The tie between religion and economic prosperity is not a new discovery. But whether changes in religious belief precede economic growth, or economic growth foreshadows a more secular society is, however, up for debate.
German sociologist and economist Max Weber argued that the introduction of Protestantism and Calvinism gave rise to the capitalist spirit in his 1905 book, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” French sociologist Emile Durkheim however, argued that economic growth leads to a decline in religion.
A new study found the opposite: secularization precedes economic development. However, only when it is accompanied by acceptance and tolerance for individual rights.
“Very often secularization is indeed accompanied by a greater tolerance of homosexuality, abortion, divorce,” said Damian Ruck, the study’s lead researcher from the University of Bristol Medical School, “but that isn’t to say that religious countries can’t become prosperous.”
But not all secular countries appeared to be relatively rich. “Various countries in Eastern Europe were a lot poorer than you’d expect despite being secular,” said Ruck. The polar opposite is true for the United States. “The U.S. it is one of the richest countries, but is very religious for an economically developed country,” he said.
The study, by researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and the University of Tennessee, was published Wednesday in the Journal of Science Advances.
The authors of the study looked at two decades of data from the European Values Survey (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS), which assess the importance of religion amongst other cultural values, and compared it to GDP over the entire 20th century. Given that religious philosophy is typically formed in the first decades of a person’s life, according to the study, the authors were able to use the 20 years of data on religious beliefs to predict relative lifetime values beliefs, which they compared to 100 years worth of GDP data for each country.
Of the 64 questions on core cultural values that were asked of 329,723 participants across 109 total countries surveyed in the WSW and ESV, the authors focused on questions like, “How much confidence do you have in the Church?,” and, “Is religious faith an important quality to instill in a child?”
The study ultimately found that “changes in the importance of religious practices appear to have predicted changes in GDP across the world,” said Alex Bentley, an author of the study from the University of Tennessee. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that secularization caused economic development, since both changes could have been caused by some third factor with different time lags, but at least we can rule out economic growth as the cause of secularization in the past,” he said.
