"Why The Gods Are Not Winning"

[mmcirvin]

Is religion on the rise around the world? In famously religionist America? This article says no.

It is also a useful corrective to the speculation by Phillip Longman and others about the greater birthrate of religious conservatives leading to a future of people with stern patriarchal values. Paul and Zuckerman acknowledge birthrate differences, but point out the countervailing fact that individuals on balance move in the direction of lesser faith; religions worldwide are actually rather bad at converting the nonreligious.

(Their characterization of Islam as a religion of poor tyrannies does seem a bit too dismissive to me: the fact that something like 150 million Muslims live in India ought to count for something. But I digress.)

They claim that the determinant of religiosity has little to do with inherent culture or traditions, and much to do with material considerations: rich societies with a generous social safety net tend to erode religion both as a consolation and as a provider of social services. They explain the greater religiosity of the United States by proposing that, while Americans are fabulously rich by world standards, Americans don't feel particularly secure in their prosperity as compared to more secular Europeans. It's interesting that the numbers they cite show no signal from the Great Awakening that has supposedly been sweeping America for the past couple of decades.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

My first impulse is that Islamic nations tend to default to poor tyrannies, but when i think about it, i think tyranny is the default for any society. Civilization is the effort to avoid it, perhaps.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, the majority Muslim countries of the world do include a lot of poor or highly stratified tyrannies. I've just gotten a bit sensitive to this kind of talk given the abuse of it by militarily ambitious neocons over the past several years, I guess.

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

That's the state of those countries today. In historical times they have been (economically) better off than Europe, but things changed. In historical times, some of the Muslim countries were more religiously tolerant than now and more tolerant than contemporary European countries.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...also, to their credit they make some effort to squelch the popular "Eurabia" fear.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, they also don't believe something I've espoused in the past, that the greater religiosity in the US has something to do with strict church/state separation. The notion seems to work if you compare the US to Northern Europe, where many countries have established churches and atheism abounds, but France is a counterexample: if anything, France has a stricter wall between church and state than the US, and France is also considerably less religious. They say similar things about Australia and New Zealand.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also:

In his Foreign Affairs article Mead noted that conservative Southern Baptists constitute the largest church in the states

That can't be right; surely there are more Catholics. Largest Protestant church, definitely.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

Yes, the U.S. Census says the Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination. The Catholics still outnumber them. Unless you also count all the undifferentiated Protestants and generic Christians as Southern Baptist. I wouldn't be surprised if the Baptists do.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

They explain the greater religiosity of the United States by proposing that, while Americans are fabulously rich by world standards, Americans don't feel particularly secure in their prosperity as compared to more secular Europeans.

Also, our social safety net has huge holes in it. Many of the attempts to fill those gaps are being made by religious organizations.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

I wonder how this correlates historically, before safety nets were in place. Was - as an example - Sweden more or less religious than the US in the 1920's? In short, is it really social safety nets eroding religiousity or eroding religiousity enabling social safety nets?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's a good question. Certainly in the US, religious conservatism (at least in white Protestants) goes hand in hand with opposition to the "nanny state" and a feeling that churches are the proper place (if any) for the services that an extensive welfare state would provide.

I don't think that was always the case, though; alignments were different back in the Populist and New Deal eras. The cynical liberal's explanation for what changed is that sometime around the Johnson administration rural whites came to associate government handouts with urban blacks, but I think there's more to it than that, because I think you can see a similar modern alignment in other countries without the particular race situation of the US.

I was thinking that a religious conservative could certainly spin all this data another way, and lament that welfare states and empty hedonism erode the proper spiritual foundation of society. American secularists like me tend to scoff at this kind of talk and (with the bit of a persecution complex that we tend to develop) point out that American religiosity shows absolutely no sign of eroding, but this paper actually implies that it is, albeit very slowly and with some noise overlaid on the secular trend.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And then there's the possible atheist libertarian take: "If all that is true, and irreligion follows prosperity and security--look, church attendance kept going down through Reagan and both Bushes! So stop picking on us for voting Republican, all right?" To which I would probably start mumbling about aggregates and distributions.