I'm not at all religious (or particularly spiritual), and in the real world I find it very difficult to accept even the slightest supernatural explanation. But I love fantasy - perhaps thats as a reaction to it. I think fiction should be about imagination, and where is that more prevalent than in fantasy? Fiction, after all, isn't real - that's what's interesting about it, that's why I read - not necessarily escapism in the sense of escaping from all the troubles that plague the world, but escapism in the sense of seeing something different from the everyday monotony of life.
The West, at least, is actually a better place than it has ever been before. Living standards for everyone are higher, people are wealthier and problems such as disease and lack of education are now comparatively minimal to what they used to be. But other parts of the world, particularly sub-saharan Africa, have got worse. The West is now in a state to help the developing world and to end poverty - but it chooses not to do so, through selfishness and arrogance. Perhaps this is what the new dark tone of fantasy is reflecting - that while we are in the best state we've ever been in, we jealously deny such luxuries to everyone else and decide, instead, to inflict pain and suffering on others through unjust wars. Since the television, we've seen how terrible war really is, even when it doesn't directly affect us. The huge protests over Vietnam and Iraq reflect this, and this more modern attitude pervades everything. And there is also the sense that government is increasingly becoming authoritarian, that individuals rights and powers are being slowly eroded in the name of security against a fantastical myth. At least in fantasy, we can see what we are defending against. We can see our enemy (note: there doesn't have to be good v evil for this), and whether we succeed or fail, it is a much faster process while reading a novel, than this slow, gradual decline.
Is it to do with the loss of faith? Most of the very religious feel that fantasy is evil from the outset. Naturally, therefore, many who read fantasy are not the most religious. Their may be a loss of faith for authors - they don't feel the need to preach a moral message that authors such as Tolkien and Lewis did.
But again, we're falling into the trap of assuming that there has been a sudden turn towards nihilism in fantasy. There hasn't - it existed in the 1930s, with Clark Ashton Smith's writing. It existed in 1950, with the Dying Earth by Jack Vance. It existed in the 1970s, with Viriconium by M John Harrison. It existed in the 1990s with Michael Swanwick and George RR Martin. Maybe it's become more obvious - fantasy as a genre has become larger, after all, but I think the answer behind it isn't any change in the writers, it's simply a reaction to much of the less realistic fantasy being worse written. Readers were choosing Martin over Jordan (though obviously not the majority) because they thought Martin was a better writer who could write a more intriguing, entertaining story. Questions of faith were irrelevant.
