Research has shown that religion declines not just with rising national wealth but also 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 Japan and Sweden, the quality of life is so good that the majority is already secular.

In my book, I asked how long it would take for the average country in the world to reach a similar level of development as countries that already have secular majorities. This transition was measured either as a minority believing in God, or a minority seeing religion as important…

So I calculated four estimates of when the average country in the world is likely to transition to a secular majority and the average estimate was 2041. The more reliable HDI method predicts an earlier transition than GDP alone.