Our god the state

Tom Rees of Epiphenom has a new paper out, Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. The abstract:

Previous research has shown an apparent relationship between "societal health" and religiosity, with nations that exhibit higher mean personal religiosity also tending to provide worse social environments. A possible cause is that exposure to stressful situations (i.e. personal insecurity) increases personal religiosity. To test this hypothesis, income inequality, a widely available proxy for personal insecurity, was compared with other macro-scale causes of religiosity (derived from modernization and rational choice theories) in a multinational, cross-sectional analysis. Income inequality, and hence personal insecurity, was found to be an important determinant of religiosity in this diverse sample of nations.

Rees explores the paradox that though within nations those who are religious tend to be more prosocial, between nations those with higher fractions of very religious individuals tend to exhibit more anomie. Here is for example a map of world happiness which has been circulating recently:

The richest nations in the world tend to be more secular, and also happen to have higher median happiness. But within those nations the religious are often the happiest. Rees' thesis is most succinctly presented in a chart (reedited for width):

Using a data set consisting of prayer frequency in 55 countries the model in the above figure used factor explanatory factors:

- More income inequality, 21% of the variance
- Lower per capita GDP, 13% of the variance
- Less urbanization, 11% of the variance
- Less religious pluralism, 8% of the variance
- Less religious regulation, 10% of the variance
- Also, unaccounted for in model was 37% of the variance

The main issue in this analysis is highlighted by the author:

More detailed investigation of the causal relationships between these factors requires either detailed time series (to establish the temporal relationship of changes) or the use of instrumented variables for the religiosity factors (i.e., a variable that is correlated with the independent variables, but which cannot be causally related to the dependent variable). Neither of these exists at the current time.

Some time series would be nice, but it isn't as if the World Values Survey was collecting data in Quebec in the 1960s, when that province went from being the most religious to one of the most secular in Canada. I decided to spot check Spain and the prayer data doesn't go back to the 1980s.

Obviously this area of social science research is of interest to those who are against and in favor of religion. Pro-religionists point to the reality that within many nations religious people are happier, nicer, longer lived and generate many positive externalities. Anti-religionists point out that the more religious the nation is, the more likely it is to suck. Unfortunately, it's complicated, and the paper above elucidates some robust relationships but probably won't convince many who don't want to be convinced of causal relationships. But for what it's worth I do think that what Brink Lindsey terms The Age of Abundance has a tendency to diminish the attraction of religious activity and institutions for many individuals whose personalities are simply disinclined toward participation in the first place. For the pro-religionists I suspect that that means that simply increasing religion isn't going to increase positive social capital proportionally, because those who are irreligious within a society where that lifestyle option is often exercised generally have an antisocial personality profile. As for the anti-religionists decades of research in development economics does not suggest that one can magically transform poor and disturbed societies where religion is a safe harbor in the chaos into rich and well ordered ones with any ease. There maybe deep structural reasons why societies remain mired in near-Malthusian poverty and high inequality, and so will give rise to religious institutions as organizations which serve as buffers against anomie.