One of the most important questions that one has to ask in doing data work is pretty simple, “Compared to what?” If I make a graph that visualizes the partisanship of white evangelicals and it indicates that 60% of them are Republicans, the data means very little by itself.
Toyed with some of the data to get a better grasp in a way easier to handle. I took my home state, which has about a million inhabitants. From the data on the bar graphs, 25% of that million attend weekly and 62% of that million identify a religion. So, about 40% of those claiming a religion would have to attend weekly to get the 25% of the total with and without religion who attend weekly. Is this my local perception?
My synagogue which has the state’s most observant Jewish members gets about 35 people on a Saturday morning. Most come every week. Each week we can expect maybe three or four people who are visitors or less frequently attending members, with the same number of regulars away that morning. Our total membership is 105 families, virtually all empty nesters on Medicare, so figure 170 people. That would mean about 22% of our people attend weekly. When I go to the Reform congregation on a Friday night, which I do a few times a year, they get about 60 people of various ages. Their membership is about 500 families, more spread out in age, so figure 900 people. That’s about 6% in attendance on any random week, irrespective of how often those 6% attend. My first thought is that the people who fill out the surveys think the sponsors will think more highly of them if they claim more frequent attendance than they really do.
Other data include church plantings and closures, though one megachurch only counts as one despite the large number of people.
I did an anecdotal survey last Passover when I needed something to occupy myself on a Sunday morning. https://richardplotzker.medium.com/church-parking-lots-2191fa6434bd As I drove past a bunch of churches at prime worship time, some had ample cars in the parking lot, others had a paltry number of vehicles. Churches and synagogues fill in part by the commitment to the religion and partly to the experience of being there, be it a dynamic Rabbi for us or engaging musical program for other churches.
While Ryan’s presentation has real data and mine are anecdotal impressions, usually they need to be compatible to assure credibility. I just don’t think 40% of the people in my state who claim a religion are in attendance at church on a random Sunday morning when I see lots of cars at the coffee places and strip malls that I drive past but not so many at churches along the same route.
I think the challenge here relates to how you define religious.Does it relate to belief, church attendance or the underlying reason for attendance. One could be an atheist and still attend church weekly, Why would you do that. Perhaps its bad for business to be seen as an unbeliever. Or your family may just want to do this and you go with the flow. Or even being an unbeliever you think it would be good for your children to be exposed to church. Or maybe thats the place where your friends and family hang out. But it would be quite challenging to find statistics to get at this,
I'd be interested in seeing how these charts compare with national happiness charts. Doesn't the Netherlands and Finland rank pretty high on levels of happiness/satisfaction? Is there a correlation?
It would also be interesting if there was a happiness chart by state, but I don't think that's ever been surveyed. I am aware that poverty, food insecurity, teen pregnancy and crime statistics have an inverse relationship to religious worship, perhaps because of wealth inequality. Keep them worshipping Jesus so you can bleed resources for the 1%.
There are a couple of ways of measuring happiness. One is through "life satisfaction" indices, and another is through whether people are unhappy enough to kill themselves. Let's look at both:
Five of the top six countries for life satisfaction are Nordic ones you mention. Beating out the most irreligious European country of the Netherlands in life satisfaction, though, is Israel, which is...not an irreligious country. Tied with the USA for life satisfaction is the UAE, which is also a very religious country. Mexico, a country with high poverty, income inequality and violent crime rates and extremely low rates of irreligiosity (92% of Mexicans self-describe as religious believers) is happier than wealthy, egalitarian, atheist France.
Japanese people are ten times wealthier than Filipinos (per capita GDP in Japan is 34K USD/year vs. 3800 USD/year in the Philippines), and Japan is also blessed with a stable government that provides generous social services, unlike the Philippines. 86% of Japanese people self-describe as atheists, while the ratio is flipped for the Philippines, with 88% of Filipinos self-describing as Catholics. Also, Japanese and Filipino people have the same life satisfaction scores, with one key difference: the Japanese suicide rate is almost five times that of the Philippines (17.5/100,000 population in Japan vs. 3.77/100,000 population in the Philippines.) Filipinos also choose to kill themselves at rates far lower than those happy folks in Nordic countries, similarly to religious Israel, UAE, and Mexico, which also have suicide rates much lower than Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
From your snark aside at the end, I can tell that you want there to be an inverse relationship between a nation's religiosity and its peoples' happiness, once you control for things like income. But I suspect you are also someone who wants to follow data, and that's not what international data show.
I read a book years ago on the inequality of wealth which occurs more frequently in Bible belt states and the higher proportion of negative social outcomes. It did not specifically site religion but I saw the correlation (being originally from Alabama). I grew up in the 60's living some of it.
And yes, I am a data guy. My favorite Bible scholar is Dan McClellan who sells apparel that reads "Data over Dogma." :)
As a second reply look at this study which, in the introduction cites Confucius.
"The lord of a state or a family, concerns himself not with scarcity but rather with uneven distribution… For where there is even distribution, there is no poverty.”
– Confucius
Numerous studies agree that income inequality, rather than absolute income, is an important predictor of happiness. However, its specific role has been controversial. We argue that income inequality and happiness should exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship due to the dynamic competing process between two effects: when income inequality is relatively low, the signal effect will be the dominating factor, in which individuals feel happy because they consider income inequality as a signal of social mobility and expect upward mobility; however, if income inequality level increases beyond a critical point, the jealousy effect will become the dominating factor, in which individuals tend to be unhappy because they are disillusioned about the prospect of upward mobility and jealous of their wealthier peers.
Hi, Kent! To be clear, I am not arguing against the hypothesis that income inequality (and in particular, increasing income inequality) contributes to unhappiness. I think the data is pretty clear that it does—at least for the kind of wealthy countries that are the near-exclusive sites for such studies*. All I’m arguing is that data do not support the claim that more religious countries have populations that are less happy than less religious countries, especially after controlling for variables like wealth and inequality.
Let’s throw income inequality into our considerations for the nations we’ve already looked at, by comparing the Gini indices for these countries. Data from here:
Japan, with its eye-popping suicide rate, wealth, and atheism has a Gini index of 32.9, vs. the poor, Catholic Philippines’ 40.7–so the Philippines is much more unequal, but comparably happy, and much less suicidal, than Japan. In cheery Catholic Mexico, the Gini index is even higher, at 43.5. It’s true that folks in Nordic countries are irreligious, quite happy, and living in fairly egalitarian countries**—with Gini indices below 30 in every case—and this can be seen as support for the hypothesis that greater equality correlates with greater national happiness. What it can’t be used to claim is that there’s a causal chain that goes (lack of religiosity <—> increased equality) —> increased happiness. It can’t even be used to claim that countries that are less religious have happier people, except as a possible confounder for income inequality.
What the data do not support is the claim that, on a global level, lack of religiosity correlates with national happiness, with less religious nations being more egalitarian and also happier. That’s just not the case.
————————————————————————
* Which are WEIRD ones: western, educated, individualistic, rich, and democratic. It’s not super surprising that wealthy capitalist countries that assign moral worth to wealth, and have as a central tenet that each atomized individual is personally responsible for his lot in life would have people who get pretty upset when income inequality increases. That describes the entire data set in the study you cite, which includes not a single poor or non-Western country.
**Not that countries like the Netherlands believe in income equality for all their citizens. Their overseas territories have Gini indices in the 30s-40s, and citizens there are entitled to fewer social services than their European counterparts. Also, despite their decreased wealth and increased inequality, Dutch citizens living in island territories are at least as happy, and significantly more religious, than Dutch citizens living in Europe. See here for life satisfaction data for Dutch islanders: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/48/satisfaction-high-in-caribbean-nl-in-spite-of-low-material-well-being
Now using religion just in the U.S. there is some direct correlation with the most conservative religious states and negative social outcomes. I will individually post several:
With data aggregated at the state level, conservative religious beliefs strongly predict U.S. teen birth rates, in a relationship that does not appear to be the result of confounding by income or abortion rates. One possible explanation for this relationship is that teens in more religious communities may be less likely to use contraception.
he children of teen mothers in the U.S., on the average, have worse outcomes in a number of ways. They score lower in school achievement tests, have a greater likelihood of repeating a grade, are rated more unfavorably by teachers while in high school, have worse physical health, are more likely to be indicated victims of abuse and neglect, have higher durations of foster care placement, and are almost three times more likely to be incarcerated during adolescence or the early 20 s than the children of mothers who delayed childbearing; the daughters of teen mothers are more likely to become teen mothers themselves[1].
As mentioned previously: I think that we’re talking past each other, because I’m making an argument about the world, and you’re making an argument about the United States, which is a very peculiar country on many grounds.
N.B., I introduced the argument about global happiness levels and religiosity because that is the relationship you proposed should be investigated in your original comment.
I'm not an expert in income inequality. I spend much more time researching Christian attitudes that affect income inequality. So I asked ChatGpt if there is a correlation between religiosity and income inequality. And yes, there are certainly "exceptions" to every rule because people are different, culture is different. So my emphasis is not on the fact that Dutch Islanders (who may or may not have ethnic ties to the Netherlanders) live differently or are treated differently. I look at macro trends. And here is what ChatGpt (open "free" AI) says:
Yes, there is a notable correlation between income inequality and religion, though the relationship is complex and varies across different contexts.
Global Trends
Research indicates that countries with higher levels of religiosity often exhibit greater income inequality. This pattern may be due to several factors:
(ScienceDirect and Wikipedia)
Economic Insecurity: High inequality can lead to economic insecurity, prompting individuals to seek solace in religion. This phenomenon, known as "insecurity theory," suggests that religion provides psychological and material comfort in unequal societies.
(Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
Religious Influence on Social Attitudes: In highly religious societies, there may be less support for governmental redistribution policies. Religious teachings can influence beliefs about wealth and poverty, potentially leading to acceptance of existing economic disparities.
Hi, Kent. I fear we’re talking past each other because I’m arguing that *globally* religiosity does not predict for unhappiness in a population, and you’re arguing that Christian religiosity in the very unusual USA and similar WEIRD countries predicts against income inequality. For instance, here you’re continuing to cite exclusively American data on income inequality (not happiness) using the notoriously American-biased ChatGPT*.
But only a tiny minority of the world’s population, let alone the world’s Christians, lives in the United States. So we can’t make claims about religiosity and inequality based on the experience of Alabama any more than we can make claims about irreligiosity and inequality based on the experience of the Dutch territories (where I live). And we certainly can’t make claims about religiosity and happiness based on either, since that’s a separate question.
I am only arguing the second thing: there is not an inverse correlation between religiosity and happiness, globally. Rather, more religious countries may be happier than similarly wealthy countries, despite income inequality.
-----------------------------
*Keep in mind that AIs including ChatGPT return answers that the querier "wants to" hear. Identical prompts submitted by users with different search histories return different answers from ChatGPT, because ChatGPT's predicted perfect answer is different for people with different ChatGPT histories. So it's very difficult to get ChatGPT to answer a question in such a way that's not molded to your own biases.
And apparently the AI commentary is too long for one post so here is the rest:
Religion and Income in the United States (Pew Research Center)
In the U.S., income levels vary significantly among different religious groups:
Higher-Income Groups: Jews, Hindus, and Episcopalians tend to have higher household incomes. For instance, about 44% of Jewish households and 36% of Hindu households earn at least $100,000 annually.
Lower-Income Groups: Members of historically Black churches and Jehovah’s Witnesses often have lower household incomes, with nearly half earning less than $30,000 per year.
These disparities are influenced by factors such as education, cultural attitudes toward work and family, and historical patterns of discrimination. For example, some conservative Protestant communities may discourage higher education, impacting income potential. (Wikipedia)
Causality and Complexity
The relationship between religion and income inequality is bidirectional:
Religion Influencing Inequality: Religious beliefs can shape attitudes toward wealth distribution and social policies, potentially reinforcing existing inequalities. (cdr.lib.unc.edu)
Inequality Influencing Religion: Economic disparities can drive individuals toward religious communities that offer support and a sense of belonging.
Overall, while there is a correlation between income inequality and religion, the dynamics are multifaceted, involving cultural, economic, and historical factors.
I have a theory that the American religious landscape, by its entrepreneurial and varied nature, has a way of promoting attendance that most other Christian landscapes do not. An EO service does not appeal that much to normies, so there's a strong tendency in EO countries to only attend sporadically, even among people who consider themselves Christians.
In terms of the 3 B's, in other words, we could say that EO countries, and to a lesser degree Catholic ones, have a higher threshold of Belief before it really changes their Behavior, at least in terms of attendance. They also have a tight sense of Belonging as a result of the church being wrapped up in their national/ethnic identity.
Protestantism is apparently dead in Europe, I think at least in part because Protestant state churches are the most degenerate form of church polity. But also the decline of nationalism in NW Europe has translated to a loss of the intertwining of the local form of Christianity with national identity that still exists in much of Southern and Eastern Europe.
I also have a theory that Protestant Europe exported a lot of its most pious citizens to America and this had lasting effects. E.g. the 19th century wave of Dutch Reformed immigrants consisted of primarily religiously-motivated Dutch that objected to their state church.
I've heard people observe that there may be more Muslims than Christians worshipping each week in many of these countries on the bottom of the list. It also occurs to me that even in some "non-Christian" countries, a larger percentage of the population may be attending Christian services each week than in NW Europe. Is Egypt in some sense a more Christian country than Iceland?
Yeah I do think the absence of religious competition really does explain Protestant Europe… but then why is the Catholic Church still dominant in most of Catholic Europe?
1. Protestant state churches are especially degenerate, probably by their nature.
2. Nationalism is still intermingled with Roman Catholicism, even if not to the same degree as EO. Italy contains the Vatican; in Eastern Europe the RCC was a point of anti-Communist / anti-Russian resistance. In Ireland, it helps define them in opposition to the English.
3. Especially pious European Protestants had a tendency to leave Europe for the New World, leaving their home Protestant communities more diminished. The same dynamic was not present among Roman Catholics, whose migration to the New World was almost entirely economically motivated.
Where does Islam fit into Europe's new religious landscape? Is there any data on this yet?
“That’s followed by South Dakota at 42%” Correction: North Dakota
Toyed with some of the data to get a better grasp in a way easier to handle. I took my home state, which has about a million inhabitants. From the data on the bar graphs, 25% of that million attend weekly and 62% of that million identify a religion. So, about 40% of those claiming a religion would have to attend weekly to get the 25% of the total with and without religion who attend weekly. Is this my local perception?
My synagogue which has the state’s most observant Jewish members gets about 35 people on a Saturday morning. Most come every week. Each week we can expect maybe three or four people who are visitors or less frequently attending members, with the same number of regulars away that morning. Our total membership is 105 families, virtually all empty nesters on Medicare, so figure 170 people. That would mean about 22% of our people attend weekly. When I go to the Reform congregation on a Friday night, which I do a few times a year, they get about 60 people of various ages. Their membership is about 500 families, more spread out in age, so figure 900 people. That’s about 6% in attendance on any random week, irrespective of how often those 6% attend. My first thought is that the people who fill out the surveys think the sponsors will think more highly of them if they claim more frequent attendance than they really do.
Other data include church plantings and closures, though one megachurch only counts as one despite the large number of people.
I did an anecdotal survey last Passover when I needed something to occupy myself on a Sunday morning. https://richardplotzker.medium.com/church-parking-lots-2191fa6434bd As I drove past a bunch of churches at prime worship time, some had ample cars in the parking lot, others had a paltry number of vehicles. Churches and synagogues fill in part by the commitment to the religion and partly to the experience of being there, be it a dynamic Rabbi for us or engaging musical program for other churches.
While Ryan’s presentation has real data and mine are anecdotal impressions, usually they need to be compatible to assure credibility. I just don’t think 40% of the people in my state who claim a religion are in attendance at church on a random Sunday morning when I see lots of cars at the coffee places and strip malls that I drive past but not so many at churches along the same route.
I think the challenge here relates to how you define religious.Does it relate to belief, church attendance or the underlying reason for attendance. One could be an atheist and still attend church weekly, Why would you do that. Perhaps its bad for business to be seen as an unbeliever. Or your family may just want to do this and you go with the flow. Or even being an unbeliever you think it would be good for your children to be exposed to church. Or maybe thats the place where your friends and family hang out. But it would be quite challenging to find statistics to get at this,
I'd be interested in seeing how these charts compare with national happiness charts. Doesn't the Netherlands and Finland rank pretty high on levels of happiness/satisfaction? Is there a correlation?
It would also be interesting if there was a happiness chart by state, but I don't think that's ever been surveyed. I am aware that poverty, food insecurity, teen pregnancy and crime statistics have an inverse relationship to religious worship, perhaps because of wealth inequality. Keep them worshipping Jesus so you can bleed resources for the 1%.
There are a couple of ways of measuring happiness. One is through "life satisfaction" indices, and another is through whether people are unhappy enough to kill themselves. Let's look at both:
Life satisfaction: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world
Suicide rates: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country
Five of the top six countries for life satisfaction are Nordic ones you mention. Beating out the most irreligious European country of the Netherlands in life satisfaction, though, is Israel, which is...not an irreligious country. Tied with the USA for life satisfaction is the UAE, which is also a very religious country. Mexico, a country with high poverty, income inequality and violent crime rates and extremely low rates of irreligiosity (92% of Mexicans self-describe as religious believers) is happier than wealthy, egalitarian, atheist France.
Japanese people are ten times wealthier than Filipinos (per capita GDP in Japan is 34K USD/year vs. 3800 USD/year in the Philippines), and Japan is also blessed with a stable government that provides generous social services, unlike the Philippines. 86% of Japanese people self-describe as atheists, while the ratio is flipped for the Philippines, with 88% of Filipinos self-describing as Catholics. Also, Japanese and Filipino people have the same life satisfaction scores, with one key difference: the Japanese suicide rate is almost five times that of the Philippines (17.5/100,000 population in Japan vs. 3.77/100,000 population in the Philippines.) Filipinos also choose to kill themselves at rates far lower than those happy folks in Nordic countries, similarly to religious Israel, UAE, and Mexico, which also have suicide rates much lower than Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
From your snark aside at the end, I can tell that you want there to be an inverse relationship between a nation's religiosity and its peoples' happiness, once you control for things like income. But I suspect you are also someone who wants to follow data, and that's not what international data show.
I read a book years ago on the inequality of wealth which occurs more frequently in Bible belt states and the higher proportion of negative social outcomes. It did not specifically site religion but I saw the correlation (being originally from Alabama). I grew up in the 60's living some of it.
And yes, I am a data guy. My favorite Bible scholar is Dan McClellan who sells apparel that reads "Data over Dogma." :)
Thanks for sharing the links.
As a second reply look at this study which, in the introduction cites Confucius.
"The lord of a state or a family, concerns himself not with scarcity but rather with uneven distribution… For where there is even distribution, there is no poverty.”
– Confucius
Numerous studies agree that income inequality, rather than absolute income, is an important predictor of happiness. However, its specific role has been controversial. We argue that income inequality and happiness should exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship due to the dynamic competing process between two effects: when income inequality is relatively low, the signal effect will be the dominating factor, in which individuals feel happy because they consider income inequality as a signal of social mobility and expect upward mobility; however, if income inequality level increases beyond a critical point, the jealousy effect will become the dominating factor, in which individuals tend to be unhappy because they are disillusioned about the prospect of upward mobility and jealous of their wealthier peers.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02052/full
Hi, Kent! To be clear, I am not arguing against the hypothesis that income inequality (and in particular, increasing income inequality) contributes to unhappiness. I think the data is pretty clear that it does—at least for the kind of wealthy countries that are the near-exclusive sites for such studies*. All I’m arguing is that data do not support the claim that more religious countries have populations that are less happy than less religious countries, especially after controlling for variables like wealth and inequality.
Let’s throw income inequality into our considerations for the nations we’ve already looked at, by comparing the Gini indices for these countries. Data from here:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI
Japan, with its eye-popping suicide rate, wealth, and atheism has a Gini index of 32.9, vs. the poor, Catholic Philippines’ 40.7–so the Philippines is much more unequal, but comparably happy, and much less suicidal, than Japan. In cheery Catholic Mexico, the Gini index is even higher, at 43.5. It’s true that folks in Nordic countries are irreligious, quite happy, and living in fairly egalitarian countries**—with Gini indices below 30 in every case—and this can be seen as support for the hypothesis that greater equality correlates with greater national happiness. What it can’t be used to claim is that there’s a causal chain that goes (lack of religiosity <—> increased equality) —> increased happiness. It can’t even be used to claim that countries that are less religious have happier people, except as a possible confounder for income inequality.
What the data do not support is the claim that, on a global level, lack of religiosity correlates with national happiness, with less religious nations being more egalitarian and also happier. That’s just not the case.
————————————————————————
* Which are WEIRD ones: western, educated, individualistic, rich, and democratic. It’s not super surprising that wealthy capitalist countries that assign moral worth to wealth, and have as a central tenet that each atomized individual is personally responsible for his lot in life would have people who get pretty upset when income inequality increases. That describes the entire data set in the study you cite, which includes not a single poor or non-Western country.
**Not that countries like the Netherlands believe in income equality for all their citizens. Their overseas territories have Gini indices in the 30s-40s, and citizens there are entitled to fewer social services than their European counterparts. Also, despite their decreased wealth and increased inequality, Dutch citizens living in island territories are at least as happy, and significantly more religious, than Dutch citizens living in Europe. See here for life satisfaction data for Dutch islanders: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/48/satisfaction-high-in-caribbean-nl-in-spite-of-low-material-well-being
Now using religion just in the U.S. there is some direct correlation with the most conservative religious states and negative social outcomes. I will individually post several:
With data aggregated at the state level, conservative religious beliefs strongly predict U.S. teen birth rates, in a relationship that does not appear to be the result of confounding by income or abortion rates. One possible explanation for this relationship is that teens in more religious communities may be less likely to use contraception.
he children of teen mothers in the U.S., on the average, have worse outcomes in a number of ways. They score lower in school achievement tests, have a greater likelihood of repeating a grade, are rated more unfavorably by teachers while in high school, have worse physical health, are more likely to be indicated victims of abuse and neglect, have higher durations of foster care placement, and are almost three times more likely to be incarcerated during adolescence or the early 20 s than the children of mothers who delayed childbearing; the daughters of teen mothers are more likely to become teen mothers themselves[1].
In the United States, what to teach adolescents about sexuality and the prevention of teen pregnancy has been controversial. A number of sex education programs in the U.S. have been mandated to be "abstinence-only" programs, excluding the teaching of contraceptive techniques. https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4755-6-14#:~:text=Conclusion,less%20likely%20to%20use%20contraception.
As mentioned previously: I think that we’re talking past each other, because I’m making an argument about the world, and you’re making an argument about the United States, which is a very peculiar country on many grounds.
N.B., I introduced the argument about global happiness levels and religiosity because that is the relationship you proposed should be investigated in your original comment.
I'm not an expert in income inequality. I spend much more time researching Christian attitudes that affect income inequality. So I asked ChatGpt if there is a correlation between religiosity and income inequality. And yes, there are certainly "exceptions" to every rule because people are different, culture is different. So my emphasis is not on the fact that Dutch Islanders (who may or may not have ethnic ties to the Netherlanders) live differently or are treated differently. I look at macro trends. And here is what ChatGpt (open "free" AI) says:
Yes, there is a notable correlation between income inequality and religion, though the relationship is complex and varies across different contexts.
Global Trends
Research indicates that countries with higher levels of religiosity often exhibit greater income inequality. This pattern may be due to several factors:
(ScienceDirect and Wikipedia)
Economic Insecurity: High inequality can lead to economic insecurity, prompting individuals to seek solace in religion. This phenomenon, known as "insecurity theory," suggests that religion provides psychological and material comfort in unequal societies.
(Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
Religious Influence on Social Attitudes: In highly religious societies, there may be less support for governmental redistribution policies. Religious teachings can influence beliefs about wealth and poverty, potentially leading to acceptance of existing economic disparities.
(cdr.lib.unc.edu)
Hi, Kent. I fear we’re talking past each other because I’m arguing that *globally* religiosity does not predict for unhappiness in a population, and you’re arguing that Christian religiosity in the very unusual USA and similar WEIRD countries predicts against income inequality. For instance, here you’re continuing to cite exclusively American data on income inequality (not happiness) using the notoriously American-biased ChatGPT*.
But only a tiny minority of the world’s population, let alone the world’s Christians, lives in the United States. So we can’t make claims about religiosity and inequality based on the experience of Alabama any more than we can make claims about irreligiosity and inequality based on the experience of the Dutch territories (where I live). And we certainly can’t make claims about religiosity and happiness based on either, since that’s a separate question.
I am only arguing the second thing: there is not an inverse correlation between religiosity and happiness, globally. Rather, more religious countries may be happier than similarly wealthy countries, despite income inequality.
-----------------------------
*Keep in mind that AIs including ChatGPT return answers that the querier "wants to" hear. Identical prompts submitted by users with different search histories return different answers from ChatGPT, because ChatGPT's predicted perfect answer is different for people with different ChatGPT histories. So it's very difficult to get ChatGPT to answer a question in such a way that's not molded to your own biases.
And apparently the AI commentary is too long for one post so here is the rest:
Religion and Income in the United States (Pew Research Center)
In the U.S., income levels vary significantly among different religious groups:
Higher-Income Groups: Jews, Hindus, and Episcopalians tend to have higher household incomes. For instance, about 44% of Jewish households and 36% of Hindu households earn at least $100,000 annually.
Lower-Income Groups: Members of historically Black churches and Jehovah’s Witnesses often have lower household incomes, with nearly half earning less than $30,000 per year.
These disparities are influenced by factors such as education, cultural attitudes toward work and family, and historical patterns of discrimination. For example, some conservative Protestant communities may discourage higher education, impacting income potential. (Wikipedia)
Causality and Complexity
The relationship between religion and income inequality is bidirectional:
Religion Influencing Inequality: Religious beliefs can shape attitudes toward wealth distribution and social policies, potentially reinforcing existing inequalities. (cdr.lib.unc.edu)
Inequality Influencing Religion: Economic disparities can drive individuals toward religious communities that offer support and a sense of belonging.
Overall, while there is a correlation between income inequality and religion, the dynamics are multifaceted, involving cultural, economic, and historical factors.
I have a theory that the American religious landscape, by its entrepreneurial and varied nature, has a way of promoting attendance that most other Christian landscapes do not. An EO service does not appeal that much to normies, so there's a strong tendency in EO countries to only attend sporadically, even among people who consider themselves Christians.
In terms of the 3 B's, in other words, we could say that EO countries, and to a lesser degree Catholic ones, have a higher threshold of Belief before it really changes their Behavior, at least in terms of attendance. They also have a tight sense of Belonging as a result of the church being wrapped up in their national/ethnic identity.
Protestantism is apparently dead in Europe, I think at least in part because Protestant state churches are the most degenerate form of church polity. But also the decline of nationalism in NW Europe has translated to a loss of the intertwining of the local form of Christianity with national identity that still exists in much of Southern and Eastern Europe.
I also have a theory that Protestant Europe exported a lot of its most pious citizens to America and this had lasting effects. E.g. the 19th century wave of Dutch Reformed immigrants consisted of primarily religiously-motivated Dutch that objected to their state church.
I've heard people observe that there may be more Muslims than Christians worshipping each week in many of these countries on the bottom of the list. It also occurs to me that even in some "non-Christian" countries, a larger percentage of the population may be attending Christian services each week than in NW Europe. Is Egypt in some sense a more Christian country than Iceland?
Yeah I do think the absence of religious competition really does explain Protestant Europe… but then why is the Catholic Church still dominant in most of Catholic Europe?
Well, I offered 3 theories in my comment above.
1. Protestant state churches are especially degenerate, probably by their nature.
2. Nationalism is still intermingled with Roman Catholicism, even if not to the same degree as EO. Italy contains the Vatican; in Eastern Europe the RCC was a point of anti-Communist / anti-Russian resistance. In Ireland, it helps define them in opposition to the English.
3. Especially pious European Protestants had a tendency to leave Europe for the New World, leaving their home Protestant communities more diminished. The same dynamic was not present among Roman Catholics, whose migration to the New World was almost entirely economically motivated.
Oh phleeeaseeeee 🙄