Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum both link to this Pew Report on various worldwide opinions. Here is the graph that gets people talking, a plot of per capita GDP versus religiosity:
This looks like a curve that was drawn by hand, rather than fit by least-squares, but there is obviously a correlation: as a country gets wealthier, it gets less religious. The United States, obviously, is a whopping outlier. Why is that? What is it about the U.S. that makes it so different from our demographic cousins, even within the Anglosphere? (Kuwait is also an outlier, but the reasons are pretty straightforward.) I’ve heard various theories, but none has really been convincing.
(Looking closely, maybe a better fit to the data would be to horizontal line segments: one at 2.25, for GDP between 0 an 10,000, and one at 0.75, for all higher incomes. Perhaps there is a phase transition that countries undergo when their per capita GDP hits around 10,000. Or, even more likely, there is some hidden third variable that is highly correlated with both GDP and religiosity. That kind of curve would make the U.S. seem less exceptional.)
Immigration?
I guess I fail to see what the incentive is to lie on a poll like this, where one is most likely assured anonymity. Surely folks lie to members of their social circle if telling the truth has negative social repercussions, but why lie to the Pew Research Center?
The more I think about this, the more mysterious it is. Clearly, what per capita GDP tells us is that a nation needn’t be economically egalitarian to be an economic powerhouse, but it’s not such a stretch accept that per capita GDP probably does say something about the common citizen’s “quality of life”. “Poor” in the USA is qualitatively different than “poor” in Somalia. Those who find themselves below the US poverty line don’t also tend to find themselves frequently on the verge of starvation, in a mud hut, with no access to clean drinking water or the most basic medical care, perhaps fearing death by violence on a daily basis, etc.
With government and religion as the basic communal institutions and a generation of nativist badmouthing of government condoning and encouraging diversity, institutional religion benefits, whether it agrees, or not. On the other side of the coin, poor countries tend to have corrupt governments, thus religion attracts the dispossessed.
Guffaw! When conservatives post this kind of graph, liberals get a good laugh at their ignorance of basic methodology. Post up a graph of suicide rates vs “degree of socialism” if you doubt this. But now SC can post up this idiotic thing and it is taken seriously. So what are the units of religiosity? Kilopopes? Nanodawkins? LOL!!
I agree with the poster who noted that religion plays different roles between the US and say Europe. It does indeed serve as sort of a communal rallying and networking role in the US which I imagine helps up the GDP numbers somewhat.
So I guess the point is the US is simply an anomaly and nothing much can be learned from it.
Aha! A measure of income inequality can be expressed as the Gini Coefficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
The wiki has a blurb on how the GC correlates with per capita GDP: Little to no relation on the low end of the per capita GDP scale, with values converging on 0.4 or less on the high end. With a GC of about 0.67, the US is yet again an anomaly.
Gah! 0.47, not 0.67…
Most countries have or have had something close to a state religion. America is rather unique in that case and competition between religious entities has maintained more religious feelings.
To me the most plausible explanation for this anomaly, lies in the difference in social security. The existential threat to US-citizens in case of accident or disease is far greater than it is in europe. I think if you could make a graph plotting existential security vs religiosity there would be a correlation where the US would not be an anomaly.
Yes, I suppose one could say that the irony about the US is that although it is one of the closest countries in the world to having a pure capitalist economy, that has the consequence that communist type aspects of government (such as social security, and/or safety nets for the disadvantaged) are somewhat neglected, and this tends to generate a growing economic underclass over time. Also, I think it is a well documented aspect of human nature that it is not how well off you are that determines your level of general happiness in a society, but how well off you are in relation to the others within it – since this is a way of measuring status. Hence my hypothesis is that the US has a large number of people that are drawn to religion due to an undercurrent of general unhappiness via this cause. And of course there are the historical aspects to the foundation of the current american state. The original colonists of the country known today as the United States were outcast from Europe due to their weird religious beliefs, some 400 or so years ago. Draw from this whatever conclusions you will…
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to jump on the bandwagon and be overly critical of America here. There tend to be a great deal of threads on the web over the last few years inviting comments that might seem rather negative and judgemental about the US, in particular towards aspects of its culture. I think we too soon forget all of the great things that America has done for the world in the last hundred years, particularly in the last fifty. The second industrial revolution, the information age, the internet – all of these things were and still are almost completely monopolised by the US. Advances in biology, medicine, you name it – the US is still the world leader in R&D, and still will be the dominant player in this regard for decades yet. I think it would be best not to forget that – and not to forget all that we owe to these technologies that have enhanced our lives in the modern age, and to the nation responsible for their development.
Pingback: Comment on American Exceptionalism by tacitus by swiftda
The U.S. economy is an outlier in just about every way. I’m willing to bet a fair part of that excess GDP is offense defense spending.
We live in a country whose citizens believe that America is the source of all goodness and peace in the world despite the fact that it has killed something in excess of a million civilians in unprovoked wars over the last half century.
We shouldn’t be surprised that gullibility extends to religion too.
1) Where is China and India, 2/5th of the world population?
2) US position is an indication of a trend. There is a surge of religiosity because there is a trend towards lower GDP.
Where is the irony in that?
I agree with post #14.
The simplest explanation is that the United States is the only country on earth founded by a collection of Protestant sects.
These sects practiced versions of Protestantism that were more extreme than those prevalent in 17th-century Western Europe (e.g. Anglicanism or Scandinavian/German Lutheranism.)
In particular, these sects were unusual in the degree to which they held work, specifically capitalistic wealth creation, to be a moral imperative.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that wealth correlates positively with the prevalence of religious beliefs that encourage its creation.
It should also be no surprise that wealth correlates positively with the weakness of religious beliefs that discourage its creation (most strains of Catholicism, quasi-Catholic forms of Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism)
[Is there such a thing as a Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, or Hindu work ethic?]
Dharma springs to mind, though it may be a more rigidly classist system than the one which our “founding fathers” were born into.
But that happened four centuries ago… I very much doubt that today the average American worker works more hours a week than the average Korean, Japanese, German, Norwegian, you name it.
Um…like, holy crap. Just on a lark I did a search using terms like religiosity and fecundity, and found an article with “American exceptionalism” in the first sentence, even.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401891.html
Kind of makes me wonder more about the Darwinian arguments in #3.
#42: Yes, I think I made a bad choice of words there. I suppose the core of what I meant was that even though the economy of America is run more optimally than those of other countries, this tends to make people’s lives comparatively suboptimal for various reasons, a view that you may or may not agree with.
#45: There are arguments for and against the power of legacy. But to suppose that it has no influence in a country that is as deeply patriotic as the US might be slightly naive. However I do agree that saying there is a deep link between events 4 centuries ago and today is a bit on the kooky side. Nonetheless I think it is worth bearing in mind, since historical context is always useful.
Turns out that the average American does work more hours, at least according to
this recent article from the New York Times. [Unfortunately, the Times has ceased to be a reliable source of information. This article has Sarkozy as an advocate of the French 35-hour work week, when he is in fact its most ardent opponent. It also seems to be attempting to de-emphasize the US lead in absolute productivity by solely discussing relative productivity gains of inferior economies.]
This article highlights the fascinating case of the Irish. Is their rise to #2 in productivity (behind the U.S.) due to weakening Catholicism?
This division of the US from other high producers is highlighted by the “red state/blue state” divisions in America. If you actually evaluate America, it is really two countries, Blue states with low religiosity, and high output, and then the Red states, with high religiosity, but low output/rural life. While there are some with high religiosity in Blue States, and some in Red states that have bank, look at the gestalt, there is a division. There are many hinterlands in America, where faith is unquestioned, they vote the Republican ticket without review of issues, and “trust” in America. I say America is built by those who do NOT trust, but verify, the antithesis of a “faith based” reality.
Eyeballing the statistics for GSP/capita or even just straight GSP for the US states, I can’t really see a noticeable red/blue correlation. Maybe a little bit, but not exactly conclusive.
I can’t believe they even include DC (#1) in the per capita GSP breakdown. Government spending is about the only economy the place has, and although that contributor is massive, a huge proportion of the actual govt. employees live in suburban VA or MD. Unemployment rates for DC residents hover around 6%, and a far larger percentage barely make a living wage if they’re not govt.-employed. It’s completely in its own catagory.