Correlation between wealth, religion

I want to return to some statistics to which I referred earlier because the point that I’m about to make was lucidly confirmed as I was recently revisiting Christopher Hitchen’s anti-theistic polemic, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”

The data is, admittedly, old from 2002, but since we are still being implicated by the events precipitated on Sept. 11, 2001, they are still, more or less, useful. The figures are from the Pew Research Center and present the not-surprising evidence that America leads by wide margins every single other wealthy, modernized nation in the percentage of people who say religion is, not just important, but very important to their lives. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said religion was very important to their lives, while on the same question, 30 percent responded affirmatively in Canada, 33 percent in Britain and 11 percent in mostly godless France. On the other hand, in many parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, where localized violence or deprivation or corruption are common realities of daily life, religion has a large stranglehold over the populace and leadership. For instance, Nigeria is at 92 percent, Pakistan at 91 and Indonesia at 95.

The conclusion is clear. As Pew points out,

Americans’ views are closer to people in developing nations than to the publics of developed nations.

Pew also found that

wealthier nations tend to place less importance on religion — with the exception of the United States.

And as Hitchens notes, with much less sterility:

… as I write, a version of the Inquisition is about to lay hands on a nuclear weapon. Under the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse. Its writers and artists and intellectuals are mainly in exile or stifled by censorship; its women are chattel and sexual prey; its young people are mostly half-educated and without employment. After a quarter century of theocracy, Iran still exports the very things it exported when the theocrats took over—pistachio nuts and rugs. Modernity and technology have passed it by, save for the one achievement of nuclearization.

This puts the confrontation between faith and civilization on a whole new footing. Until relatively recently, those who adopted the clerical path had to pay a heavy price for it. Their societies would decay, their economies would contract, their best minds would go to waste or take themselves elsewhere, and they would consistently be outdone by societies that had learned to tame and sequester the religious impulse. A country like Afghanistan would simply rot.

And it has rotted, or at least, remained inert for decades. For another example, see Somalia, which has been wrecked by Islamic extremists for years.

But before readers begin to point out that the majority of countries on the list with both high percentages of devout believers and high occurrences of violence and servitude are predominantly Muslim, America again being the exception, many in both lists, those with less devotees and more, are European and Latin American. While many of the European nations function quite ably, in some cases much better than the U.S., without religion at center stage, much of Christian Latin America is woefully impoverished, with a wide chasm between the haves and have-nots.

The larger point is that religion, taken to its extreme, as it is in many of these countries, chokes free thought, free government, democracy and well, everything else. This is the disconcerting reality that Pat Robertson, James Dobson and many others would hope to bring to this country: devout House members, devout Senate members, a devout president and devout local elected officials all the way down the rung. What would be left but to declare, once and for all, a theocracy? And we only have to look beyond our shores for proof of what such a reality might bring. We can only be thankful that believers in America today don’t believe in holy writ quite as much or as fervently as believers of different holy books, or the same book, elsewhere.