The Most Secular Countries

TL;DR

The world’s least religious societies cluster in East Asia and Northern Europe, with newer entrants in the Anglosphere (Australia, New Zealand, the UK). China leads most rankings on self-identified atheism; the Nordic countries, Czechia, the Netherlands, and Estonia top European lists; Japan and South Korea anchor East Asian secularity. Sociologically, the drivers are consistent: existential security(Norris & Inglehart), high education, urbanisation, and information access via the internet (Allen Downey). The American exception— a wealthy democracy with unusually high religiosity — is eroding fast: the religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) rose from 16% of US adults in 2007 to about 29% in 2021. The data also decisively refutes the claim that secular societies are less moral: the most secular countries dominate global rankings on happiness, social trust, gender equality, and low corruption.

The data landscape

Two major global surveys provide the best picture of religiosity by country. The WIN/Gallup International Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism directly asks people whether they consider themselves religious, non-religious, or convinced atheists. The Pew Research Center’s Global Religious Landscape surveys track religious affiliation, belief in God, frequency of prayer, and the importance of religion in daily life. Together, they paint a remarkably consistent picture: the least religious countries in the world are concentrated in East Asia and Northern Europe.

A caveat runs through all of this data. “Religion” is not a single variable; it bundles affiliation, belief, practice, and importance, and these come apart in interesting ways. Japan scores low on belief but high on ritual. Sweden scores low on attendance but retains near-universal nominal membership in the national church. The United States scores unusually high on importance of religion relative to its wealth. Rankings therefore depend on the axis chosen. The sections below synthesise across axes rather than privileging any one of them.

The most secular nations

China and East Asia

Chinaleads most rankings, with WIN/Gallup finding that 61% of Chinese citizens identify as “convinced atheists” — the highest rate in the world. Decades of state atheism under the Communist Party played a role, but the persistence of irreligion even as China has liberalized economically suggests that cultural factors run deeper than policy. Folk religion, ancestor veneration, and Buddhist or Daoist aesthetics remain culturally present, but belief in a personal creator God is vanishingly rare.

The Nordic model: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland

The Nordic countries— Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland — are all among the world’s most secular societies. Sweden is particularly striking: despite maintaining a state church (the Church of Sweden) until 2000, only about 15% of Swedes attend church regularly, and a 2015 WIN/Gallup poll found that 78% considered themselves “not religious” or “atheist.” Denmark and Norway show the same pattern — high nominal Lutheran membership, extremely low lived religiosity. Iceland’s younger cohorts are among the least religious in the world, with surveys finding essentially zero under-25s who believe God created the universe.

The Nordic case is theoretically important because it is the clearestempirical counter-example to the claim that religion is necessary for a functioning society. These countries routinely top global rankings for happiness, gender equality, social trust, and low corruption — the conditions religion is sometimes credited with producing.

Czechia and post-Communist Europe

Czech Republic(Czechia) is the least religious country in Europe. Over 70% of Czechs report no religious affiliation, and fewer than 20% say they believe in God. This is partly a legacy of Communist-era secularization, but Czechia was already less devout than its neighbours before 1948, and religiosity has continued to decline since 1989 — which is decisive against the view that Czech irreligion is purely a Soviet imposition. Estoniatells a similar story: the least religious of the former Soviet republics, with belief in God running near 30% and affiliation even lower. Post-Communist Europe is not uniformly secular — Poland and Romania remain devout — but the Czech and Estonian patterns suggest long historical roots, not just a 40-year detour.

Anglosphere outliers: Australia, New Zealand, the UK

The English-speaking world was long thought to resist European-style secularization. That picture is no longer accurate. In Australia, “no religion” surpassed any single Christian denomination in the 2021 census, with about 39% selecting it outright. New Zealand passed the same threshold earlier, with nearly half the population now identifying as non-religious. In the United Kingdom, the 2021 England and Wales census found “no religion” at 37% — up from 25% a decade earlier — and for the first time Christianity fell below 50%. These three are following a decade or two behind the Nordic curve, but the direction is unmistakably the same.

Japan: secular practice, ritual culture

Japanis consistently among the least religious nations, though its relationship with religion is complex. Most Japanese participate in Shinto rituals and Buddhist traditions culturally, but fewer than 15% say religion is important in their daily lives (Pew, 2018). Japan demonstrates that a society can maintain cultural traditions rooted in religion — shrine visits, festivals, funeral rites — while being functionally secular in belief. It is the strongest real-world evidence that ritual continuity and theological commitment are separable, and that a culture can keep one without the other.

South Korea: rapid secularization in real time

South Korea is the most interesting live case. Christianity (particularly Protestantism) and Buddhism both grew rapidly in the late 20th century, yet by the 2020s the religiously unaffiliated are the single largest group, approaching 60% of the population. Korean Christianity surged during the Cold War and industrialisation era, then began losing younger cohorts faster than almost any country outside Europe. South Korea compresses into a couple of generations a secularization curve that elsewhere took a century.

Other highly secular nations include the Netherlands(where “nones” became the largest group in 2016), Germany (majority unaffiliated in the east, trending that way in the west), France (the oldest European secular republic, with laïcité as explicit constitutional principle), and Belgium.

Why countries secularize

Existential security (Norris & Inglehart)

The strongest sociological predictor of national secularization is existential security— the theory, developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in Sacred and Secular(Cambridge, 2004), that as societies become wealthier, safer, and more equal, the psychological need for religious reassurance diminishes. Countries with strong social safety nets, universal healthcare, low inequality, and high education levels tend to be the least religious. Where daily life is precarious — acute poverty, violence, unreliable institutions — religion retains its traditional function as a source of meaning, protection, and community. Where daily life is stable and state-backed, that function atrophies across generations.

Education and critical thinking

Educationplays a significant role, particularly education that emphasizes critical thinking and scientific literacy. Countries with the highest rates of tertiary education tend to have the lowest rates of religious belief — though the relationship is not perfectly linear. Education works partly by exposing people to alternative worldviews, partly by training the habits of evidence-evaluation that make specifically religious claims harder to hold, and partly by deferring life stages (career, family, settled community) during which religious identity typically consolidates.

Urbanization and weakened community structures

Urbanizationweakens the tight-knit community structures that sustain religious practice. In rural communities, the church or mosque is often the centre of social life. In cities, people have access to diverse social networks, entertainment, and support systems that are not tied to religion. The social cost of leaving a congregation — a potent retention mechanism in small towns — falls dramatically in an urban environment where dozens of other communities are available within walking distance.

Information access and the internet effect (Allen Downey)

Information access matters increasingly. The internet has made it far easier for people in religious communities to encounter alternative viewpoints, scientific explanations, and the experiences of former believers. Research by Allen Downeyat Olin College, using General Social Survey data, found that internet access accounts for a significant portion of the rise in religious non-affiliation in the United States — more than education or declining religious upbringing alone explain. The mechanism is intuitive: in tight-knit religious communities, the cost of publicly questioning belief used to be severe; online, it is near zero, and the evidence is searchable.

The American exception — and its decline

The United States has long been an outlier: a wealthy, educated democracy with unusually high levels of religiosity. Scholars have debated why for decades. The most compelling explanation is the “religious marketplace” hypothesis (Roger Finke and Rodney Stark): America’s diversity of denominations competing for members kept religion culturally vibrant in ways that state-monopoly churches in Europe did not. A secondary factor is America’s comparatively thin social safety net — by Norris and Inglehart’s existential-security theory, a country where healthcare bankruptcy and retirement precarity are real possibilities will retain religion longer than one where they are not.

But the American exception is eroding rapidly. The share of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated rose from 16% in 2007 to 29% in 2021 (Pew). Among adults under 30, the figure is closer to 40%. Political scientist Ryan Burge, whose work on the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study has become the definitive quantitative account of the American nones, documents that the unaffiliated are now statistically tied with evangelicals and Catholics as one of the three largest religious categories in the country. Burge’s data also shows the rise is concentrated in younger cohorts and is not reversing as those cohorts age.

The United States is not becoming secular as quickly as Northern Europe, and it is unlikely to catch up soon — the Southern states, in particular, remain highly religious. But the national trajectory is unmistakable: by every measure that matters, the country is secularising, and the gap with Europe is narrowing from the American side.

What the data does NOT show

It is worth noting what the data does not show. Secularization does not lead to moral collapse. The most secular countries in the world consistently rank among the highest on measures of human development, social trust, happiness, low corruption, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. The World Happiness Report’s top ten is dominated by the same Northern European countries that top the secularism rankings — Finland has held the #1 slot every year since 2018, with Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Norway all regular top-ten entries. The Social Progress Index tells the same story: Nordic and Northwest European countries dominate the top of the rankings on basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunity.

On OECD Better Life Indexmeasures — life satisfaction, safety, civic engagement, work-life balance — the pattern repeats: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Australia consistently near the top. On Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the ten least corrupt countries in the world are, with rare exception, all highly secular. On the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, the top scorers for gender equality are again dominated by Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and New Zealand — all among the most secular societies on earth.

This does not prove that secularism causes human flourishing — the causal relationship likely runs both directions, and there are confounders (wealth, institutions, geography) that cut across the correlation. But the data thoroughly refutes the claim that religion is necessary for a moral, stable, or happy society. The evidence suggests the opposite: the conditions that allow people to thrive are the same conditions that allow them to let go of religious belief. See can you be good without God? for the philosophical version of the same point.

Sources

• Pew Research Center: Religious Landscape Study
• Pew Research Center: Modeling the Future of Religion in America (2022)
• WIN/Gallup International: Global Index of Religion and Atheism
• Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• World Happiness Report
• Social Progress Imperative: Social Progress Index
• Transparency International: Corruption Perceptions Index
• Ryan Burge, Graphs about Religion (ongoing analysis of US religious data)