What Countries Are Most Involved in Religious Organizations?
And is religious involvement related to other organizational involvement?
I have been asked several times in the last couple of weeks if I could write more about religion outside the United States. This is my attempt to do something like that. That’s not to say that I have not written about international religion before. Just a few months ago I put together a post about religious importance in over sixty countries using the World Values Survey.
I pulled up the codebook from the WVS and found another interesting battery of questions related to involvement with voluntary organizations. It says, “could you tell me whether you are a member, an active member, an inactive member or not a member of <blank> organization?” There are a bunch listed, but the one I wanted to really focus on was: church or religious organizations.
In Wave 7 of the World Values Survey, 63 countries were polled from basically every region on Earth. This is the share of each who indicated that they were an active member of a church/religious organization.
There are three countries that stand alone at the top of graph: Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. Of course, they are also on the same continent - but in each case at least two thirds of respondents said that they were active members of a religious organization. For comparison, the share of the entire sample that were active members of a religious organization was right around 20%. The country that comes in fourth place is Guatemala and it’s nearly twenty points lower than Ethiopia.
What countries score at the bottom? There are some surprise here, honestly. Egypt is dead last - less than 1% of respondents said that they were part of a religious organization. The next four were: Kazakhstan, Tunisia, China, and Vietnam. It’s a weird combination of countries, really. Several of them are in Central or Southeast Asia, but I think we can call admit that Kazakhstan and Vietnam have little in common.
For what it’s worth, the United States lands in 14th place at 33% of respondents saying that they are active members of a religious group. That’s nestled right above Ecuador and right below Thailand. Germany is the closest European country at 27%.
When I was noodling around this data, I had an idea. The WVS asks about religious importance - that was explored in the previously linked post. There has to be a strong correlation between religious importance and religious organizational involvement, right? A scatterplot can reveal that type of relationship. (For a spreadsheet of country abbreviations, click here.)
The line does slope upward, but fairly modestly. Among countries where basically no one thinks religion is very important, about 10% are part of churches. In countries where basically everyone thinks religion is important, church involvement is about 30%. Sure, that’s higher but not that much higher, right?
There’s some really weird stuff going on this data, honestly. For instance, Egypt makes absolutely no sense. 97% of Egyptians say that religion is very important to them. .8% are active members of a religious group. In Tunisia those numbers are 91% and 2%. Even in Greece it’s 55% saying religion is very important compared to only 2% who are active members in a religious organization.
This is why I don’t write a lot about other countries - I don’t really understand what is happening over there. I’m not an expert on religion in the Maldives or Jordan. So, someone can slide into those comments and make this make some sense please.
But, before you do that take a look at the graph below. I just looked at the countries where religious importance was north of 50% and religious involvement was below 20% and tried to see if it was just a bunch of people saying that they were inactive members of religious groups.
Nope, that’s not at all what is happening here. That Egyptian data comes back to haunt me. Nearly all Egyptians say that religion is very important to them. 98% of Egyptians don’t belong to any church or religious organization. That’s basically the case in this subset of the data - except for Zimbabwe. In that country, 78% of folks indicate that they are inactive members of a religious group. In no other country does this share rise above 18%.
This is giving me the same vibes as a previous post about the share of Americans who say that religion is very important to them, but they attend religious services less than once a year. I don’t know if the same factors are at play internationally, but it’s worth some reflection.
Let me take a different angle on this data - I calculated the share of each country’s respondents that were involved in a bunch of different organizations beyond religious ones: arts/music, charitable, mutual aid, labor unions, political parties, etc. I wanted to try and figure out where religious organizations were the most popular and if they weren’t what replaced them in those societies. Here’s what I found:
Religious groups were easily the most popular. Of the 63 countries that show up in Wave 7 of the World Values Survey, religion is the most popular in 37 of them (57%). The next most popular are recreational groups (sports clubs) - that’s 16 of the countries. No other group is the most popular in five or more countries. It’s essentially religion or recreation for most places on Earth. Nothing else really comes that close.
Notice how the Western Hemisphere is basically dominated by religion, though. I’m not sure that I would have guessed that. The only one that doesn’t fit this pattern is Uruguay where Art/Music/Education is the most popular. In both China and Russia, recreational groups are the most popular. That’s also the case in Australia. But for most of Africa and the Middle East, religious organizations score at the top.
I have one more way to look at this data that I thought may be illuminating. One true-ism in the United States is that religious participation is positively related to political participation. Said simply: church going people are more likely to engage the political process. They don’t crowd each other out, they actually keep the social flywheel spinning.
I wanted to see if that was the case across the world. So, I created a simple summed index by just adding up the share who were active members of nine different organizations, many of which were included in the map above. I intentionally left out religious organizations. That became my measure for the x-axis. If a larger share of a country is engaged in religious organizations, are they also more likely to be more involved in social organizations broadly?
The answer is clearly yes. They absolutely are. The line is strongly positive. Recall that Kenya had the highest share of respondents who were active members of a religious organization. They also easily scored the highest on the summed index of all organizations. Kenyans are just incredibly socially engaged - that’s one clear takeaway from this data.
But it’s generally true that religious involvement is positively related to involvement in non-religious groups. As the share who are active members in a church rises from 20% to 40%, the summed index of activity rises from .7 to 1. That’s a significant increase.
Involvement in religion is deeply related to involvement in non-religious parts of institutional life, too. That’s true across multiple datasets and multiple countries now.
I love writing about religion. Especially American religion, because I think I understand it pretty well. It would take me decades to understand the nuances of the religious landscape in Egypt or Vietnam or Japan. But with data like this, I can at least try to broadly understand how religion works in a universal way. While American religion is incredibly unique in many ways, there are also common linkages across dozens of countries that are worth reflection and closer study.
Code for this post can be found here.
Graduate student of religion in India here, so no expert, I have been curious about how your analysis would affect foreign and particularly non-Christian cultures, as Christianity and Judaism may be the only religions I have studied with what I call as a former southern Baptist, "fellowship hall culture." In Islamic countries and communities, there is rarely a family or fellowship culture to the mosque, as it is simply a beautiful and large place to host prayers, usually for the male population, and usually for Friday communal prayers in particular. You can hear wise teachings and have a convo with friends or religious elders afterwards, but it is usually not the bowling league analog that Protestantism is in the US, which also colors immigrant religious communities in the US (e.g., American mosques have more community events hosted and religious education things for kids, whereas in Egypt that is probably unnecessary).
Hinduism in particular has a rich tradition of social beliefs and standards but the temples are for you the individual to pray to the gods, not to organize a bake sale or baseball little league for Christ like some American Christians might do. Sermons are not central to Hindu worship, as much as bringing offerings to priests for image adoration. You can also do all the stuff you need from a home shrine, the communal temples just have bigger and better resources, but the Gods can hear your regardless of how big or small their image is, so in spite of strong collective rules governing Hindu life and custom, the temple is usually not the hub of sociality in India itself.
All of this to say if the summer camp-adjacent vibes of weekly American Protestant worship are essential to our American society having social infrastructure, how can countless societies and cultures that have never had a "bowling league" or "fellowship hall "culture attached to their communal religious rituals survive and thrive without it, but de-churching Americans seem to collapse into anomie without it? Can Americans take notes from the Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus of Asia who make their friends and social connections outside of the religious contexts, but who still are driven by collective religious stories and expectations? Did Christianity "summer camp" our society and the Western Hemisphere as a whole to a point where we are socially broken without it, or did religious power from the colonial era just take longer to lose its grip on North and South America? Do we need more de-churching to save America from a reliance on a non-universal "fellowship hall" culture? Did de-churching Europeans in the 60s or secular Japanese in the 80s drop off the social map as their institutional religions were decentralized in their cultures? Or was a lack of folksy low church Protestant culture mean that they never associated religion with political activity and social engagement?
Many comments have said this already but I'll concur. For Muslims, belonging to a religious organization means being part of something like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Tablighi Jamaat. Regular people just show up at the mosque, they might even send their kids to an Islamic school or arrange after school religious lessons, but they don't think of themselves as belonging to a group or organization per se. It's just who they are and what they do. Mosques are funded by the government in many places, or by endowed nonprofits known as waqfs. A person might even donate money to build a mosque, maintain a saint's tomb (shrine), or endow a waqf, and would still not consider themselves a member of anything, because there is nothing to be a member of. Mosques and shrines are open to all (men, they're not open to women everywhere), you just show up and pray at the one closest to the location you happen to be at, or visit the shrine of the saint you want to venerate. No-one is keeping a roster of anything.
Side note: Because there's no concept of membership, there's also no equivalent of excommunication.
In the US, immigrant communities had to adopt the funding models of Protestant churches, since they had neither government support nor endowments. So you have memberships in order to vote in board elections, and a lot of community events etc. But the mosque is still open to all.