Eighty-one countries. Six waves of survey data. Thirty-two years. Run internet access against religious identity across all of it, and the line points the same direction almost everywhere you test it.

That’s the finding of Internet Diffusion and Religious Decline: Evidence from 81 Countries, 1990–2022, a new study by Miran Lavrič and Tibor Rutar of the University of Maribor, published this week in Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review and picked up by PsyPost, Deseret News, and Yahoo News between September 18 and 20, 2026. The researchers weren’t chasing a hunch. They built a six-item religiosity index from World Values Survey data, tracked it against national internet penetration across three decades, and controlled for education, wealth, urbanization, globalization, immigration, and aging populations. The internet still came out ahead of all of them as the single strongest predictor of religious decline in the model.

Max Weber called this in 1917. He wasn’t describing an algorithm — he was describing a lecture hall in Munich, decades before anyone had a modem. But the term he coined, Entzauberung der Welt, the disenchantment of the world, is close to a working translation of what Lavrič and Rutar think is actually happening inside their regression tables.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether rising internet access predicts falling religiosity across countries over time
Who ran it?	Miran Lavrič and Tibor Rutar, University of Maribor
Where and when?	Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review; covered by PsyPost, Deseret News, and Yahoo News, Sep 18–20, 2026
Sample	81 countries, six World Values Survey waves, 1990–2022
Core finding	A one-standard-deviation rise in internet diffusion tracks with roughly a 0.20 standard-deviation decline in religiosity
Strongest effect	Institutional belonging and religious self-identification
Weakest effect	Personal importance of God and service attendance — smaller, less stable
Proposed mechanisms	Exposure to competing worldviews, cheaper access to scientific information, easier questioning of religious authority
What Weber already argued	Science as a Vocation (1917): rationalization strips magical and religious meaning from lived experience — “disenchantment”

The Quick Version

A 2026 study spanning 81 countries and three decades of World Values Survey data found that as internet access spreads through a country, religious identification and belonging fall — and the effect outpaces education, wealth, and globalization as predictors of the decline. The researchers propose that the internet works by exposing people to competing worldviews, cutting the cost of scientific information, and eroding the authority religious institutions used to hold by default. Max Weber described that exact mechanism in 1917, a century before there was data to test it, and called it disenchantment: the slow replacement of mystery with calculation.

What the Study Actually Found

Lavrič and Rutar didn’t run a single survey and call it a day. They stitched together internet-penetration statistics with six waves of the World Values Survey, building a composite religiosity index out of service attendance, the personal importance of God, the stated importance of religion, religious self-identification, confidence in religious institutions, and formal denominational membership. Then they ran country fixed-effects models with time lags, so that internet access in one wave was tested against religiosity in the next — a structure built specifically to make sure they weren’t just catching a country getting richer or more educated at the same time it got more wired.

The headline number: a one-standard-deviation increase in internet diffusion tracked with about a 0.20 standard-deviation decline in overall religiosity. That’s not enormous, but it beat every other modernization variable in the model, including income and education — the two variables secularization theory has leaned on for half a century. As Lavrič put it in the study’s own framing, picked up by PsyPost: “As societies became more connected to the internet, they also tended to become less religious.”

The effect wasn’t uniform across the six measures, though, and the unevenness is the interesting part. Religious belonging and self-identification — whether you call yourself religious, whether you claim a denomination — took the biggest hit. Personal religious practice — whether you privately think God matters, whether you show up to services — moved less and less consistently. The internet, in other words, looks like it’s eroding the label and the institutional tie faster than it’s eroding the underlying belief or the private habit. People are dropping the affiliation before they drop the practice, if they drop the practice at all.

What Did Weber Mean by “Disenchantment of the World”?

In his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, Max Weber argued that the advance of rationalization and technical knowledge doesn’t mean everyone personally understands how the world works. It means everyone can now believe, in principle, that they could understand it if they tried — that nothing is left that’s fundamentally incalculable or magical. Weber called this disenchantment: the world stops being a place of mysterious forces and becomes a place of masterable mechanisms.

That’s the part people get wrong when they hear “disenchantment” and picture villages losing their fairy tales. Weber wasn’t describing a decline in belief so much as a shift in what belief has to compete against. Once a technical, calculable explanation exists for something — weather, illness, the origin of a species — the older, sacred explanation doesn’t disappear by force. It just stops being the only option sitting on the shelf, and starts having to justify itself next to alternatives it never used to face.

How the Internet Disenchants, According to the Study

1. It exposes people to competing worldviews. A believer who grew up hearing one account of the world now scrolls past a dozen others before breakfast — other faiths, other cosmologies, no faith at all, presented with equal confidence and equal production value.
2. It lowers the cost of accessing scientific information. What used to require a library card and a research habit is now a search box. The technical, calculable explanation Weber described isn’t rare or effortful anymore. It’s the default tab.
3. It makes traditional religious authority easier to question. A local clergy member’s word used to be close to the only interpretive authority in reach. Now it’s one voice in a feed that includes theologians, skeptics, and everyone in between, all reachable, all arguable with.

Line those three up against Weber’s lecture and they’re not an update to his thesis. They’re an implementation of it — rationalization and the spread of technical knowledge, running at broadband speed instead of the pace of the printing press.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

Here’s the connection I think actually matters, and it’s narrower than “a dead German sociologist predicted the internet.” Weber’s claim was structural: once calculable, technical accounts of the world are cheap and available, the sacred account stops being the default and starts being a choice — one option among several, argued for rather than simply inherited. Lavrič and Rutar’s third factor, the erosion of religious authority, is that exact claim showing up as a coefficient instead of a paragraph.

This is close kin to what Walter Benjamin argued about mechanical reproduction: that making something infinitely available and inspectable strips away a quality it had when it was singular, local, and harder to access. Benjamin called the lost quality aura. Weber was describing the same trade at civilizational scale a decade earlier — abundance and access on one side, mystery and unquestioned authority on the other, and you don’t get to keep both.

It also tracks with Simone Weil’s argument about attention: that a mind trained to treat information as something to be captured, sorted, and consumed loses the specific, receptive posture that older forms of devotion required. An internet built to answer every question instantly is, by Weil’s account, training exactly the wrong muscle for the kind of attention religious practice used to ask of people.

The Limits of the Data

Lavrič and Rutar are upfront about what their numbers can’t do. This is a correlational study — a strong, controlled, cross-national one, but correlational — and they flag a real possibility of reverse causation: people who are already less religious may simply be more inclined to get online and stay online, rather than the internet making anyone less religious in the first place. Their own reverse-ordering tests found some evidence running in both directions, which is honest and also a little inconvenient if you wanted a clean story.

The country-level design has a coarser problem too: it can’t see what any individual person is actually doing online. Someone spending three hours a day in an atheist forum and someone spending three hours a day in an online prayer group both count as “more internet use” in this dataset. The study measures a population-level pattern, not a mechanism inside any one browser history.

What This Doesn’t Mean

It doesn’t mean the internet is some kind of anti-religious technology by design, or that getting online is a step toward atheism on a checklist. Plenty of religious communities have used the internet to organize, teach, and grow — the study measured a net national trend, not a verdict on what any specific platform or community does with the tool.

It also doesn’t mean disenchantment removes the questions religion used to answer. Paul Tillich’s distinction between neurotic and ontological anxiety is worth sitting with here: the anxiety of meaninglessness Tillich described doesn’t evaporate because a technical explanation replaced a religious one. It just loses its traditional container and has to be handled some other way — which is a large part of why Camus built an entire philosophy around what to do once the sacred explanation is gone and no calculable one arrived to replace it.

And it doesn’t mean a more disenchanted world is automatically a wiser one. Access to information isn’t the same as access to meaning, and the site’s own coverage of AI companionship replacing human relation makes the same point from a different angle: more connection, more access, more instantly available answers — none of it guarantees anyone actually gets what religious community used to supply alongside belief, which was a place to be known.

What Actually Follows From This

1. Separate losing an explanation from losing the experience it explained. You can stop believing lightning is divine anger and still feel the specific, wordless jolt of standing under a storm. Aristotle called that jolt thaumazein — wonder — and it doesn’t require an enchanted cosmology to survive. Notice which one you’ve actually lost before assuming it was both.
2. Ask what the affiliation was doing besides stating a belief. The study found identity and belonging eroding faster than private practice. If that’s true for you too, the label was probably carrying weight — community, ritual, a place to bring grief — that a search engine was never going to replace and never tried to.
3. Use the internet’s access deliberately, not by default. Weber’s mechanism runs on cheap, constant exposure to competing accounts of the world. That’s not reversible, and it’s not obviously bad. But it’s worth choosing when you want the calculable answer and when you’re looking for something a calculable answer was never built to give you.

Weber never said disenchantment was a tragedy, exactly. He said it was the price of a particular kind of honesty — a refusal to pretend the world still holds mysteries that a determined person, with enough time and a search box, couldn’t eventually explain. Lavrič and Rutar just handed him the regression table he never had. Eighty-one countries, thirty-two years, and a coefficient that says the same thing his lecture said in 1917: give people the tools to calculate everything, and fewer of them will keep calling anything sacred.

---

This post discusses a 2026 sociology study and a 1917 philosophy lecture. It isn’t a claim about any individual’s faith or a recommendation to use the internet more or less. If questions of meaning or belief are weighing on you, a pastor, chaplain, or therapist can offer something a research paper can’t.