In an interview on God

And in consequence they are not marginal, but involved in an ongoing discussion. And one of the anomalies in this discussion is America. And here we are sitting in your apartment in New York. So shall we talk about America?

Yes, both of the next books on my list have something particular to say about America. My fourth book is by two social scientists called Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. It’s called "Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide". It was published in 2004 and is meticulous and powerful in its interpretation of an enormous range of data. What they’re looking at are the data on religious practices in the world today and the extent to which they can be correlated, country by country, with various socioeconomic variables. Now, many books and articles on the state of religion are remarkably data-free, or get muddled in their account of the data, and this one is the antidote.

People prefer revealed atheism to natural atheism?

They prefer colourful stories, newspaper headlines and poorly digested and collected opinion-poll data. Norris and Inglehart do use poll data, among other sources, but only the best sort, carefully vetted and cross-referenced to determine church attendance and so forth. The other sort of data this book relies on is data about education, health, wealth, the distribution of wealth, life expectancy and so on. Because what the authors are looking at in this book is what’s called the “secularisation thesis”, which says roughly that the more modern or economically developed a country gets, the less religious it is. So they are trying to examine that thesis, and they find a great deal to support it, but with one important tweak. And this tweak is what enables them to explain America. Because, of course, America is a very modern, economically developed country, yet its level of religiosity is much more like an undeveloped country. All the other rich countries in the world—not just the European ones, but all of them—are significantly less religious than America. The extreme contrast is with Scandinavia, the others tend to be somewhere between the two, but the difficulty for the secularisation thesis has always been America.

So how do they explain America?

What they propose is that religion declines not simply because of economic development, but when that economic development brings with it the security that you would expect it to bring, which they call “existential security”. Now what they argue is that America is much more like a poor country than a rich one in that many of its citizens do not enjoy this security. Take life expectancy, which is the most basic measure of social welfare. Now, if you were to rank the countries of the world by life expectancy, with the longest lived at the top, where roughly would you expect America to be?

Well I suppose in the top ten at least.

Everyone assumes that. But it is not in the top ten. It’s not in the top 20 or 30 or 40. It’s number 43. And the biggest single reason for that is that tens of millions of Americans cannot afford health care, though there are other factors too.

That’s almost impossible to believe.

Yes, and I think it would surprise most Americans. But it’s certainly correct. Now amongst the other relevant differences between America and the rest of the developed world is the fact that you’re much more likely to die through violence in America or to die in a natural disaster. And if you lose your job—and there’s a higher turn-over or “churn” in jobs than in many other places—then much worse things are going to happen to you, because there’s much less of a supporting welfare state than exists in Western Europe and elsewhere. So to cut a long story short, life here in America is, for an awful lot of people, very much more worrying than it is for people in other rich countries—an intractable fate seems to play a bigger role—and that affects the culture and climate of opinion. In America, you need God, because nobody else is going to help you. Now, for Norris and Inglehart this is not the sole explanation for the popularity of religion in America. It’s a big, complex subject—for example, you don’t have to spend a long time in America to realise that religious organisations here provide much of the social networking for a relatively mobile, rootless culture. But if you take this research into account, the relative lack of existential security here, you begin to understand how the secularisation thesis in general is correct: that countries do tend to become less religious as they become more economically successful and developed. And America is an exception because a lot of what usually comes with economic development hasn’t come in America.