“Secularization is the historical process whereby religious faith, religious involvement, religious identification, and religious institutions weaken, fade or become less significant in society. And while secularization is in no way inevitable or irreversible … when we look at the world today, the evidence for dramatic trajectories of secularization … is simply staggering.”
So sociology professor Paul Zuckerman writes in Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions, a 2014 book in which he explores the dramatic rise in secularism in the United States and other western countries. Zuckerman, a self-identified secularist, takes seriously the statistical indications that a growing number of Americans (currently some 20 percent) are distancing themselves from religion and religious identity.
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