Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8kt4b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-26T10:43:41.779Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Secularization Theory and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2020

Kostanca Dhima  and
Matt Golder
Kostanca Dhima*
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
Matt Golder
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Kostanca Dhima, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, 2010 Allen Building, College Station, TX77843. E-mail: dhima1@tamu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What is the relationship between religion and human development? Using data from the pooled 1981–2014 World and European Values Surveys, we examine the effect of human development on a country's level of religious attendance and belief. Consistent with the idea that the primary causal mechanism underlying secularization theory has to do with the substitutability of secular and religious goods, we find that human development has a negative effect on religious attendance but no effect on religious belief. Our results indicate that as societies develop, we should not be surprised if religious belief remains high even as religious attendance declines. The negative effect of human development on religious attendance is driven primarily by a country's level of education and health. Our analysis suggests that it is important to think carefully about what one's theoretical model of the secularization process implies for different aspects of religion.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 37 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Sona Golder and audience members at the 2016 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association for their helpful comments. The data and all computer code necessary to replicate the results in this analysis will be made available on our websites at http://mattgolder.com/ and https://kdhima.com/ on publication. Stata 13 was the statistical package used in this study.

References

REFERENCES

Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Chaves, Mark. 2011. American Religion: Contemporary Trends. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chaves, Mark, and Cann, David E.. 1992. “Regulation, Pluralism, and Religious Market Structure.” Rationality and Society 4: 272–290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Philippa, and Wheaton, Blair. 2007. “Addressing Data Sparseness in Contextual Population Research Using Cluster Analysis to Create Synthetic Neighborhoods.” Sociological Methods & Research 35(3): 311–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Driskell, Robyn, Embry, Elizabeth, and Lyon, Larry. 2008. “Faith and Politics: The Influence of Religious Beliefs on Political Participation.” Social Science Quarterly 89(2): 294–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esmer, Yilmaz, and Pettersson, Thorleif. 2007. “The Effects of Religion and Religiosity on Voting Behavior.” In Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, eds. Dalton, Russell J. and Klingemann, Hans-Dieter. New York: Oxford University Press, 481–503.Google Scholar
EVS. 2015. “European Values Survey Longitudinal Data File 1981–2018 (EVS 1981–2008).” GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA4804 Data File Version 3.0.0.Google Scholar
Feenstra, Robert C., Inklaar, Robert, and Timmer, Marcel P.. 2015. “The Next Generation of the Penn World Table.” American Economic Review 105(10): 3150–3182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finke, Roger. 1990. “Religious Deregulation: Origins and Consequences.” Journal of Church and State 32: 609–626.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finke, Roger, and Iannaccone, Laurence R.. 1993. “Supply-side Explanations for Religious Change.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527: 27–39.Google Scholar
Finke, Roger, and Stark, Rodney. 1992. The Churching of America, 1776–1990. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Finke, Roger, and Stark, Rodney. 1998. “Religious Choice and Competition.” American Sociological Review 63: 761–766.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Froese, Paul. 2004. “After Atheism: An Analysis of Religious Monopolies in the Post-Communist World.” Sociology of Religion 65(1): 57–75.Google Scholar
Gaskins, Ben, Golder, Matt, and Siegel, David A.. 2013a. “Religious Participation and Economic Conservatism.” American Journal of Political Science 57: 823–840.Google Scholar
Gaskins, Ben, Golder, Matt, and Siegel, David A.. 2013b. “Religious Participation, Social Conservatism, and Human Development.” Journal of Politics 75: 1125–1141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gill, Anthony. 2001. “Religion and Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 4: 117–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gill, Anthony, and Lundsgaarde, Eric. 2004. “State Welfare Spending and Religiosity.” Rationality and Society 16: 399–436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greeley, Andrew M. 1989. Religious Change in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Green, John Clifford. 2007. The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections. Westport: Praeger.Google Scholar
Grim, Brian J., and Finke, Roger. 2006. “International Religion Indexes: Government Regulation, Government Favoritism, and Social Regulation of Religion.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 2: 1–40.Google Scholar
Hadden, Jeffrey K. 1987. “Toward Desacralizing Secularization Theory.” Social Forces 65: 587–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iannaccone, Laurence R. 1991. “The Consequences of Religious Market Structure: Adam Smith and the Economics of Religion.” Rationality and Society 3: 156–177.Google Scholar
Inglehart, Ronald, and Baker, Wayne E.. 2000. “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values.” American Sociological Review 65(1): 19–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, Jason. 2014. “Religious Belief, Religious Denomination, and Preferences for Redistribution: A Comparison Across 13 Countries.” West European Politics 37: 19–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karakoç, Ekrem, and Baskan, Birol. 2012. “Religion in Politics: How Does Inequality Affect Public Secularization?” Comparative Political Studies 45(12): 1510–1541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Layman, Geoffrey. 2001. The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Martin, David. 1978. A General Theory of Secularization. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Norris, Pippa, and Inglehart, Ronald. 2004. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omelicheva, Mariya Y. 2018. “Religion and Politics: Examining the Impact of Faith on Political Participation.” Religion, State, and Society 46: 4–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, Robert D., and Campbell, David E.. 2010. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Ramet, Sabrina P. 1998. Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Solt, Frederick. 2016. “The Standardized World Income Inequality Database.” Social Science Quarterly 97(5): 1267–1281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solt, Frederick, Habel, Philip, and Grant, J. Tobin. 2011. “Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity.” Social Science Quarterly 92(2): 447–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, Rodney, and Finke, Roger. 2000. Acts of Faith: Exploring the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, Rodney, and Iannaccone, L.. 1994. “A Supply-side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe.” Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion 33: 230–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stegmueller, Daniel. 2013. “Religion and Redistributive Voting in Western Europe.” Journal of Politics 75(4): 1064–1076.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
UNDP. 2016. “Human Development Index and its Component Indices, 1980–2015.” Calculated by the Human Development Report Office. November 2016.Google Scholar
Van den Bercken, William. 1985. “Ideology and Atheism in the Soviet Union.” Religion, State, and Society 13(3): 269–281.Google Scholar
WVS. 2015. “World Values Survey 1981–2015 Official Aggregate v.20150418.” World Values Survey Association (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org). Aggregate File Producer: JDSystems, Madrid.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Dhima and Golder supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Dhima and Golder supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 203.3 KB