We are an outlier:
(from Pew Report's "Global Attitudes Project", published 9/17/08)
In the above graph, national religiosity is plotted against wealth. The inverse correlation between religiosity and prosperity among various countries is interesting and does exist. The US is a notable outlier, though. You could argue that economic freedom and religious freedom usually both produce more prosperity and more religiosity, but besides here in the US, that doesn't seem to hold true.
A GLOBAL survey recently conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that the wealthier you are, the less likely you are to be religious.There seems to be a balance between religion as a positive force in increasing productivity by fostering attitudes like responsibility and self-reliance, versus religion as a negative force because it sucks up so much money from the private sector.
The survey, done as part of the Pew Global Attitudes Project, covers a wide swath of economic matters, including global trade and immigration (pewglobal.org).
Pew found that there is “a strong relationship between a country’s religiosity and its economic status.” The poorer a country, the more “religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations.”
The United States is the “most notable” exception. Other exceptions are oil-rich, mostly Muslim nations like Kuwait.
There is no simple interpretation of the findings. Perhaps as “people get less religious, they get wealthier,” wrote Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog (washingtonmonthly.com). “Or perhaps the other way around. Or perhaps there’s something else behind both trends.”
Mr. Drum concludes that it’s “probably a bit of all three.”
The authors turn next to the assessment of how differences in religiosity affect economic growth. For given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. In contrast, for given church attendance, increases in some religious beliefs -- notably heaven, hell, and an afterlife -- tend to increase economic growth. In other words, economic growth depends mainly on the extent of believing relative to belonging. The authors also find some indication that the fear of hell is more potent for economic growth than the prospect of heaven. Their statistical analysis allows them to argue that these estimates reflect causal influences from religion to economic growth and not the reverse.The inverse relationship even holds within states of the US (also here, bottom graph). The South is notorious for its teen pregnancy rates, poverty, obesity, murder rates, etc., all being the highest in any region of the country. Its religiosity is also higher than any region in the country.
Barro and McCleary suggest that higher rates of religious beliefs stimulate growth because they help to sustain aspects of individual behavior that enhance productivity. They believe that higher church attendance depresses growth because it signifies a greater use of resources by the religion sector. However, that suppression of growth is tempered by the extent to which church attendance leads to greater religious beliefs, which in turn encourages economic growth.
As Charles points out, the same inverse correlation exists between education level and religiosity as wealth and religiosity, since higher education is causative of higher wealth. It's important not to confuse correlation with causation, but it's also important not to dismiss correlation because in studying it you will usually discover underlying causes.
As far back as June 2006 I commented on Gregory Paul's study in Nov 2005 that purported to show that increased religiosity is correlated with many negative sociological variables. A discussion over on the GC message board got started on this very paper just this past week and I jumped into the fray with the following observations (most of which I've reiterated here on this site before). I like to read about sociological studies and religion. The good news is that globally, godlessness is on the rise:
The evangelical authors of the WCE lament that no Christian "in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism…. and in the Americas due to materialism…. The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians" (italics added). (The WCE probably understates today's nonreligious. They have Christians constituting 68-94% of nations where surveys indicate that a quarter to half or more are not religious, and they may overestimate Chinese Christians by a factor of two. In that case the nonreligious probably soared past the billion mark already, and the three great faiths total 64% at most.)Ditto here at home in the US:
Far from providing unambiguous evidence of the rise of faith, the devout compliers of the WCE document what they characterize as the spectacular ballooning of secularism by a few hundred-fold! It has no historical match. It dwarfs the widely heralded Mormon climb to 12 million during the same time, even the growth within Protestantism of Pentecostals from nearly nothing to half a billion does not equal it.
The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.From Barna:
The proportion of atheists and agnostics increases from 6% of Elders (ages 61+) and 9% of Boomers (ages 42-60), to 14% of Busters (23-41) and 19% of adult Mosaics (18-22).From CUNY's ARIS survey:
the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight percent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001If this trend continues, younger Americans are going to grow more secular with time and as older Americans die off, the US will no longer be so religious because younger Americans are so much less religious than their forebears. The trends are already pointing that way.
Some people would argue that religion really is the opiate of the poor masses, and that economic standing best explains all the other negatives. That sounds more plausible to me. Poverty = less education = more religion. It is just hilarious, because the very moral failures that the "values voters" here in the South decry the loudest they exemplify the most (divorce, teen pregnancy, gun violence...) and they propose religion as a panacea, when the existence of their own abundant religiosity proves it to be otherwise.
But, until secular Americans start to learn how to organize and become a political force as the religious learned long ago, we'll continue to be underrepresented in Congress and undervalued as a slice of the electorate.
