For most of recorded history, parenting and religion were the same activity. To raise a child was to baptize, circumcise, name with the family saint, mark with the caste sign, teach the prayers, walk to the temple, observe the holy days, place the child inside a cosmology that explained what suffering meant and what death was for. The framework was not chosen. It was the medium parenting moved through. A parent who had doubts kept them private. The child still got the rituals.
What is happening now in the developed world, especially in North America, Western Europe, and parts of East Asia, is unprecedented at this scale: parents who do not believe, do not practice, do not bring their children to anything, and do not feel guilty about the absence. The Pew Religious Landscape data tracks the trend with cold precision. The religiously unaffiliated — Pew's "nones" — have grown from roughly 16 percent of American adults in 2007 to nearly 30 percent by the early 2020s, and the cohort effect is concentrated in young parents. A nontrivial fraction of children in the United States, and a larger fraction in Britain, France, Scandinavia, and urban East Asia, are being raised entirely outside any religious institution by parents who were themselves raised inside one.
This is not a continuation of older secular traditions. Earlier secularists, atheists, freethinkers, and humanists generally constructed substitutes — Ethical Culture societies, Sunday Schools without God, Communist youth leagues, scout movements with civic liturgy. They knew that childhood needs scaffolding and that scaffolding has historically been religious in form. The current generation of non-religious parents largely does not build substitutes. They raise children inside a flat, naturalistic, achievement-oriented framework with no formal ritual life, no shared cosmology, no community of intergenerational elders gathered weekly around a story older than any of them.
Christian Smith's research on the religious lives of American teenagers describes the resulting default worldview as moralistic therapeutic deism — a vague sense that there is something benevolent out there, that the point of life is to be happy and decent, that God exists primarily to help you when you need it. Smith found this worldview common even among nominally religious teens. Among children of the unaffiliated, the framework is even thinner: be kind, be successful, be true to yourself, and figure out the rest on your own.
Phil Zuckerman's work on secular Scandinavia and on American secular families pushes against the alarm. Secular children, he finds, are not less ethical, less happy, or less stable than religious children when controlled for parental income and education. They simply organize meaning differently. They construct ad hoc frameworks from school, peer group, online communities, therapy, fiction, and family lore. The frameworks work, in the sense that the children grow into functional adults, but they are individually assembled rather than collectively transmitted, and this is the historically new condition.
The collective revision is not yet complete. The first generation parenting fully without religion is improvising. They have inherited religious vocabularies they no longer use — sin, grace, soul, blessing — and they have not yet developed shared vocabularies to replace them. They mark birth, coming of age, marriage, and death with whatever feels right, which often means borrowing aesthetics from religions they do not believe in, or attending therapists who play the role of pastoral counselors without the cosmology, or holding birthday parties and graduation ceremonies that strain to carry weight the rituals were not built for.
What the first generation cannot yet see is what the second and third will look like — children raised by parents who were themselves raised without religion, with no living memory of a thick ritual life at all. The early signs from Scandinavia, where secular parenting is now multi-generational, suggest neither apocalypse nor utopia. People live ordinary, decent, somewhat lonelier lives. Loneliness is the recurring datum. The thing religion provided that has not been replaced is not belief. It is a regular gathering of people across generations who are obligated to show up to each other. Whether the secular societies invent a functional replacement, or whether they continue to rely on the slowly fading social capital that religion built, is the open question of the next fifty years of collective parenthood.
This is Law 5 — revise — at maximum amplitude. The largest inherited framework in human history is being set down by a single generation of parents, and the children they raise will hand forward whatever they make of the absence.