As the World Got Online, It Got Less Religious. A Study of 81 Countries Says That Is Not a Coincidence.

In 1990, fewer than three percent of people on Earth had ever gone online. By 2022, most of the planet carried a browser in a pocket, a shift that took barely one generation. Across that same window, a wide slice of humanity also quit calling itself religious.

The overlap is hard to miss. A freshly published paper says the connection between those two curves runs closer than coincidence.

The work comes from Miran Lavric and Tibor Rutar, sociologists at the University of Maribor in Slovenia. They tracked 81 nations across six waves of the World Values Survey, spanning 1990 to 2022, and built a religiosity index out of six recurring survey questions.

• How often someone attends religious services
• How important they say God is to them personally
• How important they say religion is to them generally
• Whether they identify with a specific religious denomination
• Whether they call themselves a religious person
• How much confidence they place in churches

That index held together statistically, with a reliability score, Cronbach's alpha, of 0.90 across 266 to 285 country-period observations. Lagged web access outpredicted every other modernization variable the pair tested, including schooling, wealth, city growth and trade openness.

The decline was not even across categories

Denominational belonging and religious self-identification fell the most, with standardized coefficients between -0.299 and -0.376. Attendance at services and confidence in churches moved less, and in some models the difference was not statistically significant. People let go of the label faster than they let go of the habit.

“Years ago I heard Daniel Dennett say that the internet was the best thing to happen to atheism since Darwin.”

Lavric says the actual research testing that idea stayed thin for a long time. "More recently, I was surprised to find that research on whether the internet actually has secularizing effects has remained relatively sparse and methodologically limited," he told PsyPost. That gap sent him and Rutar hunting for a systematic answer across dozens of nations and three decades of survey data.

Not proof, and not the whole story

The pair are careful about what their numbers do and do not show. Faith can also predict later internet adoption, so the paper cannot rule out reverse causation. Survey coverage was uneven across countries and decades. The composite index cannot tell a person reading scripture on a phone apart from someone scrolling something else entirely.

Lavric also points to a countertrend his own fieldwork has picked up back home in Slovenia. Online influencer culture there is fueling renewed religious interest among young men, running the opposite direction from his global data. "There is no reason to assume that the secularizing pattern associated with internet diffusion will persist in the future," he said.

This pattern is not new, and it is not small

This is not the first paper to draw a line between modems and pews. A 2021 University of Michigan analysis of 42 nations found the same secularizing pull between 2007 and 2020, right as global connectivity surged. Earlier American research had already pinned going online as responsible for something like 20 percent of the decline in U.S. religious affiliation between the 1980s and 2010.

What was measured keeps evolving

The web Lavric and Rutar measured was mostly forums, search engines and early social platforms, not the algorithmic feeds and AI chat companions of 2026. Whether today's version of being online pushes people further from organized worship, or toward newer, looser forms of belonging, is still unclear. This dataset was never built to answer that question.