I'm just going to go ahead and give a reminder that these statistics only represent correlation, not causality.

My guess is that it's more that when you don't have things, the more you tend to have more of a motivation to seek religion. That being said, it would be an interesting study to find if there was a causal relationship between non religiousity and certain markers of prosperity. As a "practicing" Christian, I'd honestly love to know, regardless of what the results are.

> Interesting: The least religious countries/territories have more economic, social, and political stability and are far wealthier and more technologically/scientifically advanced than the most religious ones.

And 8/10 are in Europe, with 1 being run by a European country for the last century when it became developed.† Which also correlates to a lack of corruption:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

Which also seems to be inversely related to places where cousin marriage is prevalent:

* PDF: https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2019-akbari.pdf

* DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2019.07.015

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#Prevalence

There's also the fact that 7/10 the top democratic countries, many of which also appear on your list, are constitutional monarchies:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

What happened in European history that could have perhaps led to all of these countries moving in the same developmental direction?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Europe

† IIRC, Japan also explicitly modelled their system after the UK's during the Meiji Restoration.

I think the causality is backwards; as countries become more prosperous they become less religious as the people become more cosmopolitan.

No for all the countries on that list. Communism also had a role...

unfortunately I couldn't find the methodology, but it's very important to realize that self reported data is fraught with many many issues.

In many communist countries religion (or at least freedom to choose from foreign or other religions) is suppressed. People which might have been religious do not become, and those that are might not tell the truth.

Similarly in religious nations I'm sure we'd get a far lower "religious" rate if you went through a set of beliefs for each religion and see what things they actually practice.

Eg: church attendance most weeks, prayer, reading the bible, taking communion, monogamy/marriage, etc... I'm sure if you go down that checklist the number of people who say they're "Christian" for whatever reason, would actually sharply decline when we consider their actual life practices.

to make a HN analogy I can put CEO on my linkedin profile, but unless I incorporate something, sell something, hire people, build a business etc. am I really the CEO of anything the way that people interpret when they hear "CEO" ?

That is one of the factors. The other factor can be that the least religious countries are the most homogeneous (with some exceptions).

Is this just a pet theory, or have you actually quantified the homogeneity of the most and least religious countries?

While the Scandinavian countries are probably very homogenous, I'm guessing that at least some of the most-religious list (Ethiopia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Malawi, Burundi, Mauritania) are fairly homogenous too.

None of the ones you named are particularly homogeneous. In Ethiopia and Malawi there is no majority ethnic group. Mauritania's largest ethnic group has a narrow (54%) majority. Yemen is in a civil war between its two largest endogamous sects. The central government of Ethiopia is at war with Tigrayan separatists. The central government of Sri Lanka only recently defeated the Tamil separatists.

Democracy does not need religion, nor does prosperity. Democracy definitely needs education and the participation of citizens in government.

Some regimes use religion as part of propaganda that maintains the power structure. Monarchies, for example.

Religion isn't necessarily unwelcome in democracy as long as it doesn't conflict with governance, health and education policy.

This trend, while generally true, has been examined through multiple sources and variables to find out what makes a country prosperous- the US is an exception though

https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22

> the US is an exception though

I would say people in the US just really like to profess to being Christian, even though they act the part in no way, shape, or form. Both country and people. It's more of a cultural 'thing' than actual belief or practice.

The dichotomy of word and action is striking. Like watching someone claim to be a firefighter, attend training and seminars, then commit arson and not do any, you know, firefighting.

There is an extremely large very religious population in America. If you live in a blue state, though, you likely have little connection with them.

You can't "No True Scotsman" the definition of "religious," though, by claiming that they don't act religious. That quickly becomes a slippery slope of definitions. "Oh, these people don't like immigrants, they're not really religious."

There's no single definition of Christianity. There are so many denominations and different practices within, it's almost mind-boggling.

So you may think people in the US merely profess being Christian according to your personal definition of whatever you think a Christian is or ought to be.

But I can guarantee you the US is an extremely religious country and the different denominations are quite sincere in their beliefs.

You don't have a monopoly on judging what "actual" Christianity is. In fact, your attitude is an extremely paternalistic, and frankly offensively, literal "holier than thou" position.

Dude, it isn’t like we can’t see what red-letter Jesus said and did, and also see that many — even a majority — of self-identifying “Christians” behave in ways that are in contradiction to His commandments. IOW, about as “Christian” as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is “Democratic”: the self-selected name does not represent the actual reality.

Christianity as it is practiced by the vast majority of Christians today is not based on the teachings of Jesus, but rather on the teachings of Paul. If you were to take only the teachings of Jesus (minus those that were clearly invented by later scribes), it is not very far from the views expressed in the Talmud. In some cases Jesus was on the liberal end of Jewish thought, in others on the conservative end, and in the few cases where he deviated from the mainstream he did not stray all that much. When Jesus complained about the Pharisees (i.e. Rabbis), his complaint was not that they taught the wrong doctrine but that they were hypocrites who did not properly keep the law they taught.

On the other hand, mainstream Christian ideas about human nature, about sin, about the messiah, and about God's will (not to mention the nature of God), are for the most part based on Paul's writings and all represent departures from Jewish thought on those topics. It was primarily Paul who pushed for Christians to abandon kosher laws and circumcision, two major hurdles he faced in convincing non-Jews to join the new religion. More than anyone else described in the New Testament, Paul was responsible for Christianity becoming a distinct religion rather than just another Jewish sect.

"Dude", if you think Christianity is mostly about what Jesus taught or his commandments... then I'm sorry but you don't understand Christianity at all.

Christianity is a multifaceted historical phenomenon, a cultural tradition of which Jesus and even the text of the Bible is a small part.

Saying Christianity is about what Jesus said and did makes as much sense as saying that the US is about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In both cases, it's not nothing, but neither is it the whole story, or even 10% of the story.

You're free to decide what Christianity means to you, but not to prevent others from doing the same for themselves. After all, others doing it for themselves is precisely why "Christianity" is a family of seemingly countless denominations and divisions within. It's not a single monolithic thing, or even close to it.

> Christianity is a multifaceted historical phenomenon, a cultural tradition of which Jesus and even the text of the Bible is a small part.

Agreed, Jesus Christ’s teachings play a minuscule part, especially in modern American Christianity.

Wondering why you're singling out America here.

Do you think it's any less than among Catholics in Italy? Or Eastern Orthodox adherents in Russia?

Because back toward the root of this thread, the talk was about America.

I think there is one more factor. Due to polarized state of our politics religion is used as “rally flag” or a way to show “family values”. On both sides.

Is it though? I am a christian in the US and have only met other christians at religious functions save for two or three occasions, where as everyone else I meet is not christian and probably not religious.

But increasingly less:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/10/nothing-i...

This is from an outsider’s view. No need to go to church, it helps, but it is not the main attribute of a Christian. In fact, these institutions have become so blatantly centers of salesmanship nowadays, that there is a greater probability of fakes and hypocrites attending today.

One outlier is America of course. It has pretty high scores for importance in daily life and it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It does have very high differences in wealth distribution though, much more than the Nordic countries. But I think there's a large cultural aspect there too.

There are always going to be exceptions to the rule, usually due to a strong counfounding factor that can explain the difference pretty well...

For example, Saudia Arabia is wealthy and extremely religious... I hope I don't have to explain the counfounding factor in this case.

Regarding the USA: even though it scores high in religious people rates, it's also one of the free-est places in the world, so people who are not believers are still relatively free to go about their daily lives without problem, unlike in most other highly religious nations. The USA also happens to have the biggest military in the world, capable of taking over and applying pressure on its enemies in order to further its economical interests... I think these two factors should be sufficient to explain quite well why the USA is an exception to the rule.

Well I've heard that in the US in certain areas (mainly rural) that if you want to get a job and are not a churchgoer you can forget about it :) If that's true it's not all that free to be unreligious in my opinion. But I've never even visited the US so I'm not sure how true this is.

In Europe this is absolutely not a thing. Well, unless you want to work at a religious organisation I guess.

Why don't you just spell it out explicitly? What you are implying certainly isn't obvious.

I was trying to "imply" that religious countries tend to be poorer than non-religious countries according to the data (why that is, I am not sure myself but probably because religions limit your society and specially creativity in ways that are damaging to economical success) and if that's not the case for a particular country, that's just because there are stronger counfounding factors that can explain the disparity... is that what you were expecting me to say???

I wasn't expecting anything, that's why I asked. What are the confounding factors for the countries you named?

I explicitly mentioned those factors for the USA already. Do you really want me to be more explicit about Saudi Arabia?? Oh well, ok: oil.

I mean, even back in your original post it would simply have been quicker to say "due to oil" than "I hope I don't have to explain the counfounding factor in this case," even without a couple more posts arguing about it.

Note taken: never assume anything to be obvious to others.

I still don't really understand how any of these are confounding factors? I'm not a statistician but as I understand it the definition of a confounder is that it has a causal relationship with both A and B, which masks the causal relationship between A and B.

A and B here are religion and wealth/technology I understand (sort of) the points you are making about wealth, but how does any of this stuff link causally with religion?

The hypothesis is: religious countries tend to be poor.

One can read this as "religion causes people to be poor", but that's not exactly the same because when a whole country is religious, its institutions and codes will tend to be based on religion rather than science or a rationalist moral system.

With this, I hope I am making it clear that saying that religion can cause a country to be poorer than it could be otherwise is not the same as saying the same about a specific person or family.

Now, we have an extremely simplistic formula based on this hypothesis: the more religious a country's population is, the poorer the country should be.

But many factors can influence a country's wealth, including its military power (which could be a result of its priorities, not necessarily of its wealth in the first place), how much its culture/religion incentivate creativity and support new ideas (things which tend to improve technological advances which usually translate into wealth), how many natural resources it was blessed with, how honest the population is in general and so on. These are all confounding factors (they may affect the results) which can cause some countries to deviate from our original hypothesis... in a canonical scientific experiment, to know if the hypothesis is correct, you would need to find ways to remove these factors from the equation so that the only important factors that matter are those you include in your hypothesis. That can't be easily done for a study of countries because there's just not enough of them.

So the best we can do is see how well most countries fit into our hypothesis and try to understand the most important (confounding) factors that can cause countries to deviate from our hypothesis to see if the outliers can be explained away (or if they show a genuine weakness in the hypothesis) so that we can have a higher level of confidence that the hypothesis seems correct.