Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion

(click on years above to see how restrictions have changed)

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

The share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose from 31% in the year ending in mid-2009 to 37% in the year ending in mid-2010. Because some of the most restrictive countries are very populous, three-quarters of the world’s approximately 7 billion people live in countries with high government restrictions on religion or high social hostilities involving religion, up from 70% a year earlier.

Restrictions on religion rose not only in countries that began the year with high or very high restrictions or hostilities, such as Indonesia and Nigeria, but also in many countries that began with low or moderate restrictions or hostilities, such as Switzerland and the United States. (See sidebar on the U.S..)

Read the whole thing.

Question:  If you consider there to be a market for religion, what impact do you expect government restrictions to have on these market outcomes?  As government restrictions become  stronger in given regions, do you expect a 'black market' for religion to emerge?  Does this match what we see in many countries?

Muslims From Abroad Are Thriving in Catholic Colleges

A recent New York Times article mentioning Marymount University on why Muslim students (particularly females) often feel most comfortable at Catholic Universities:

The flow of students from the Muslim world into American colleges and universities has grown sharply in recent years, and women, though still far outnumbered by men, account for a rising share.

No definitive figures are available, but interviews with students and administrators at several Catholic institutions indicate an even faster rate of growth there, with the Muslim student population generally doubling over the past decade, and the number of Muslim women tripling or more.

At those schools, Muslim students, from the United States or abroad, say they prefer a place where talk of religious beliefs and adherence to a religious code are accepted and even encouraged, socially and academically. Correctly or not, many of them say they believe that they are more accepted than they would be at secular schools.

Many Muslim students, particularly women, say they based their college choices partly on the idea that Catholic schools would be less permissive than others in the United States, though the behavior they say they witness later can call that into question.

They like the prevalence of single-sex floors in dorms, and even single-sex dorms at some schools. “I thought it would be a better fit for me, more traditional, a little more conservative,” said Shameela Idrees, a Pakistani undergraduate in business at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., who at first lived in an all-women dorm.

Read the whole thing.

Questions: Are Catholic Universities attractive to Muslim students because of a lower perceived cost of maintaining their religious identities? Is this perspective correct? Would this also be true at Protestant universities in the US relative to secular schools? Why or why not?

Related article: Sacrifice and Stigma: Reducing Free-riding in Cults, Communes, and Other Collectives by Larry Iannaccone.

Hans Rosling on Religion and Babies

Hans Rosling with fascinating look at the effect of religion on birthrates and what the future population of the world looks like.  Highly recommended!

Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions. With his trademark humor and sharp insight, Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates.

I'm particularly pleased to see Rosling making use of data from the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) -- a tremendous online goldmine of religious data.

See my previous posts on ARDA and Hans Rosling.

P.S. -- While I fully believe all of Rosling's numbers across nations, it is also likely true that individuals within nations with high levels of religiosity (devotion/commitment/practice of their faith) have more kids than average.  This certainly holds true for Christians in the United States.

Where in the World Are the Christians?

A Pew report on the size and distribution of the world's Christian population:

The number of Christians around the world has nearly quadrupled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2 billion in 2010. But the world’s overall population also has risen rapidly, from an estimated 1.8 billion in 1910 to 6.9 billion in 2010. As a result, Christians make up about the same portion of the world’s population today (32%) as they did a century ago (35%). 

This apparent stability, however, masks a momentous shift. Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole. 

At the same time, Christianity has grown enormously in sub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, where there were relatively few Christians at the beginning of the 20th century. The share of the population that is Christian in sub-Saharan Africa climbed from 9% in 1910 to 63% in 2010, while in the Asia-Pacific region it rose from 3% to 7%. Christianity today – unlike a century ago – is truly a global faith. 

One of the many interesting statistics in this report is that China is currently has the 7th largest Christian population in the world. With the current growth of Christianity in China, this is likely to increase further in the near future, with many commentators speculating China will have the world's largest Christian population in the near future.

Read the whole thing.

P.S. -- Here is John Micklewait, editor of the Economist, on Christianity in China:



More on the growth of Christianity in China from PBS and NPR.  And a deeper look into Christianity in China by the Pew Forum.

Religion = Romance? Divorce Rates vs. Church Attendance

I've lost track of how many times I've heard pastors and Christian authors quote the statistic that divorce rates are the same for church-goers as in the general population. This is misleading and disheartening to many devout Christians. The truth is, church attendance has a profound correlation with a reduced probability of divorce.

Sociologists and economists studying religion tend to use frequency of church attendance as a proxy for religiosity. (The notion being that those more serious about their faith are more likely to be involved in church than those less serious.) This measurement has far more predictive power on a whole host of social outcomes than simply asking if someone is a Christian.

To illustrate, above is a graph I just created in Stata showing the impact of church attendance on divorce rates. (Based on data from the 2006 General Social Survey.) The effect is particularly strong for men who attend church on a weekly basis.

Here are a few takeaways from the graph:

• Just over half of non-weekly church attenders who have ever been married have been divorced at least once.
• Approximately 41% of women who attend church weekly who have ever been married have been divorced at least once. One way to think of this is that weekly church attendance is correlated with an approximately 20% reduction in the probability of divorce for women.
• Approximately 32% of men who attend church weekly who have ever been married have been divorced at least once. One way to think of this is that weekly church attendance is correlated with an approximately 40% reduction in the probability of divorce for men.
• Part of the lessened effect for women is likely due to the fact that more women than men attend church on a weekly basis. Statistically, this means weekly church attending women are more likely to be married to a non-weekly attending man than vice-versa.
• This data may actually understate the differences between weekly and non-weekly church attenders. Weekly attenders are more likely to get married, while non-weekly church attenders are more likely to cohabit as alternative to marriage. (Cohabitation has a much higher likelihood of dissolution than marriage.)
  

It is important to note that data shows a correlation only and does not necessarily imply causality. (It could be an attribute that makes an individual likely to go to church also makes that individual more likely to marry and less likely to divorce.) However, as a weekly church attender myself, I find this data highly encouraging.

See more of my posts on the economics of religion.

Is the US a Religious Outlier?

An interesting graph from Charles Blow:


More on this here.

Downward Sloping Demand Curves?

“We Pretend We Are Christians”

Preference falsification as seen in the wild:

We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.

It seemed silly but it’s all very serious business down here. We don’t go to church or teach or children one belief is “right” over another. We expose them to every kind of belief and trust that they will one day settle in to their very own spirituality. However, for the sake of friends and neighbors, we pretend we are Christians. We try not to lie but rather not to disclose unnecessary information. As the children are getting older, this isn’t so easy for them and an outing is probably eminent.

This may be more common than many people would guess and applies not only to religion, but politics as well.  Timur Kuran has some interesting writing about preference falsification and religion in the Muslim world. 

Whenever the benefits of faking belief exceed the costs, expect to see it becoming more commonplace.

How Religious Is Your State?

The Pew Forum:

Which of the 50 states has the most religious population? Since there are many ways to define "religious," there is no single answer to this question. But to give a sense of how the states stack up, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life used polling data to rank them on four measures: the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God. Mississippi stands out on all four, and several other Southern states also rank very high on the measures.

Follow the link for an interactive graphic and see how your state stacks up on each of these four dimensions.

The Stronger Sex -- Spiritually Speaking

The gender gap in religion:

A new analysis of data from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that women are more religious than men on a variety of measures.

Data: Pew Forum U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007, released in 2008.

Of God and Money?

Interesting...

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good? A new study found that Protestants were more likely than Jews or Catholics to contribute money to a public pool. The Protestants also worked hardest for wages in a labor market game. Consider it evidence for the Protestant work ethic. (HT: Chris Blattman)

Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World

Interesting...

Creationism is growing in the Muslim world, from Turkey to Pakistan to Indonesia, international academics said last month as they gathered here to discuss the topic.

But, they said, young-Earth creationists, who believe God created the universe, Earth and life just a few thousand years ago, are rare, if not nonexistent....

More and more seem to be joining the ranks of the so-called old-Earth creationists. They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences.

The debate over evolution is only now gaining prominence in many Islamic countries as education improves and more students are exposed to the ideas of modern biology.

Read the whole thing.

If this movement becomes large enough, I wonder if there will be a corresponding strengthening of 'old-earth creationism' among Christians? Competition works among religious groups, just like it does in the marketplace.

One way to look at the emergence of creationism among Muslims is as a reaction to the increase in educational opportunities in the Muslim world. As more and more young Muslims are taught about evolution, the more it poses a threat to traditional Islamic teachings about the creation of man. Likewise, if Islamic 'old-earth creationism' has stronger intellectual appeal than Christian 'young-earth creationism' to people questioning matters of religion, you may see a strengthening of Christian 'old-earth creationism' as both religions compete for converts.

Power Play, Poaching, or Pastoral Response?

Game theory between the Catholic and Anglicans:

The timing of the Rome's announcement of an Apostolic Constitution was driven by the General Synod's determination to allow women bishops in the Church of England without an accommodation for traditionalists that would diminish the power of women bishops. The purpose of the Apostolic Constitution is to give traditionalists leverage so that a cadre of the Church of England remains untainted for a future unification. Rome expects that in the equilibrium of this strategic game the Church of England will cave in to the traditionalists; it does not expect to more than a few C of E members to cross the Tiber. Power play, poaching, or pastoral response? It's power play, out of weakness perhaps, but power play.

Read more here about the Pope's plan to bring Anglicans into the Catholic fold. Further thoughts here.

(HT Tyler Cowen)

Your Religion Is False?

Tyler Cowen:

The author is Joel Grus and the link to the book is here. I am a pro-religion non-believer, but if you wish to hear from an anti-religion non-believer, this is the place to go. He will tell you that your religion is false.

In addition to its humor, I prefer the content of this book to the better-known "new atheist" tracts. Grus yields many of the strongest arguments. For instance the biographical and sociological correlates with belief (most people choose the religion they grew up with, or encountered through a friend, etc.) suggest that, in this area, intuitions which feel "certain" simply cannot be trusted.

I'm a pro-religion believer and am interested to read what Grus has to say. I just downloaded a sample of the book to my Kindle. (The Kindle edition costs $4.99.)

For related content, see my other posts on the economics of religion.

Graphing Religion vs. Politics

Aleks Jakulin:

Via infosthetics, I came across a new and very nice web application for data analysis, Verifiable. Among their featured graphs, there's a very nice one displaying the association between politics and religion:

This graph also shows how the often-hated bar charts can be effective. In all, the graphs coming out of Verifiable look like some of the best I've come across. Previously, I've written about ManyEyes, which is quite versatile and allows many data types, and Swivel, which was among the first. Nicely done.

[Several commenters have pointed out (thanks!) that the selection of colors is not good, and that some religions in the list are very similar, or too small to be interesting. When it comes to selecting good colors, I stand by ColorBrewer.]

Religious Identity in the US

With Easter weekend upon us, it seemed appropriate to take a look at what how many Americans currently consider themselves believers, according to the latest American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), released last month. Sadly, most religious groups in USA appear to have lost ground since 1990:

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists.
• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
• The percentage of those who choose a generic label, calling themselves simply Christian, Protestant, non-denominational, evangelical or "born again," was 14.2%, about the same as in 1990.
• Jewish numbers showed a steady decline, from 1.8% in 1990 to 1.2% today. The percentage of Muslims, while still slim, has doubled, from 0.3% to 0.6%. Analysts within both groups suggest those numbers understate the groups' populations.

Here's a look at the actual numbers from the American Religious Identification Survey in 2008:



And a map of how denominations are distributed across states:



For the first time, 15% of the population now claims "None" for their religion. Only Catholics and Baptists are larger in size. Among the "Nones", upbringing appears to play a critical role:

A closer look at the "Nones" — people who said "None" when asked their religious identity — shows that this group (now 15% of Americans, up from 8% in 1990) opts out of traditional religious rites of passage:

• 40% say they had no childhood religious initiation ceremony such as a baptism, christening, circumcision, bar mitzvah or naming ceremony.
• 55% of those who are married had no religious ceremony.
• 66% say they do not expect to have a religious funeral.

"Your parents may decide for you on baptism and your spouse has a say in your wedding, but when people talk about dying, they speak for themselves," says Kosmin.

He expects the number of Nones to continue to grow as each generation begets more.

If these figures are correct, it implies that religion is losing market-share in the US in terms of a percentage of the population. What these numbers don't tell you is that there has been an absolute growth of about 25 million new believers (an increase of 22 million Christians plus 3 million non-Christians) in the US since 1990. While there has been growth among those who identify themselves as "None", there has also been substantial numerical growth among believers of almost all types as well.

Some questions this survey data raises:

• What is the decline in the overall levels of church attendance since 1990?
• Would some of those who classify themselves as "None" have classified themselves as Christian in 1990?
• Of the 15% who are "None", what percentage is atheist vs. agnostic vs. something else?
• How much of the changes in belief are due to changes in population growth and immigration?
• What is the impact of social mobility (people moving from one region of the US to another) on religion? Has there been any change in this mobility between 1990 and 2008?
• What growth or shrinkage has there been among those who attend church on a weekly basis since 1990, both on an absolute and percentage basis? These numbers are more likely more indicative of actual levels of belief in both time periods.

I hope to take a more in-depth look at all of these questions soon. (After this semester ends.) In the meantime, if you'd like to do some exploring of religious data on your own, I highly recommend exploring the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) website. They've got some truly fascinating statistics and religious databases available free of charge.

On My Way to ASREC

I'm on my way to the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC) conference in Crystal City. Below is a schedule of our sessions. See a more detailed schedule here. [PDF]

Read all of my posts on the Economics of Religion and learn more about it here.

ASREC 2009 Schedule

FRIDAY, APRIL 3

Friday 8:30 – 10:00 am
Religious Capital
The Economic Impact of Islamic Teachings
Religion and Culture
Churches and Firms: Incentives and Organization

Friday 10:15 – 11:45 am
Weber Revisited: Religion and Capitalism
Islamic Diversity: Gender, Identity, and Economics
Beyond the Religious Mainstream
Book Session: The Economics of American Judaism

Friday 1:15 – 2:45 pm
The Impact of Religion on Income and Earnings
Religion and Social Stability
Health and Education
Ethics and Markets

Friday 3:00 – 4:30 pm
Thriving in Adversity: Communities of Faith
Islam and Collective Action
Membership Trends / Church Growth
Modeling the Religious Markets

Friday 4:45 – 6:00 pm
Keynote Address: Deirdre McCloskey
“Toward a Seriously Religious Economics”

Friday 6:15 – 7:15 pm
Reception

Friday 9:00 – 11:00 pm
ASREC Evening Social

SATURDAY, APRIL 4

Saturday 8:30 – 10:00 am
Religion, Youth, and Well-being
Discrimination: From "Faiths" to Favoritism
TheARDA.com: Religious Data and Much, Much More
Mega-Churches, Para-Churches, Growing Churches

Saturday 10:15 – 11:45 am
International Perspectives on Religion and Schooling
Religion and Violence
Religion and the Family
Media Roundtable: Telling your Story to Journalists, Broadcasters & Bloggers

Saturday 1:15 – 2:45 pm
Faith and Philanthropy
Terrorism
Church and Sect
Teaching the Economics of Religion

Saturday 3:00 – 4:30 pm
Secularization
Church and State
Together At Last: The Mormons and the Amish
New Methods for Religious Research: Experiments & Cognitive Science

Saturday 4:45 – 6:00 pm
Keynote Address: Arthur Books
“Earthly Rewards to Faith, Hope & Charity”

Saturday 6:15 – 7:15 pm
Reception

Saturday 9:00 – 11:00 pm
ASREC Evening Social

SUNDAY, APRIL 5

Sunday 8:30 – 10:00 am
Causes and Consequences of Religious Liberty
Religion and Politics

Sunday 10:15 – 11:45 am
Faith-Based Commerce: The Economic Impact of Religious Institutions
Religion and Society

Religion, Income, and Voting

An interesting graph from Andrew Gelman. (Follow the link for many more.)



Will Wilkinson comments:

No matter how churchy, really poor people strongly favor Democrats. No matter how rich, people who don’t go to church VERY strongly favor Democrats. Generally, the higher the income, the more church attendance matters to votes, which as Andrew points out suggests that people care more about “social issues” the richer they get. But the relevant “social issues” is very different for religious and non-religious people. But what’s going on toward the top of the income scale?

At all levels of church attendance, having more money increases the chances of a Republican vote until you hit a relatively high level of income — looks like something near the border of the upper-middle and lower-upper class — at which point additional income starts to make a Republican vote a bit less likely. This is true even for very frequent church attenders. Superrich very-frequent churchgoers are evidently pretty [darn] Republican, but less so than almost-rich very-frequent churchgoers, and that’s interesting.

See my other posts on the economics of religion.

(Ir)religion and Irrationality

David Friedman:

Religions serve at least two purposes, both important to humans. One is to help make sense of physical reality, explain (for instance) why living things appear to be brilliantly engineered creations. The other is to make sense of life, to answer questions about what we ought to be doing and why.

The development of science over the past few centuries provided a strong rival to religion for the first purpose, an explanation that not only covered the same territory but came with much stronger evidence for its truth. One might hear stories about occasional miracles at Lourdes or elsewhere, but one directly observed the miracles of science every time an electric light was turned on or an illness cured.

Science did not, however, provide an alternative for the second function. People responded, I think, in one of two ways. One was to retain a serious belief in the religion and reject those parts of modern science that they found inconsistent with it—in its more extreme form, the fundamentalist option. The other was to give up serious belief in the religion and adopt some substitute: Environmentalism, Liberal politics, Marxism (as in "liberation theology"), Objectivism, New Age superstitions.

Two recent events started me again thinking about this situation. One was a conversation with a college freshman very upset to discover that the church she was now attending blended environmentalism, which she does not believe in, with Christianity, which she does believe in. The other was a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal offering quite striking evidence, from polling data, that religious people are less superstitious, less given to a variety of what most of us would regard as irrational beliefs, than non-religious people.

The effect is not small.

Which gets us back to a recent blog post and associated discussion—on whether the fact that people were religious was a reason to expect them to behave in irrational ways, hence a reason not to want a religious person as President. Judging by at least the evidence in the article, it's the other way round. It is the non-religious President we should be worried about—because who knows what he believes instead.

How A Shortage of Men Affects Dating in College & Church

How a shortage of men leads to a hook-up culture in colleges. The quoted text is from this article by Richard Whitmire [Microsoft Word File]. Read his associated blog post here.

Last year, the writer Laura Sessions Stepp created a stir with her book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which described what the author says is lost as young men and women move away from traditional romantic relationships and toward fleeting sexual encounters. Not only are women gambling with their health, argues Stepp, but they are making decisions they will regret in future years. The hookup culture could leave them bereft of the skills to build real relationships later in life. Whether Stepp is "retro," as some of her critics charged, may be less important than the fact that the hookup culture shows no signs of reversal.

One key element to the pickup culture, however, remains unreported: American colleges are undergoing a striking gender shift. In 2015 the average college graduating class will be 60-percent female, according to the U.S. Education Department. Some colleges have already reached or passed that threshold, which allows anecdotal insights into how those imbalances affect the pickup culture. What can be seen so far is not encouraging: Stark gender imbalances appear to act as an accelerant on the hookup culture.

Biologists and social scientists can't be surprised by that observation. In the animal kingdom, it is well known that whichever sex is in short supply has the upper hand.

College campuses are not immune to such laws of nature, something I glimpsed while doing research into why boys are lagging in literacy skills and college attendance. In 2006 I visited James Madison University, a public university with 17,000 students. At the time, women made up 61 percent of the campus population.

As a result of the rising gender imbalances, the university has become "female centric." But while women may run the clubs, dominate in classes, and generally define the character of the university, the law of supply and demand rules the social scene. That's why the women are both competitive in seeking men and submissive in lowering their standards.

Men at the university don't dispute what the women say. "Since there's such an overwhelming number of girls, they have such competition between each other to get a guy," a male junior admitted. "The guys here aren't stupid. They're plenty aware of that and know that girls have to get into a fight over them, instead of what's normal with guys courting girls."

Does this mean that college campuses with a shortage of women will be more prone to have a traditional courting culture? Or are there spill-over effects from nearby colleges? (At male-heavy Virginia Tech, guys would simply go over to Radford to get a better ratio.)

Read the whole thing and be sure to check out the author's blog, WhyBoysFail.com.

What About Churches?

To a certain extent, you should also expect to see a similar effect in religious groups where women nearly always outnumber the men. Certainly a counter effect is in play where most large religious groups have more traditional sexual mores than the average of the population. On the other hand, this may explain why many singles groups I've seen at churches have so little relationship activity taking place. If there's an environment with 50 women and 25 guys, it's unlikely the guys will feel overly motivated to fight over the women with quite the vigor the women might prefer. However, for men devoted to their religion, they less likely to lower their sexual mores in the same way college students do.

Assuming levels of religious devotion are positively correlated with strict sexual mores, it seems like this would lead to several effects:

1) Men who have less devotion to their religion will find lower-cost substitutes and date outside the religion and/or less devoted women.

2) Men who have more devotion may pay the high price to date devoted women, but in lower quantities than either gender would prefer, leading to low rates of traditional courtship.

3) Women with less devotion may lower their standards and date men outside the religion and/or men with less devotion.

4) Women with higher levels of devotion will maintain their high price in a market with an oversupply of similarly high-priced competitors.

It seems like this scenario would cause less devoted people to leave the group in the long-run, with the religious sexual mores having a similar effect to a price-floor for highly devoted people. This would lead to an excess supply of highly-devoted women charging "high prices" in the dating market, leading to lower levels of courtship than would exist at the "optimum".

This describes what I have seen in many Christian groups. Could it be that the maintenance of high levels of sexual mores actually leads to an underprovision of dating? (Note: I'm not arguing for a change, just observing effects.) In the long-run, this may actually serve as an incentive for religiously devoted people to stay married once they get married and help partially explain why people with high levels of church attendance have lower rates of divorce. Paradoxically, what's bad for dating could actually be good for marriage. This phenomenon may also explain why many women at Christian colleges scramble to try to get their "Mrs. degree" before they graduate.

(HT Todd Zywicki)

Icelanders: The Happiest People On Earth?

Nearly all happiness research indicates that high levels of religiosity and having a strong marriage are two factors that lead to increased happiness. But then there's Iceland:

Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world.

Yes, but - what with the dark winters and the far from tropical summers - are Icelanders happy? Actually, in so far as one can reliably measure such things, they are. According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)

My thoughts: Iceland is a happy place despite its high divorce rates and low levels of religiosity. It is a very free country (#14 out of 157 according to the Index of Economic Freedom). As with other nations, rising GPD per capita and better economic opportunity for women makes divorce less costly and therefore more likely. While Iceland may indeed generally be a happy place, I'd expect Icelanders who have solid marriages and attend church regularly are even happier than your average Icelander.

While it is true that people in wealthier countries are happier than people in poorer countries, there is only weak correlation inside those countries between happiness and wealth. (In other words, if you live in a wealthy nation, earning a lot of income probably won't buy you a whole lot of happiness relative to a modest income.) My intuition says that a similar relationship may hold true for marriage and religiosity -- cross-country comparisons and intra-country comparisons may lead to two entirely different results. It is entirely conceivable that countries with higher divorce rates and lower levels of religiosity are "happier" than countries with lower divorce rates and higher levels of religiosity, while at the same time people in each country who have higher religiosity and lower divorce rates are happier than their fellow countrymen.

P.S. -- People generally are happier the freer they are. When freedom and wealth both increase, people have greater opportunity and ability to express true preferences about both religion and marriage. This could lead to less preference falsification within society -- potentially leading to higher divorce rates and lower rates of religious participation. (Timur Kuran has some excellent work on preference falsification called Private Truth, Public Lies.) I would expect societies with lower levels of preference falsification to have stronger correlations between happiness, marriage, and religiosity.

(HT Seth Roberts)

Why People Turn Away From Liberal Religions

A brief clip from ER that shows why liberal religions almost always decline. This video highlights some of the issues we've touched on in my economics of religion classes in a very poignant way:



Read my previous posts on this topic for more detailed explanations:

• Rewards, Rationality, and the Future of a Religion
  
• Sacrifice and Stigma
• Why They Left the Episcopal Church
• The Self-Defeat of 'Secular Christianity'?
• Liberal Christianity is Paying for its Sins?

(HT Joe Carter)

Communism vs. Religion

"Repressive states increase individual suffering and, in so doing, add even greater fuel to the religious impulse. In making faith more costly, the Soviets probably have made it both more necessary and valuable. Perhaps religion is never so potent as when it is an underground church, for then its compensators bear no taint of worldliness and are of maximum potency. Unless or until communism turns supernatural and becomes a religion, it always will be overmatched in long-term conflicts with real religions." -- The Future of Religion by Stark and Bainbridge, p. 527

Religious Women Less Likely To Get Abortions - Not For The Reason You Think

I first met Amy at a Social Change workshop at the University of Virginia a couple of years ago.  It's good to see her work getting some good attention:

A study in Social Science Quarterly says that religious women are less likely to have abortions than secular women - not because they're more pro-life, but because they're less likely to get pregnant before marriage.

“Religious influences on attitudes are much more powerful than religious influences on behavior,” the authors note. “While religion is the main reason for differences in abortion attitudes, religion is a relatively minor reason for differences in abortion behavior.”

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, researchers led by Amy Adamczyk, PhD, of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Jacob Felson of William Paterson University measured sexual behavior and out-of-wedlock pregnancy to religious and denominational affiliation. The study used multiple religion measures with longitudinal data to examine the influence of religion on abortion behavior.

Researchers found that religious women were less likely to obtain an abortion than secular women, in part because they are less likely to become pregnant before marriage. Among those who become pregnant before marriage, religious women are more likely than secular women to take the traditional religious path and marry the father of the child, rather than get an abortion.

Because religious women lead a sexually conservative lifestyle, they are less likely to find themselves pregnant and without a potential marriage partner, when abortion may be a particularly appealing option. Also, religious women are more likely to get married if they become pregnant.

In my limited understanding of Amy's work, religious women tend to be more pro-life than the general population leading to a decreased incentive to have an abortion, but they also feel more shame at having an out of wedlock pregnancy leading to an increased incentive to have an abortion.  These two factors essentially cancel each other out, leading to the appearance of little religious impact on abortion rates once a woman becomes pregnant.  The largest religious effect is in the pregnancy rates, rather than in likelihood of abortion.

The Irrational Atheist?

"If there were no God, there would be no Atheists." -- G. K. Chesterton

Dr. Helen:

I spent part of the day reading Vox Day's new book, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

The Irrational Atheist is described as follows (from the inside cover):

The Irrational Atheist is not a theological work nor is it a conventional religious defense of faith. It contains no arguments for the existence of God and the supernatural, nor is it concerned with evolution, creationism, the age of Earth, or intelligent design. This book contains no arguments from Scripture. In attacking the arguments, assertions, and conclusions of the New Atheists, Vox Day's only weapons are the secular tools of reason, logic and historically documented, independently verifiable fact. The Irrational Atheist is not a book about God, but about those who seek to replace Him....

Day takes on the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens and seeks to demonstrate that they and other "New Atheists" are no champions of reason. For example, Day discusses one argument made by Harris where Harris questions the correlation between Christian conservatism and social health:

If there was a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and social health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don't. Of the 25 cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in "blue" [Democrat] states and 38% are in "red" [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the US are in the pious state of Texas.

Interestingly, though, Day found that "red-state" crime is primarily committed by "blue counties" within those states and has a nice chart to show the stats on this. It seems that Harris was looking at states such as Texas that had more crime and called the states "red" but conveniently omitted the part where the counties where the crimes were committed tended to be "blue."

Other myth busters include the notion that religion causes the majority of war as some atheists profess, Day provides evidence to the contrary--he found that more than 93% of all the wars in human history had no relation to religion. In the twentieth century, in fact, he states that atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined.

The book is definitely thought provoking and worth a read if you are interested in the topic!

Sounds like a truly fascinating read and similar to what I've written about numerous times before:

See my previous posts:

• By the Numbers: America is Increasingly Anti-Scientific?
• Belief in Evolution = Scientific Literacy? Not So Fast...
• Why Is There A Market For Anti-Religious Books?
• Academics Against Evangelicals
• The New Atheists
• More on The Atheist Delusion
• More on Atheists in Academia
• The Atheist Delusion
• Evangelical Atheists
• Reasons for Optimism
• The Mischaracterization of American Evangelicals

Also listen to Professor Larry Iannaccone's podcast, The Myth of the Religious Right.

The Importance of the Ten Commandments

My classmate, David Youngberg, on the importance of the Ten Commandments:

Friday on Real Time, Bill Maher argued the Ten Commandments demonstrate the backwardness of religion and have little to do with our time. Most of them are stupid, referring to how great God is, and others are simply obsolete.

But those first five are really about [making] the second five legitimate. If this is the word of the only God (a word your parents are likely to share), and he's serious about being the only God. You better not pay attention to anyone who says some other deity wants to add, subtract or modify the laws. And they're good laws. I'm not a religious person, but it's easy to see the advantages in taking these things to heart.

The sentiment, the big picture, behind the second five are things all cultures can embrace:

• Don't murder.
• Don't commit adultery (or, generally, "keep your promises")
• Don't steal.
• Don't lie about your neighbor (or, generally, don't lie)
• Don't covet your neighbor's wife/house (or, don't desire stuff to the point that it hurts others)

...the essential elements of the sanctity of people, property, and promises are there. Religion isn't mindless and the people of the past weren't stupid. Just because it's about God doesn't make it worthless.

Well said, David!

By the Numbers: America is Increasingly Anti-Scientific?

Richard Florida wrote:

We talked at length about the growing culture divide affecting American science. This is not just a question of religion, many Americans are more than skeptical, they dislike, are fearful of and are angered by the institutions which develop science and help provide the broad eco-system of innovation. They view leading universities as places filled with "immigrants, liberals, weirdos, atheists" and so on, who's views are antithetical to "family values." Universities add fuel to this fire by remaining walled off from their communities and in many cases disdainful of them.

The anti-science, anti-university drum-beat in American life has thus far remained somewhat muted. Just wait a few years: if something isn't done - and as bad as things are now, I'm not at all sure what that might be - this is a powder-keg waiting to blow.

I just left the following comment on his blog:

I think there is a far larger problem of anti-religious bias, particularly among academics, than there is an anti-science or anti-university bias among the rest of the population. The view that academia is filled with liberals and atheists, while not true in an absolute sense, certainly is from a relative one compared to the rest of the US. (In several academic disciplines, it is close to being true in an absolute sense as well.)

I am currently working on my PhD in economics at George Mason University, with a concentration in the "economics of religion". (Similar to the sociology of religion, except using economic analysis to understand religious behavior.) I think there is a far larger problem with academics mis-perceiving religious people than there is vice-versa. GMU Professor Larry Iannaccone has done some excellent research in this area.

I have over 40 posts on the economics of religion on my blog.

Here one of my recent posts, commenting on how disbelief in evolution does not equal scientific illiteracy.

It’s important for academics to extend the scientific method of inquiry to investigating societal and economic claims about religious people, rather than assuming the preconceptions of others to be true. We just might be surprised by what we discover that we never knew before and how many of our stereotypes of others are unfounded.

Here are many of Professor Iannaccone's papers on the economics of religion. Highly recommended!

It will be interesting to see if and how he responds.

Update: A great response from Richard Florida:

Brian - Thanks for the comments. Yes, indeed: Many academics are areligious and quite a few are atheists. Me personally, I agnostic when it comes to religion. Individuals should be free to believe or not believe as they like. The problem is academia gives off the sense that its views are somehow better than those of the rest of the population. Even if individual academics don't do this personally, that is the perception out there in the community. You've said it much more clearly than me, but that is more or less what I said to the National Science Board (sorry if I garbled it in the post).

There is a huge cultural and class divide between academia and the larger community, and a large part of it comes through the lens of religious values. Academics and universities may choose to ignore it, poo-poo it of look down on it, but it is not going away. Regardless, my advice was academics and universities need to understand and acknowledge this gap, and begin to figure out new ways to better connect with their communities if they want continued public (and financial) support.

Game Theory, Culture, and Religion

Teppo Felin:

I recently ran into some interesting inter-disciplinary research by Michael McBride (UC Irvine); research at the nexus of game theory, culture and religion. Some examples:

• A piece on the relationship between wealth and religiosity: “Religious Market Competition in a Richer World.”

• An article on ”Religious Pluralism and Religious Participation: A Game-Theoretic Approach.”

• And, a recent article from Rationality & Society on norms, structure, and participation in the LDS Church.

I only briefly read/skimmed the above pieces for their central thesis and approach; all of them quite nicely straddle economics and sociology. Here’s McBride’s website with additional papers on networks, culture, public goods etc.

I've met Michael McBride at a number of conferences and he is engaging in some great economics of religion work. Highly recommended!

Belief in Evolution = Scientific Literacy? Not So Fast...

"I can perfectly understand the precepts of Communism without believing them. Does that make me by definition illiterate about Communism?"

I just came across this post on the normally excellent Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog (emphasis mine):

I recently wrote about evolution and scientific literacy. The graph on the [right] shows the percentage of the population that understands evolution is a core scientific principle. The graph based on data from 2005 for 34 countries.

• Blue indicates those that know that “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”
• Yellow are those that are unsure
• Red are those that don’t know that it is true

The United States is is second to last place in this questions of scientific literacy with only 40% of the population knowing the truth. The USA was between Cyprus and Turkey in this measure of understanding of scientific knowledge. The most knowledgeable countries have about twice the rate of knowledgeable respondents (with nearly 80% knowing).

I couldn't help responding in length to what I see as a seriously flawed conclusion. Below is the response I left in his comments section:

I'm a former engineer turned economist who is now studying religious groups from an economic perspective (basically the topic of the sociology of religion, but using the tools of economic analysis). It seems that using "belief in evolution" as the proxy for scientific literacy is an extremely unscientific and biased measure. It skews the data horribly by measuring something that is controversial in many circles and purporting that those who disagree are educationally lacking.

For example, I know many engineers who know far more about applied mathematics and science than 99% of the American (and world) population. Some of these same people are less than convinced about some of the claims of evolution. On the other hand, I also have many friends who struggle with algebra and know next to nothing about chemistry or physics (far less than the engineers), but who are absolutely convinced that evolution is a fact. According to this metric, they would appear more scientifically literate than the engineers.

Incidentally, the rates of belief in evolution in the Western countries shown on this graph loosely correlate with national levels of church attendance (high rates of belief in evolution = low church attendance). However, sociological research shows no particular level of scientific illiteracy amongst church-goers beyond this one issue of evolution. America is far more religious than any other Western country or Japan and therefore shows up as having lower rates of belief in evolution. That does not imply low rates of scientific knowledge in any other area.

The survey question used seems to have some serious problems with it. Many serious thinking people may answer this question about as "Not Sure". The question also doesn't ask if people understand the concept of evolution, but rather if they agree with its implications. Those are two different things. (For example, I can perfectly understand the precepts of Communism without believing them. Does that make me by definition illiterate about Communism?)

To draw a quote your own post about what Dr. Simon Best said everyone should learn: “I should teach the world the basics of the scientific method per se, and the basic statistical tools that support it. I feel passionately that these are core tools of citizenship, that - once grasped - allow anyone to ask the right questions of scientists and their respective advocates and opponents, whether in the private or the public sector.”

It’s important to extend the scientific method of inquiry to investigating societal and economic claims, rather than assuming our preconceptions of others to be true. We just might be surprised by what we discover that we never knew before and how many of our stereotypes of others are unfounded.

The economics of religion is a burgeoning field. I am currently working on my PhD in Economics and this is one of my sub-disciplines. I have about 40 blog posts on this topic so far.

I'd also highly recommend reading some of Professor Larry Iannaccone's excellent work on the for more on this.

The Law May Be With Episcopalian Breakaways

This could be one more nail in the Episcopal Church's coffin:

Virginia's attorney general is defending the right of 11 conservative Anglican parishes to use the state's Civil War-era "division statute" to leave the Episcopal Church while retaining millions of dollars in assets and property.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell's motion to intervene is a significant setback to the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia, which have said secular courts have no place in resolving the property dispute — the largest in the church's history.

Mr. McDonnell, a Roman Catholic who is planning a run for governor in 2009, said state law is on the side of the 11 churches, now with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA).

CANA's case relies heavily on the state's division statute, known as "57-9" because of the section of the state code in which it falls. The statute says that if the majority of a congregation's members decide to leave the parent denomination, that congregation can retain the church's property. In December 2006 and January 2007, the majority of members in all 11 congregations scattered across several counties voted to leave.

I wrote a paper on the decline of the Episcopal Church last year for my law and economics class last year, emphasizing that denominationally owned property kept congregations from leaving the denomination. (Essentially holding them "hostage" thorugh their property.) If the courts rule on the side of the breakaway churches, my prediction is that many more Episcopalian congregations will soon follow suit.

The case is expected to be appealed no matter how it turns out and will likely be heard by the Virginia Supreme Court.

See my related posts:

• What's Wrong With the Episcopals
• Why They Left the Episcopal Church
• Episcopal Church Appoints First Openly-Muslim Bishop?
• The Self-Defeat of 'Secular Christianity'?
• Liberal Christianity is Paying for its Sins?

Where the Megachurches Are

The New York Times:

There are just over 1,300 megachurches in the United States, according to the most recent survey by Prof. Scott Thumma at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. These are churches that average at least 2,000 in weekly attendance. The shaded areas reflect the density of megachurches in counties across the United States, based on the most recent census figures.

Here is more on America's largest and fastest growing churches.

A Goldmine of Religious Data

The Association of Religious Data Archives (ARDA) is a collection of comprehensive statistics on religion (both domestic and international) and is designed to be an easy to use online research tool for people working on scholarship about religion.

ARDA recently added an international section with country profiles containing various measurements of religious freedom and persecution levels.  Each country also has varying levels of surveys on societal attitudes towards nontraditional religions and conversions to other religions.  As an example, here’s the profile on Burma.  (Note the tabs for the Adherents, Religious Freedom, Socio-economic, and Public Opinion sections – lots of good stuff to explore.)  ARDA also lets you compare two countries against each other, contrasting religious freedom and other issues between countries.  Here are a few examples:

• Burma vs. Pakistan
• Egypt vs. Indonesia
• China vs. India

ARDA also has a section on International Religious Freedom Data, containing a data set they’ve coded from the 2005 U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Reports.  (They also have data from previous years.)  I’m still trying to figure out how to best access this information.  They’ve also got a useful list of links to other related sites.

The domestic data has been very useful for my economics of religion research and I am excited by the recent addition of the international data.  There’s a veritable goldmine of data on religion here.