Mark: “Can humanity survive over the long term without religion?” To my way of thinking, that’s like asking “Can humanity survive over the long term without music?” Religion, like musical appreciation, is just a feature of the general human personality, arising from the structure of the human nervous system. The religious impulse is more developed in some of us than in others, and a few of us are completely tone deaf (though that’s no reason to exclude us from non-musical discussions); but most human beings enjoy a good tune at some level. It’s human nature.

The future of human nature is of course a large question, with guesses ranging all the way from, at one end of the scale, Ray Kurzweil and his Singularitarians, via Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, to the Voluntary Human Extinction crowd at the other extreme. (My own guess naturally leans towards Idiocracy.) We’ll just have to wait and see. As long as we remain the way we are, though, there’ll be some kind of religion. It’s only human.

The much-deplored rising tide of secularism is really just a falling inclination to participate in regular collective worship of an active monotheistic Deity. Taking human history as a whole, though, that’s been a minority inclination. Plenty of civilizations — China and Japan, to name two — have got along for millennia without it.

Those deplorably-secularizing European countries remain surprisingly religious. See this, or a dozen similar polls. They’re just less and less inclined to go to church, consult with priests/pastors/ministers, or believe in miracles.

And you are mistaken in saying that secularism was until recently an elite phenomenon. The working-class English people I grew up amongst fifty years ago were mainly non-church-going, though rarely anti-religious. Mayhew’s surveys of the early-Victorian London poor found the same thing, if memory serves. (Mayhew comments somewhere — and I am again working from memory here, can’t find the quote — that the Gospel of Christ was as unknown in the slums of 1840s London as it was in Tibet.)