Well, the payoff comes this year, with a book by Putnam on the way. Putnam also spoke recently at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and a taste of what will be in the book can be seen in the media buzz.
It seems that American youth are more secular than their parents, and the country's going to hell in a handbasket as a result.
From a certain, narrow perspective, that's a perfectly reasonable conclusion. After all, Putnam's study showed that religious Americans are more 'civically engaged' than their non religious counterparts:
The scholars say their studies found that religious people are three to four times more likely to be involved in their community. They are more apt than nonreligious Americans to work on community projects, belong to voluntary associations, attend public meetings, vote in local elections, attend protest demonstrations and political rallies, and donate time and money to causes — including secular ones. (USA Today)
Stands to reason, then, that fewer religious people means a disintegrating society, right?
Well, maybe not. In the USA today, being religious is a social norm. Those people who are prepared to stand up and be counted as atheists are also those who reject this social norm. It's not too surprising that they don't score as highly on these measures of integration.
Those atheists who do want to participate in their community are going to have to swallow their principles and pretend to be religious. If you want to participate in American society, then you need to be a church goer. It's expected of you.
But it doesn't need to be this way. Focus the microscope on more secular countries - New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden etc. - and the image you get is rather different. These are hardly nations on the brink of social meltdown. Rather, they are among the happiest nations on earth.
So could it be that religion has little or nothing to do with social capital?
That's certainly what two European sociologists, Loek Halman and Thorleif Pettersson, have concluded. Using data from the European Values Survey, they found that there was no relationship between how religious a country was (on average) and a rich it was in social capital.
For example, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have similar levels of social capital, although Slovakia is far more religious than the Czech Republic. Some of the countries with the most social capital, Sweden and Denmark, were also the least religious.
In fact, in Western Europe, the trend is the reverse of what you might expect - the least religious nations have the most social capital!
Now, the important fact to bear in mind is that, in Europe as in the USA, more religious people are more civically engaged. It's just that, at the aggregate level, other factors are overwhelmingly more important.
For example, social trust, a key generator of social capital, is driven at a cross-national level by the same factors that build a strong democracy - such as open institutions and free speech. Although religious are generally perceived to be more trustworthy on an individual level, that really has no bearing at a national level.
In other words, this is another example where extrapolating from the personal effects of religion to the society-level (or aggregate) effects just does not work.
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Kaasa, A., & Parts, E. (2008). Individual-Level Determinants of Social Capital in Europe: Differences between Country Groups Acta Sociologica, 51 (2), 145-168 DOI: 10.1177/0001699308090040
Newton, K. (2004). Social trust: individual and cross-national approaches Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 3 (1), 15-35 DOI: 10.1386/pjss.3.1.15/0
This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Your conclusion that this is a case where individual effects do not generalize to social effects does not quite make sense.
ReplyDeleteYou are comparing individual level measures of social effects and aggregate level measures of social effects. Social effects at each level are valid, but can mean different things depending on the method of aggregation, measurement, and the precise constructs (see Robinson, 1950 if you haven't already).
Just because the level of analysis changes doesn't mean that that social part changes.
The social meltdown is, perhaps, being experienced now by some religious folks becoming educated by science.
ReplyDeleteHi ??? (real name?): I was trying to avoid using 'aggregate' as much as possible because I don't think it's widely understood. But in doing so I lost the sense of it, as you point out. Let me change it...
ReplyDeleteI think you're a probably right. Aggregating data can induce confusion, especially when thinking about interpretation. People have been writing papers on that topic for at least 50 years.
ReplyDeleteSome people suggest that having the direction of effects converge over several levels of analysis is important for building comprehensive theory. While I don't disagree with that I think it is just as interesting to see when they don't converge as it provide boundary conditions for the effect.
My real name is Mark. I don't intend to be rude with the ???, I just have my blogger privacy settings rather high.
Eric Hoffer once said,"It is easier to love humanity than it is to love your neighbor." In other words, talk is cheap.
ReplyDeleteOne thing unique about humans is our ability to fool ourselves and rationalize our behaviors. When it comes to morality and your sense of intellectual superiority, I think a few of you are doing just that.