New York Times columnist Charles Blow included this chart in his latest op-ed. Countries further to the right are wealthier than those to the left, while countries higher up are more religious than those further down. In general the trend is that wealthier nations are less religious than poorer nations. A decent curve could be extrapolated except for the wealthiest nation included, the United States, which persists in its abnormal religiosity among developed nations.
Thanks for the chart, Paul. It’s fascinating. I think it’s important to bring in as much empirical, even quantitative, evidence as possible in studying religion. This is a good way to evaluate the claim that American is exceptional, religiously speaking.
There are a few other observations that might be made from the chart. One is that people in Islamic countries tend to think religion is far more important than people in Christian countries. This holds true even for Saudi Arabia, a comparatively wealthy country (though I doubt that income is distributed equitably in Saudi Arabia.) I wonder if the Islamic outliers like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan might have been influenced more by the Soviet Union than other Islamic countries. Vietnam and Russia, for example, are comparatively poor but comparatively irreligious.
Second, where’s China? Maybe I’m just missing it, but I can’t find it on the chart. (Perhaps the pollsters weren’t able to ask that question in China?) China, and India, and for that matter, the United States, raise the question of how you interpret the data when a country is clearly religiously divided. Do, say, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims have different levels of religious commitment? Different levels of income?
I wonder if the best way to think about this data is not in terms of regression lines, but of modes. By that I mean that it seems to be more helpful to think of the data not in terms of a function (i.e., religiosity as function of per capita income, or vice versa) but in terms of modal “clumps” (i.e., nations with this GDP per capita tend to clump around this level of religiosity, while others clump here, etc.) I don’t have the statistical vocabulary to express the difference. But I’m sure that just as there are mathematical tests to see how well a regression line fits the data, that there must be tests to see how well modes fit the data. Either way, the United States will end up being an outlier.
Another flaw is inherent in the question asked, “Is religion important in your daily life?” If China had been included then you probably would have had a low positive response. But that would be a deceptive result. Party loyalty and nationalism in China are essentially religious sentiments that would not be measured by the question so posed.
PoliticalMathBlog had a write-up on this earlier this week. It has some interesting observations. http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?p=605
Excellent analysis! Thanks for that, Jared. I had completely forgotten about Taiwan and Singapore.
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