Religion declines with economic development. In a previous post that rattled around the Internet, I presented a scholarly explanation for this pattern: people who feel secure in this world have less interest in another one.
The basic idea is that wealth allows people to feel more secure in the sense that they are confident of having their basic needs met and expect to lead a long healthy life. In such environments, there is less of a market for religion, the primary function of which is to help people cope with stress and uncertainty.
Some readers of the previous post pointed out that the U.S. is something of an anomaly because this is a wealthy country in which religion prospers. Perhaps taking the view that one swallow makes a summer, the commentators concluded that the survival of religion here invalidates the security hypothesis. I do not agree.
The first point to make is that the connection between affluence and the decline of religious belief is as well-established as any such finding in the social sciences. In research of this kind, the preferred analysis strategy is some sort of line-fitting exercise. No researcher ever expects every case to fit exactly on the line, and if they did, something would be seriously wrong.
Researchers do not incur any particular obligation to explain why one point is farther from the line than some others. We generally wash our hands of such minutiae and attribute them simply to "statistical noise." While we strive to explain as much of the variation as we can, we never expect to account for it all.
What matters is the overall pattern. Many different studies have shown that as affluence increases, the religiosity in a country declines (1). The probability that all might be wrong is so small that it can be dismissed as a practical impossibility.
The fact remains that in the U.S. the vast majority of the population claims to be religious in surveys, although far fewer show up in church on Sundays. This is very different from the picture in Europe where the majority do not believe in God (2).
Instead of jumping to the conclusion that the U.S .as a single data point invalidates the relationship between affluence and religion, it is interesting to ask what it is about life in this country that fans the flames of religious belief.
In my own (as yet unpublished) research on this question, I have looked at several other facets of the security hypothesis that go some way toward explaining why Americans remain more religious than their European cousins.
The conclusions are not very flattering so far as the quality of life in this country is concerned. In her recent book, Third World America, Arianna Huffington made the case that this country is regressing to the inequitable conditions more typically found in a far poorer country.
Despite having great wealth, the riches are unevenly distributed. Such income inequality is typical of developing countries and it has worsened considerably in recent decades. Moreover, we lack the well-developed welfare state found in Europe that serves to redistribute wealth and provides a safety net for the poor.
Health is nothing to brag about either with a life expectancy similar to that in Costa Rico. Education, a powerful leveling agent, is also in decline according to international comparisons.
The bottom line, then, is that Americans feel far less secure economically, and in relation to their health and well-being, than would be expected given the overall wealth of the country in terms of GDP per capita. This existential insecurity provides a fertile ground for religion. Scholars might appeal to historical factors such as the Puritan founders but history counts for little in these matters given that virtually every country has a devout past.
It has often been pointed out that poor people in America tend to vote against their economic interests by voting for Republican politicians who are interested in further concentrating wealth in the hands of the affluent. They do so, in part, because the Republicans appeal to their religious propensity. That propensity is further fed by the increasing insecurity in the lives of the poor. Yet another reason for separating Church and State.
1, Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Zuckerman, P. (2007). Atheism: Contemporary numbers and patterns. In M. Martin (ed.), The Cambridge companion to atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book is not held by any U.S. Library.
Religion Dividing Europe from United States
Secular Europe's Merits - New York Times
Crises of Faith - Magazine - The Atlantic
Scott Atran: Religion in America: Why Many Democrats and Europeans ...
First of all, just as there are many different kinds of Americans (WASPs, Blacks, Asians, Latinos, and even a few "original Americans"), there are many different kinds of Europeans - from the Nordics to the Portuguese, from the Irish to the Russians.
But Americans are more religious for the same reasons that many Americans are more violent, kill more people, are more intolerant, produce the major share of the world's pornography, and lately are bent on starting wars - a habit that used to be mostly European. All of these behaviors of course are sanctioned by relgion - well - maybe not the porn business, killings though for shure.
A great study was done where, instead of asking Americans point blank, "Did you go to church last Sunday," researchers asked participants to describe everything they had done over the weekend. Churchgoing rates were about half of what people generally claim.
Curiously, this was a very American phenomenon--the gap still existed in other countries, but it was nowhere near as pronounced as in the US. I could try to find the study if anyone's curious; it was quite interesting.
The higher the education the less likely one is to be religious.
Ask a Christian to just explain the narrative of the New Testament off the top of their head. Most would not knew where to start, what is in it, what isn't. Most atheists know more about it.
There have been some 50 different studies spanning over 80 years and every last one of them came to the same conclusion.
The less the education level, the higher the likelihood of you being religious, also the lower the education level the more Fundamentally religious you are likely to be.
http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm
Just a plain fact.
And finally, it's no coincidence that we've also seen the Republican party embracing both big business and big religion, a deal with the devil if ever there was one...
http://www.edgetech-us.com/images/Map/Gallery/INS/edu9.gif
Map: Religious Adherents as a Percentage of all Residents
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/pics/geo200/religion/adherents.gif
Draw your own conclusions.
Use this one and select the top map.
http://www.edgetech-us.com/Map/EduLvls.htm
Use this one and select Religious Adherents
http://www.valpo.edu/geomet/geo/courses/geo200/religion.html
I had this really funny moment once watching some Mormon kid trying to proselytize to the woman standing next to me on the bus. It was real subtle, too... (in Italian) "It's getting cold... I like that, because it means Christmas is coming... Jesus was born on Christmas... let's talk about Jesus... here's this pamphlet..." Then the kid got off the bus. The woman looks as me, and asks what just happened. I tried to explain as best I could about Mormons. She goes, "I'm not going to talk about my relationship with Jesus on a public bus!"
These Americans who want to take what historically has been about freedom of personal choice and conflate it with a political religion are ignoring the lessons of political conflicts laced with religious fervor, and effectively betraying a main component of American ideology.
But anyway. On a totally irrelevant note, I've been stuck in America for the last 3 years and I miss Europe.
He then said he was amazed at the diversity of faith in the US. If you go to any city in the US, you can go to any variety of religions, sects of those religions and the style of worship you would like. You have your Catholic, mainstream Protestants (about 50 varieties), Jewish (anywhere from Orthodox to progressive, Hindu, Muslim, Kabala, Jehovah's Witness, Scientology, Mormon, etc... You have small churches of 20 people to mega churches of 6,000+ people. You have traditional services or modern services with rock n roll. If you want to go to a live service, television service or internet service, its’ all available. The choices are endless.
Europe is starting to have more option now, but they are nowhere near the choices we have in America. Some people complain about the separation of Church and State in the US. But its that separation (in my mind) that has allowed the free market of religion to flourish in the US while in Europe heavy handed government management of religion (that still occurs today) has hindered free expression of faith.