Here's a big question: why are there more religious people in some countries than others? To some extent, that's easy to explain. Richer countries tend to have fewer religious people. But why, for example, is the USA so religious relative to European countries?
This was a question that Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde tackled by in 2004. They analysed the data from a range of countries, and found that the greater proportion of GDP that was spent on government welfare, the more non-religious people there were and the lower church attendance was. This held true even after statistically adjusting for other factors, like per-capita GDP, urbanization, government regulation of religion, and religious pluralism.Now, this might explain why the USA is less religious than Europe. But what explains the link? Gill and Lundsgaarde's explanation seems unlikely to me.
They reckon that religion provides a service, the provision of welfare, and that with the availability of government welfare the demand for religion falls away. In other words, they're thinking within the 'rational choice' theory of religion.
Maybe there's some truth to their theory. It might well explain why people stop going to church. But it doesn't really explain why people stop believing in God. And people go to church for all sorts of reasons, other than the hope of a handout.
There are some other tidbits of information that give a different perspective. Pippa Norris, in a book also published in 2004 (Sacred & Secular), suggested that the major reason people turn to religion as a psychological buffer to hardship and adversity.
Now put this with a third paper, the controversial publication in 2005 of a paper that claimed that religious countries had worse 'societal health'. That paper, by Gregory S Paul, was published in the Journal of Religion and Society.
Paul found that religious countries were worse on a range of outcomes, like murder rate, infant mortality, teenage pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Could this explain the link between welfare and religiosity? Perhaps it's not simply that people choose to get their handouts from the government, so give up going to church. Perhaps government welfare programmes are simply quite effective in creating societies that are less stressful places to live.
Maybe those governments that spend national wealth on reducing hardship also reduce the personal tragedies that draw people into religion. That's the hypoethesis that I wanted to test.
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Gill, A. (2004). State Welfare Spending and Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis Rationality and Society, 16 (4), 399-436 DOI: 10.1177/1043463104046694
Paul, Gregory S (2006). Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look Journal of Religion and Society, 7
This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
It is my impression that here in the USA, at least, that the more authoritarian (read right wing) the religious group is the more it opposes the the use of direct government (secular) aid to people. They tend to couch there reasons in terms of personal responsibility but I've always suspected that that their actual motivations were fear of competition and appearing superfluous.
ReplyDeleteYou should post the r^2 value on that regression.
ReplyDeleteMy suspicion is that the more educated people are, the more likely they are to see religion, and especially its practice, as vacuous, and also the more likely to see the understand the benefit of welfare.
ReplyDeleteI also imagine that another component is the size of the population. The bigger a group of people is, the less likely people are to value sharing with everyone else, and instead value other forms of sharing at a lower level, such as through religious groups.
Anon, they don't give the r^2 on that regression, but for the full model (including regulation, pluralism and urbanisation) it's 0.65. Welfare is the strongest factor in the model.
ReplyDeletejdhuey and Bjørn: I agree with both! There's clearly a lot of different factors. In the US, the religious right gets its strength from a combination of the economic interests of the wealthy and the religious interests of the poor. They unite them by providing low taxes to one and conservatism religious values to the other.
As I understand it, there is a link between liberalism and education, though I'm not to sure how strong that link is. And as you point out, the more divided a society is - especially ethnically, the less support there is for welfare (Alberto Alesina has published on this).
Hi!
ReplyDeleteWhere did you get your data from?
I was surprised about the claim that Sweden were spending much more money on health than Norwey (see photo).
According to WHO (2007):
"Country with highest government spending per person per year on health: Norway (US$ 4508)
Country with lowest government spending per person per year on health: Burundi (US$ 0.70)"
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs319/en/index.html
As a person, who lives next to Norway, I am very sceptical about claims that Sweden had greater welfare expenses than Norway. In fact, all statistics I've seen have shown the opposite. (Of course it is a bit difficult to compare the systems, because in scandinavian countries the welfare system is so different than in USA. But could you tell the your source you used, where is stated that Sweden spents much more money on welfare than Norway?
Oops. I didn't notice the concept gross domestic product... Norway's GDP is very high because the oil, and that may explain the thing.
ReplyDeleteOne should be able to replicate Paul's study in the United States, looking at the individual states' religiosity and the various societal health measures he used. I have a faint memory that some sort of thing's been done, but can't recall where or when.
ReplyDeletean: yeah, that's right. The graph shows welfare spend as a proportion of GDP. So Norway scores lower than expected cos of all the oil wealth (a large part of which they stick in the bank).
ReplyDeleteRBH: if you find that study, let me know!