This story was recently taken up by the Guardian Express and the International Business Times, whose writers were responding to a prediction in my book Why Atheism Will Replace Religion. Unfortunately these writers got the story wrong in various ways. Research has shown that religion declines not just with rising national wealth but with all plausible measures of the quality of life, including length of life, decline of infectious diseases, education, the rise of the welfare state, and more equal distribution of income. Clearly there is less of a market for religion in societies where ordinary people feel secure in their daily lives. In the most developed countries, such as … Continue reading Nigel Barber