It is a fact that in most societies of the global north, such as the United Kingdom and France, church attendance has dropped significantly since the 1800s and in places now represents a tiny minority of something like 1-2%. The term "secularisation" refers to the process by which religious faith is increasingly marginalised from society, and limited to the private lives of a small number of individual believers. A major contemporary expert on secularisation is Professor Hugh McLeod of the University of Birmingham, who is himself a Quaker. Hugh McLeod's work offers lots of statistical data and insights into the phenomenon of secularisation. The process of secularisation goes back at least as far as the 1600s, and a major contributing factor was co-existence and belligerence between rival forms of Christianity during that century. There appears to be a certain typical chronological sequence for secularisation in "Christian" countries, beginning with the co-e...