Belief in God is slowly declining in most countries around the world, but persists or grows most in developing countries and Catholic societies.

Classifying communities and their practices and values as ‘religious’ often has the effect of marginalising them from the mainstream of public debates on justice and the proper ends of the good life, says scholar Timothy Fitzgerald. Such classification has the effect of clothing secular reason with the misleading aura of neutral objectivity, he suggests.

The chair of Equality and Human Rights Commission has been asked to apologise to non-religious people for comments he made in a recent interview.