Pre-release: The Return of Spirituality & Religion

The global trend reshaping business and investment

One hypothesis of this substack is that Western organisations are caught in a pincer like movement.

Externally, the non West is growing in political, demographic, financial and social power. And so is increasingly able to press its worldview. Spoiler, it is not the same as a secular western institution.

Internally, Western culture is witnessing a reemergence of spiritual and religious ideas after decades of formal decline and statistics that masked a more complex picture.

To develop this further, I have done a detailed piece of research on the questio, to go beyond the more anecdotal article I wrote 18 months ago on it.

The question I wanted to ask was how would you demonstrate that claim to be true? Perhaps to an investor or board?

And, if true, why and how should western organisations be taking its accompanying risks and opportunities more seriously?

Organisations, particularly large ones, already spend time thinking about the impact of geopolitics on their risk profiles, decision making, strategy etc. This document is in that vein but with the focus on the spiritual and religious component of that reality.

Executive summary of the conclusions

From Outside the West

• Western orgs must start adapting to world that is increasingly religious and decreasingly accepting of secular materialism

• The non West is becoming more religious as it modernises and more socially and economically powerful at the same time

• The non West is increasingly able and willing to reject the reductive, secular materialism inherent to many Western organisations

From Inside the West

• The direct marketplace for religio - spiritual services, products, leadership and content is gathering significant pace

• The combination of a meta crisis and materialism appearing to have peaked is feeding a rising appetite for religio - spiritual thinking

• Western organisations are under ever increasing pressure to address people’s immaterial wants and needs

Generally Speaking

• Faith led markets and communities dominate global landscapes but are mistakenly treated as a niche interest by Western companies

• How Western organisations should respond to all of the above is contextual to their strategic, cultural and operational needs

• The relevant concepts can loosely be divided into buckets of Spiritual Capital, Spiritual Health and Spiritual Intelligence

Content Sections

The content sections are:

1. Executive Summary
   Western orgs need to start adapting to a less secular world

2. A High Starting Point
   Religious and spiritual perspectives are very widespread to begin with

3. Global Power Shift
   The non West is becoming more religious and more powerful

4. A Turning Tide
   In the West, the tide is turning back towards religious/spiritual concerns

5. Why Now?
   Contextual factors that could be causing a cultural transformation

6. The Market Impact
   Example impacts and consequences for the marketplace

7. What to do?
   Pathways to productively and successfully engage with this new reality

Some interesting statistics

On researching for this document, I came across many interesting statistics and stories. Here are a few:

Globally & Outside The West

• Unlike the West did, the non West is becoming more religious as it modernises, not less

• China is projected to be the world’s largest Christian nation by 2030 and, by some informal accounts, already is. The majority of the religiously un-afilliated are also in China, where atheism is collapsing

• Islam is on track to be the world’s largest religion by 2050

• Iran appears to have the world’s fastest growing Christian community and 50,000 of its 75,000 mosques have closed

• 84% of the world is religiously affiliated and a high proportion of the remainder sees themselves as spiritual in some regard

• A significant proportion of self identifying atheists and agnostics still believe in angels, demons, ghosts, a higher power, spiritual experiences or the after life

• Religious populations are projected to grow 23 times faster than non religious ones through to 2050

• Religious organisations own a land mass equivalent to that of Russia + Canada + China

• $5 Trillion dollars of assets are owned across the four main religious groups but faith based advisory support is treated like a niche motivation and asset class

• Islamic Finance has grown from negligible in the 1970s to over 500 banks and $3Trn AUM

Inside The West

• A wave of secular academics are re-popularising religious ideas as worthy cultural and social drivers after a lengthy period of secular academic indifference

• A growing number of commercial brands and social influencers are incorporating religious and spiritual ideas into their content, products and services

• There has been a theistic revolution within UK and US philosophy departments in recent decades, which may be having a downstream impact on the mainstream

• Many of the world’s best selling business leadership books have been written by people of faith who have effectively repackaged scriptural ideas and their wisdom tradition into corporate lingo, probably unbeknownst to their readers

• Wicca has grown in the US from 8,000 people in the 90s to 1.4 Million today

• WitchTok and NunTok are now massive on TikTok

• There is $437 Billion of faith based business being done in the US and 5 times that amount exists in terms of faith led purchasing power

• Religion is arguably the single biggest driver of social impact in the US and contributes over $1.2 Trillion of socio-economic value

• Whilst still small compared to the overall market, religious apps are experiencing a significant increase in investment and are seen by some as the next big thing

Enjoy!