I don’t think we can assume that children will continue in their parents religion though. The US, for instance, is much less religious than it used to be.

The genetics (and heritability more generally) of religiosity are fairly well understood.

Fairly, but Western countries started as very religious and are losing that at varying rates. Heritability is real but far from absolute.

All other things being equal I'd expect it to reach an equilibrium. I don't think all other things are equal in this case, and nonbelief becomes more attractive over time (for better or worse).

Are they? Would you elaborate on it or link some reading material? I've never heard of religion being heritary and your claim is pretty strong to just throw out there without any additional information.

One 2005 twin study [0] found religiosity was approximately 40% genetic.

[1] argues that pro-religion alleles are likely to become more common over time, since in the contemporary world religious people tend to have more children than the non-religious on average

It seems unlikely there is any single "God gene". Rather, certain personality traits (such as agreeableness) increase the likelihood of a person accepting religion, and genetics contributes to those traits, which in turn indirectly contributes to religiosity

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15745438/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125629/

The western world is an exception to the general norm. Virtually everyone in the country where I’m from follows their parent’s religion, for example. Anyway, the folks at Pew are pretty smart. I’m sure they’re accounting for that.

>The western world is an exception to the general norm

I see this quoted a lot, but I don't think it's true:

+ There are plenty of places (and with a significant population) outside the western world that are quite secular and have become more secular in the past decades + There are places in the West that have become more religious. If by "Western" you mean just "Western Europe", then, yeah, that's a specially secular place but it's also a tiny place in both population and area.

China, Japan and South Korea are quite secular in many ways. A big chunk of Latin America is now quite secular too. You already have ~1.5B people fairly secular people that are non western.

On the other hand, countries like Poland or Hungary (which I'm guessing we would classify as Western) are becoming more religious.

> On the other hand, countries like Poland or Hungary (which I'm guessing we would classify as Western) are becoming more religious.

That is not true. Where did you get that idea?

The US is much less religious with respect to the traditionally recognized religions (e.g. Christianity), but it seems that religious energy is still ever present in non-traditional religions.

> religious energy is still ever present in non-traditional religions.

Which would those be? Are you talking about stuff like the rise of astrology and numerology in the US?

I think they are talking about the fervent fringe political ideologies, like trumpism or being very woke.

In a nominal sense this is true because people fairly rarely renounce their religious identity, qualitatively it's almost certainly not the case. On paper 84% of the Irish population are still Christian, de facto the country is much more secular than it was decades ago resulting in legalization of abortion, gay marriage, removal of blasphemy laws, the world's fifth gay head of state etc.

Secularization within formally religious groups is progressing much faster than change in demographics.

A few hundred million Europeans are becoming more secular. While a billion Indians are becoming more religious.

A billion Indians are becoming more religious? Really?

Politics is polarising along lines of religious identity, yes, but increasing religious behaviour? Going to temples more, donating more of their incomes?

Are you sure?