Comments on Epiphenom: Did fornicating Farm Girls boost the rise of athei...

James, I just realised that my post was confusing....

2010-06-07T21:39:34.840+01:00

James, I just realised that my post was confusing. Those are birth cohorts. The rise in non-attendance is for people who were born during the war. It's not non-attendance by time period. I'll fix that to make it clearer.

Did the study control for the proportion of former...

2010-06-05T12:08:23.469+01:00

Did the study control for the proportion of former congregation who were not able to attend due to the fact that they were, you know, away from home, fighting a war?

Konrad, I think you should probably look at the ef...

2010-06-02T22:05:14.775+01:00

Konrad, I think you should probably look at the effext of WWII in the UK in Durkheimian terms. The population was caught up in vast social projects (the armed forces, for example), and these simply supplanted religion as the focal point for society. Plus, many people were displaced, and formed new social groupings within these new, secular structures. After the war, there was a dramatic increase in the role of government (a national health service, for example).

As a result, the social role for religion was undermined. People stopped going to Church because they could get the same services elsewhere. If you believe that learning about invisible entities is promoted by observing actions, then beliefs too would begin to be undermined.

(that's in addition to the pluralism and intermarriage).

I agree Brown's thesis is probably wrong. But variants of it are popular among those seeking to revive religion. The idea is that the solution is to create a more masculine christianity, to attract men back to the fold.

Tom, trying to work through the implications of ev...

2010-06-02T10:16:59.788+01:00

Tom, trying to work through the implications of everything you say. Any which way you look at it, the WWII bump looks surprising from the point of a Malinowski-style insecurity thesis. I wonder how the graph as a whole would correlate with various measures of security. I am not sure that it would. Mind you, normal measures such as unemployment would not work over over a period during which social security provisions changed how stressful being unemployed would be. Most interesting.

The Brown feminisation thesis sounds like pure bunkum, I have to say. What the hell could he mean by that? Would he consider the traditional Marian worship that plays a central role in countries such as Poland, Italy and Ireland to be masculine? Sounds like A-grade tosh to me, not too far from the "liberals made priests rape little boys" line.

Interesting post! I think it is true that people w...

2010-06-02T09:27:38.700+01:00

Interesting post! I think it is true that people with parents from different religions are more likely to be less religious themselves. Especially when these are two monotheistic religions. When you grow up with two mutually contridictory religious viewpoints both being held by people that you admire as the Truth, you tend to be a) less likely to follow one over the other and b) generally more tolerant of other peoples religious beliefs.

That was all anec-data by the way!

"minor as the differences between Anglicans and Methodists" I think back in the day that was quite a major difference, for class and social reasons as much as religious ones.

Konrad, These data are all about religious practic...

2010-06-01T20:59:53.214+01:00

Konrad, These data are all about religious practice - inevitably, because we don't have any records on beliefs that go back far enough.

It could be argued that Methodists are switching into other religions. But the restricted data for Anglican Protestants suggests a similar pattern. The key point is that religiosity, in terms of religious practices across the board, seemed to peak much earlier than is generally believed.

Bruce does deal tangentially with the idea that secularization doesn't mean all indicators of religion moving in tandem, or even in the same direction (at least, in the short term).

What's more, I would say that Church attendance is probably more sensitive to insecurity than religious beliefs. The mismatch between beliefs and attendance is greater in poorer countries, for example (because non-believers go to Church).

Furthermore, pluralism is linked to reduced intensity of belief. The critical factor (and Bruce provides some evidence although the best is from Voas 2008) seems to be intermarriage.

Of course, in an insecure society intermarriage would decrease as well, so it's hard to unpick affiliation, attendance and beliefs.

Hi paper is actually a response to an earlier work by Callum Brown. He puts a late date on the decline in Christianity, and has an explanation based on feminisation of Christianity followed by permissive culture in the 1960s.

I am a bit concerned that you may be conflating tw...

2010-06-01T17:12:38.851+01:00

I am a bit concerned that you may be conflating two issues and what you say about the results does not clarify the problem for me. When talking about decreasing religiousness we can be talking about two different kinds of things. First of all, we can be talking about falling numbers of adherents to a particular religion, measured in whatever terms (that's what your first graph is clearly about). Secondly, and more abstractly, we can talk about falling adherence to religious beliefs in general. The first kind of phenomenon can cover any number of changes including people swapping over to a different religion. The second is more fundamental, from the point of view of an atheist, in that in that case you have people moving from theism of some sort to agnosticism/atheism. Different causes can underlie these two kinds of phenomena. From what I have seen, it seems like the only thing that does lead to secularisation is security, such as is made universal by the existence of a welfare state. Rational critiques and other such cultural pressues, on the other hand, seem to generally lead to the destabilisation of particular faiths, without affecting the underlying propensity to religious thought. A prime example where the second process may be seen to work without the first also taking place is modern US, with its continued religiousness and without a monolithic church that people maintain adherence to. From what you write, however, it might be interpreted that a cosmopolitan social milieu also leads not just to instability in religious beliefs but to their negation. This is what the second graph seems to suggest, with the additional surprise that the time of war would have been a time of great insecurity so increased religiousity would have been expected! All of what I write ignores, of course, the distinction between religious practices and religious beliefs so it may be that the answer to my question is to be sought there.

Just like the despicable promises of an "afte...

2010-06-01T15:29:46.712+01:00

Just like the despicable promises of an "after life" that religion makes, you have joined their "club" by writing a headline that makes promises that your story doesn't keep. Shame on you!
.

Another study illustrating that one of the greates...

2010-06-01T12:36:56.201+01:00

Another study illustrating that one of the greatest cures for religion is social change as contrasted to theological debates.

Yeah, a shameless bid for readership :)

2010-06-01T07:24:17.474+01:00

Yeah, a shameless bid for readership :)

the title certainly made me look at your review!

2010-06-01T06:44:12.607+01:00

the title certainly made me look at your review!