Does insecurity promote faith?

[Ken Morgan]

Most wealthy countries in the world, including Japan and much of Western Europe, are not particularly religious, with fewer than 25% of their citizens professing belief in God. The United States is a notable exception. Although it has high per capita income, it also has high religiosity — around 60% of us believe in God. Sociologists have produced a lot of theories about why America is an outlier in this respect, but several recent studies are converging on an answer: insecurity.

I found the latest of these, by medical writer Tomas Rees (author of the blog Epiphenom), described the latest New Humanist. Unfortunately, Rees’s article is not one of the pieces posted online, but you can find his original article, published in The Journal of Religion and Society, here (click on the lick at the upper right of the page). Rees also has a blog post on the topic here.

What Rees did, to make a long story short, was to calculate (using the Gini statistic) the degree of income inequality among citizens in each of 67 countries and then correlate that with his index of religiosity, which Rees took as the frequency of daily prayer not involving prayers uttered in church.


http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/does-insecurity-promote-faith/

 

[Bill Mattocks]

It's interesting, and there may be something to it, but I think it leaves out a lot of important variables. Or, if they are in there, they're not accounted for in the results presented. Our uncommon national heritage may play a large role in things, amongst other things. Long answer short: I dunno. Interesting, but ultimately unenlightening.

 

[Jenny_in_Chico]

And let us never, ever forget that correlation is not equal to causation.

 

[Blade96]

I think there's a lot of truth to it, because a lot of people seem to have 'found god' when they get troubles in their life. One of those was my very religious uncle who was drinking and stuff and then turned to religion.

 

[MA-Caver]

And there are those who have grown up with religion in their lives and maintained it throughout. Some become disillusioned after a while but some of those return to their (respective) churches and keep up.
Income hasn't got anything to do with it IMO. I've known very poor people who have a love and faith in their God and I've known the very rich to have the same, most I've known are somewhere in the middle of the two to some degree or another. So how much money you make doesn't have anything with the amount of faith you have.
That the U.S. is high on the percentage of those who have religion shouldn't be surprising. Considering our origins and the origins of those who came here over the last two and half centuries... plus the high profile that many religions have here... why would this particular statistic be surprising or of note?

 

[Sukerkin]

I meant to post something on this myself a few months ago when I heard some discourse about it on BBC Radio 4.

An interesting correlation indeed. It's well worth investigating the original research if you have the time (I doubt, sadly, you will be able to listen to the documentaries I heard on the subject, so that easier path of 'on-tap' professional interpretation will be unavailable ).

 

[Omar B]

I do think there's some insecurity there, after all, there's this pressing need to convert others which I see as just wanting people to agree with you. But I'm over simplifying a really huge issue. Fact is, it's usually insecure people who try to convince you for hours as to their point of view, while truth is self evident I believe and would be seen by those who wish it.

 

[teekin]

I seldom think Truth is self evident. I think Truth with a capital "T" lays hidden on the edge of shadow and like wisdom is a quest not for the faint of heart. Truth is brutal, has no mercy, is ugly, it often hurts like hell and sucks to no end. But it's the only thing that can make you free. If you think truth is easy you haven't lived very long or hard. or I may be full of Poo and just cranky.
lori

 

[seasoned]

Rich people tend to be more self absorbed. Faith does take the edge off a bit. I read somewhere about a camel, the eye of a needle, rich people, and heaven. Of course that thinking is mostly for kids, right? "does wealth promote insecurity".

 

[Carol]

Interesting choice of words.

He's using the phrase "insecurity" which is commonly used as a phrase denoting a negative personality trait.

However, the examples that he sited in the article may or may not have to with personal insecurity and more to do with instability in one's surroundings.

I'm also curious at the choice of metric "frequency of prayer". Wouldn't that unfairly weight the scale towards Muslims and other groups that believe in praying multiple times a day?

Another thing curious is that both graphs seem to intentionally not display all of the countries used. One only labels some of the countries, the other only uses a single letter of the country, and the letter used is not always intuitive.

The last paragraph didn't sit well with me.

Nevertheless, Rees and Paul may be onto something. And if they’re right, even in part, then we atheists have a bigger task than simply trying to dispel the influence of religion on people. For to do that, we may have to work for better and more just societies. But isn’t that, in the end, a nobler goal?

Ehh...its all because I ate the Flying Spaghetti Monster for lunch, isn't it? :lol:

Personally, I don't appreciate being proselytized by an atheist any more than I appreciate it by Evangelical. If a person treats me with respect and is overall a person of reasonable character, then it doesn't matter to me what their spiritual path is. If they choose to share it with me, all the better, because I find that sort of stuff to be interesting. But to demand that I think exactly the way I do is a whole 'nother thing. I don't think any body of philosophy, secular or sacred, truly benefits from coercion...although that doesn't stop some from trying.

 

[Ramirez]

I have never heard of the Gini statistic, but the data looks like it would fit to a linear regression model....I am assuming that is what the straight line is...in which case variance and standard deviation looks like it would be very large.

 

[Jenny_in_Chico]

I have never heard of the Gini statistic, but the data looks like it would fit to a linear regression model....I am assuming that is what the straight line is...in which case variance and standard deviation looks like it would be very large.

Explaining the R squared of 0.42.

 

[Carol]

I passed a church on my way home from work which made me think of an alternate explanation.

The other countries mentioned in the study (Japan, most of western Europe) are all very old nations with culture that goes back for centuries...culture that is much deeper than the U.S., which is not even 250 years old.

We are a nation of immigrants, and because of that dynamic, I think churches played a role in shaping our culture in ways that Japan and Western Europe haven't experienced.

In older days, churches were often the center of a community. In addition to offering worship services, they were places where the citizenry would gather. In the case of people emigrating from a non-English speaking country, the churches sometimes served as a de facto community center for people of similar culture/language. Even today, the churches in my city that may have once celebrated mass in Italian or Polish now celebrate mass in Spanish and Vietnamese. We even have one church that still offers services in French...which is a nod to the French-Canadians that have emigrated from Quebec since the mid-1800s.

The churches played a role in immigration to the U.S. as well, many German immigrants, including my great-grandfather, came to the US after the civil war, when someone in his family's church began advertising farmland for sale in North Carolina. So many German Lutherans responded to the ads that the area became known as "Germantown".

Our current immigrants are, more often than not, from areas where actively practicing a faith is commonplace (CALA, Phippines, India, Canada) with some exceptions (China, Korea).

 

[blindsage]

I have read theory in the past (can't recall the source right now), from an economist I believe, that relates the level of 'religiosity' to whether or not there is a state religion. The difference between Western Europe/Japan and the U.S. is that there is state religion in the former and none in the latter. He (the author) theorized that not having state religion creates a form of competition between denominations and ends up leading to a higher degree of 'religiosity' (I swear there was more complexity in the argument, sources, data, etc.). So, less 'religiosity' in countries with state religion, and more in countries without. FWIW.