"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.