This is a pretty interesting study. It plots those who are religious with those who are wealthy. There is a very strong tendency for wealthy people to be less religious. And for less wealthy people to be more religious.
Why is that?

Also, notice how much of an outlier the U.S. is.


the full report

Ye can not worship God and Mammon. The love of money is the root of all evil. The religious right notwithstanding, the Gospels lean to the left on economic matters.

Europeans and Americans dispute some values and share others.  But one can do better than that.  Consider the third recent report, the world values survey run by the University of Michigan.

This survey goes back a long way.  The university has been sending out hundreds of questions for the past 25 years (it now covers 78 countries with 85% of the world's population).  Its distinctive feature is the way it organises the replies.  It arranges them in two broad categories.  The first it calls traditional values; the second, values of self-expression.

The survey defines “traditional values” as those of religion, family and country.  Traditionalists say religion is important in their lives.  They have a strong sense of national pride, think children should be taught to obey and that the first duty of a child is to make his or her parents proud.  They say abortion, euthanasia, divorce and suicide are never justifiable.  At the other end of this spectrum are "secular-rational" values: they emphasise the opposite qualities.

The other category looks at “quality of life” attributes.  At one end of this spectrum are the values people hold when the struggle for survival is uppermost: they say that economic and physical security are more important than self-expression.  People who cannot take food or safety for granted tend to dislike foreigners, homosexuals and people with AIDS.  They are wary of any form of political activity, even signing a petition.  And they think men make better political leaders than women.  "Self-expression" values are the opposite.

Obviously, these ideas overlap.  The difference between the two is actually rooted in an academic theory of development (not that it matters).  The notion is that industrialisation turns traditional societies into secular-rational ones, while post-industrial development brings about a shift towards values of self-expression.

The usefulness of dividing the broad subject of “values” in this way can be seen by plotting countries on a chart whose axes are the two spectrums.  The chart alongside (click to enlarge it) shows how the countries group: as you would expect, poor countries, with low self-expression and high levels of traditionalism, are at the bottom left, richer Europeans to the top right.

But America's position is odd.  On the quality-of-life axis, it is like Europe: a little more "self-expressive" than Catholic countries, such as France and Italy, a little less so than Protestant ones such as Holland or Sweden.  This is more than a matter of individual preference.  The "quality of life" axis is the one most closely associated with political and economic freedoms.  So Mr Bush is right when he claims that Americans and European share common values of democracy and freedom and that these have broad implications because, at root, alliances are built on such common interests.

But now look at America's position on the traditional-secular axis.  It is far more traditional than any west European country except Ireland.  It is more traditional than any place at all in central or Eastern Europe.  America is near the bottom-right corner of the chart, a strange mix of tradition and self-expression.

Americans are the most patriotic people in the survey: 72% say they are very proud of their country (and this bit of the poll was taken before September 2001).  That puts America in the same category as India and Turkey.  The survey reckons religious attitudes are the single most important component of traditionalism.  On that score, Americans are closer to Nigerians and Turks than Germans or Swedes.

Of course, America is hardly monolithic.  It is strikingly traditional on average.  But, to generalise wildly, that average is made up of two Americas: one that is almost as secular as Europe (and tends to vote Democratic), and one that is more traditionalist than the average (and tends to vote Republican).

But even this makes America more distinctive.  Partly because America is divided in this way, its domestic political debate revolves around values to a much greater extent than in Europe.  Political affiliation there is based less on income than on church-going, attitudes to abortion and attitudes to race.  In America, even technical matters become moral questions.  It is almost impossible to have a debate about gun registration without it becoming an argument about the right to self-defence.  In Europe, even moral questions are sometimes treated as technical ones, as happened with stem-cell research.

The difference between the two appears to be widening.  Since the first world values survey in 1981, every western country has shifted markedly along the spectrum towards greater self-expression.  America is no exception.  But on the other spectrum America seems to have become more traditional, rather than less.  The change is only a half-step.  And Italy, Spain and France have taken the same half-step.  But if you look at Europe as a whole, the small movement back towards old-fashioned virtues in big Catholic countries is far outweighed by the stride the other way in post-Protestant countries such as Germany and Sweden.  On average, then, the values gap between America and European countries seems to be widening.

Anyone notice that the Middle East isn't on that graph? Except Kuwait, and it too stands far away from the pack much like the US.

I'm sure Saudi Arabia, a very religous and wealthy country as well, wouldn't be near the trendline either.

Religion comforts people for the lack of wellbeing, and thus poorer people as a whole are more religious than wealthier people. That's Sociology 101.

I wonder if he said that before or after he knocked up his proletarian maid and then fired when she came up preggars?

so you have established that one study which contains maybe 25 countries (then calling it a world average) has some type of relationship b/t wealth and religion.

It just shows a relation...it doesn't show causality

Neo, it's not this study, rather it's the gazillion of previous studies that consitently show how poverty causes religiousness. In times of distress, people attends more to the church, to say so.