How religiosity is transmitted to new generations and what inequality has to do with it

Many things that we deeply care about are related to the topic of religion: gender norms, sexual morals, work ethics but also altruism, charity and community. It is therefore an important question to ask how religiosity will develop in the future. Contrary to what you might expect, religion continues to play an important role in countries all over the world, as the figure shows.

In the picture you see a snapshot of religiosity around the world, based on Gallup World Poll data from 2008. Respondents were asked to indiciate whether religion was “an important part of their daily life”. Each dark grey dot represents a country in which at least 50% agreed with this statement. The light grey dots are countries in which less than 50% agreed. As becomes immediately clear, the majority of the 128 countries plotted can be described as religious. The minority of secular societies is concentrated in the lower right corner. These are, by and large, European countries. They have in common that they have high levels of Human Development (x-axis), moderate or low levels of inequality (y-axis) and low fertility rates (size of dots). But how exactly do societies secularize? The answer is: through cohort replacement. Countries tend to grow less religious when older generations are replaced by younger, less religious generations. Yet this depends on the context in which people are socialized. Some contexts make the transmission of religious beliefs easier, some more difficult.

Countries tend to grow less religious when older generations are replaced by younger, less religious generations.

In a recent article we examined which societal context makes a transmission of religious beliefs more likely. The idea is that people are not only socialized by their parents, but that the larger society has a socializing effect as well. Parents raising their kids in a strongly religious society will have it easier to transmit their beliefs to the children. The pool of potential friends, colleagues and marriage partners that are themselves religious is much higher in such societies. However parents raising their children in less religious societies will find this more difficult. If they want to make sure that their children acquire religious beliefs they will have to choose the right friends and find religious schools and clubs. This means that the effect of parents’ religiosity on their own children’s religiosity is higher if the context is less favourable of religion. In the first case we will observe that younger generations are almost as religious as the generation of their parents. In the latter case, it is likely that younger generations lose faith.

We examined four factors that should have an impact on the costliness of religious socialization: the general religiosity of a society, whether a society experienced state socialism, economic development, and its levels of income inequality. The costs of socializing children in formerly socialist countries should have been higher because the state actively suppressed religious activity. Hence the successful socialization of religious beliefs strongly depended on the parents. Higher economic development should also increase the costs of religious socialization because living conditions improve. Lastly, growing up in more unequal societies should make religious socialization easier because under these conditions religious networks provide valuable contacts.

Our results confirm that religious socialization is more efficient in religious societies and that it depended more strongly on parental efforts in socialist countries. However, increases in economic development did not affect religious socialization at all. The one factor that explained a successful transmission of religious beliefs better than all other factors was income inequality.

The one factor that explained a successful transmission of religious beliefs better than all other factors was income inequality.

As the figure shows, the level of religious beliefs that someone acquires in low inequality societies (bottom regression line) is strongly dependend on the religiosity of their parents. (The x-axis shows how often the respondent’s parents attended religious services when the respondent was a child. 1 means never, 5 means weekly.) In unequal societies (top regression line) it is less important how religious someone’s parents were. Even those respondents with weakly religious parents report strong religious beliefs.

What does this mean for the future of secularization? Looking back at the first graph above, we see that a significant amount of countries currently have very high levels of inequality. In these societies it seems unlikely that secularization will take place soon. Applying our findings to religious minorities in mostly secular countries, we would expect that religion might become less important for them. However this will probably only hold if existing inequalities in regard to educational attainment and job market prospects are gradually reduced.

References:
Kelley, Jonathan and Nan Dirk De Graaf. 1997. "National context, parental socialization, and religious belief: Results from 15 nations." American Sociological Review 62(4):639-659.
Müller Tim. 2012. On secularisation - structural, institutional and cultural determinants shaping individual secularisation. DPhil Thesis. University of Oxford.
Müller, Tim, Nan Dirk de Graaf, and Peter Schmidt. 2014. “Which societies provide a strong religious socialization context? Explanations beyond the effects of national religiosity” forthcoming in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

by Tim Müller