandinavian countries have among the highest measures of nonreligiosity and even atheism in Europe, 47% of atheists who live in those countries are still members of the national churches.

A Pew 2015 global projection study for religion and nonreligion, projects that between 2010 and 2050, there will some initial increases of the unaffiliated followed by a decline by 2050 due to lower global fertility rates among this demographic. Sociologist Phil Zuckerman's global studies on atheism have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.

Gallup Religiosity Index 2009 (light color indicates religious, dark nonreligious)

The tables below order the percentage of a country's population that are nonreligious from highest to lowest.

Country	Percentage of population that is non-religious (+20%)	Date and source
Estonia	70.4
Czech Republic	67.8
Vietnam	63
Denmark	61
Netherlands	56
Germany	55
Sweden	54
Albania	52
Japan	52
Azerbaijan	51
China	50.5
Uruguay	47
France	44
Russia	43.8
Belarus	43.5
South Korea	43
Finland	42.9
Hungary	42.6
Ukraine	42.4
Iceland	42
New Zealand	41.9
Latvia	40.6
United Kingdom	39
Belgium	35.4
Luxembourg	29.9
Slovenia	29.9
Chile	25.0
Canada	23.9
Spain	23.3
Slovakia	23.1
United States	22.8
Australia	22.3
Switzerland	21.4

Country	Percentage of population that is non-religious (-20%)	Date and source
Lithuania	19.4
Guatemala	18.3
Italy	17.8
Argentina	16.0
Nicaragua	15.7
Belize	15.6
South Africa	15.1
El Salvador	14.6
Croatia	13.2
Austria	12.2
Portugal	11.4
Costa Rica	11.3
Puerto Rico	11.1
Bulgaria	11.1
Philippines	10.9
Honduras	9.0
Brazil	8.0
Ecuador	7.9
Ireland	7.0
Mexico	7.0
India	6.6
Venezuela	6.0
Serbia	5.8
Peru	4.7
Poland	4.6
Greece	4.0
Panama	3.0
Turkey	2.5
Romania	2.4
Tanzania	1.7
Malta	1.3
Iran	1.1
Uganda	1.1
Nigeria	0.7
Thailand	0.27
Bangladesh	0.1

See also

• Humanism
• Importance of religion by country
• Irreligion by country
• Nontheistic religions
• Pantheism
• Post-theism
• Skepticism
• Spiritual but not religious
• Transtheistic