Why are richer countries less religious?

It’s generally taken as a given that as society’s reach higher levels of industrial and economic development, they become less religious. Recent trends in Europe and the United States certainly seem to bear this out.

But is it a change in the way people think or in the way they behave? That’s the topic of a recent paper by University of Innsbruck sociologist Jochen Hirschle. He notes that The argument goes back to the early days of sociology when Max Weber suggested that the rise of capitalism is accompanied by the victory of rational thinking over mysticism, while Emile Durkheim viewed religion as more of a social function, with the market coming to replace the social role of religion.

Hirschle looked at church attendance rates and survey data on personal religious beliefs in 13 European countries between 1970 and 2009. (The last time a wrote about a paper that compared countries based on values survey data it touched off a bit of an internet shitstorm, so feel free to take this all with however many grains of salt you feel appropriate.) When he compared these to GDP, he found the following:

In comparison to attendance rates, which were, in general, negatively correlated with eco-nomic growth, the relationship between GDP and religious beliefs is more complex. While in some countries, religious values weakened as GDP increased (especially in France, Luxemburg,and Britain), the association with economic development is, in general, much more restrained. In6 of 13 countries (Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands), the change inreligious beliefs is only minimally associated with economic growth. In Italy, Denmark, and theNetherlands, the trend line for belief even increased slightly in the last few decades. In Spain, in contrast, self-definition as a religious person has clearly declined since the mid-1990s.

In other words, people don’t necessarily get less religious as their countries become richer, but they do spend a lot less time in church. Since the study involves only European, predominantly Christian countries that were already at relatively high levels of development in the 1970s, it’s probably not a good idea to make any overly sweeping conclusions, but it’s nonetheless interesting to consider that it’s the church, not God, who has an image problem in Europe.