On the day that the 2021 Census data was released, there was considerable excitement from religion and worldviews teachers. Kathryn Wright, Chief Executive of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, described it as a ‘special holiday or festival’ for us due to the impact of the statistics in our classrooms. In the briefing, representatives from different faith groups and academics discuss the statistics’ trends, possible reasons for the changes in adherents and what they predict for the future. Teachers can use the data in class for students to analyse and compare how different religious and secular institutions in the briefing have presented the information relating to their own group: what statistics or headlines did they prefer to focus on and why?

This is the first projection of religion across the world to use formal demographic data on population rates, migration, fertility, mortality and people switching between faiths. With a broad timeline and geographical reach, these comprehensive statistics will interest to religion and worldviews teachers and students. Students can apply statistical, geographical, sociological and political disciplines to the data on this site, which has both infographics and explanations of trends and processes. This resource was published before the 2021 census data for England and Wales, and its prediction that less than fifty per cent of the population would state they were Christian was accurate. Students could consider specific religions and regions of the world, as part of a broader topic in that area.

What do religion and religious ideas fulfil for humanity, and why does religion endure despite the challenges of modernity and secularisation? These questions and more are explored in this episode. First, the ways that technology is answering many of the ultimate questions we have as humans, including the desire for immortality, are explored. Recorded before the release of the AI chatbot ChatGTP, a lengthy discussion on the implications of AI on religion and faith seems as timely now as it was in 2018. Discourse on fundamentalism and evangelicalism are juxtaposed with conversations around the ‘secular’ religion of humanism and the Sunday Assembly. Not only will this episode help in discussions around the future of religion, but discussions of the mind-body problem and what it means to be human in today’s world.

Sociologist Chen’s book explores the adoption of many religious ideas and processes by employers in Silicon Valley, USA, where religious membership has declined as working hours have increased. With language adopted from the broadly Buddhist worldview of ‘compassion’ and ‘enlightenment’, tech companies hope to fulfil the spiritual needs of their employees to enable them to bring their ‘whole selves’ to work. While this has some benefits for employees, Chen views it as detrimental to the wider community and social infrastructure. For example, with employees no longer attending external temples or places of worship, those places come into the company to run gatherings on site. These gatherings can then conform to the company’s needs and aim to increase productivity rather than a genuine spiritual path for the individual. As well as examining the commercial aspect of religion that these companies are tapping into, this serves as an interesting case for not only the future of religion but also how we define religion itself.