2012
DOI: 10.1177/1069397112463328
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Country Religiosity Declines as Material Security Increases

Abstract: According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion declines as the quality of life improves. Replicating an earlier study with religious disbelief as the DV, it was predicted that religiosity would decline in developed countries due to greater existential security, including income security (income equality and redistribution via welfare states) and improved health. This study used a uniform data source, improving on the heterogeneous surveys tapped in the earlier work. Predictions were tested by correlation an… Show more

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Cited by 42 publications
(28 citation statements)
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“…It is initially puzzling that existential security proved impotent in our analyses, as it appears to be an important factor in explaining cross-cultural differences in religiosity (Barber, 2013;Inglehart & Norris, 2004;Solt et al, 2011). It is possible that our analyses were at the wrong level of analysis to capture the influence of existential security, which may act as a precursor to other cultural forces.…”
Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning
confidence: 93%
“…It is initially puzzling that existential security proved impotent in our analyses, as it appears to be an important factor in explaining cross-cultural differences in religiosity (Barber, 2013;Inglehart & Norris, 2004;Solt et al, 2011). It is possible that our analyses were at the wrong level of analysis to capture the influence of existential security, which may act as a precursor to other cultural forces.…”
Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning
confidence: 93%
“…The moralization of religiosity has the potential to answer other open questions about secularization and deconversion. For example, sociologists emphasize that broad sociocultural factors like wealth and inequality predict secularization [15][16], yet these models do not explain why nations such as the United States-which strongly moralizes religion-are more religious than similarly wealthy countries [9]. On the other hand, psychologists study individual motivations for religious belief such as death anxiety [17], loneliness [18], and lack of control [19], yet these individual-level factors do not always correlate with religious belief [20][21] and are less suited to explaining cross-cultural variation in secularization since they focus on human universals.…”
Section: Moralization Of Religiosity Explains Worldwide Trends In Relmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…However, at the societal level, countries that are the least theistic often fair better than countries with high numbers of religious individuals. For example, they have higher overall socioeconomic development, 60 report higher levels of happiness, 61 lower rates of homicide and sexual transmitted diseases, 62 and better quality of life and better governmental services. 63 Moreover, across 33 countries, participation in a non-religious organization correlated with equal or higher levels of self-rated health than participation in a religious organization.…”
Section: Nonreligion and General Wellbeingmentioning
confidence: 99%