The Least Religious Nations Are The Happiest, Study Finds (The National Secular Society; Dec 4)

A new study (pdf) into the correlation between religious belief and contentment and security shows that the less religious a society is the happier and more secure it becomes.

The study, by Gregory Paul, published in Evolutionary Psychology Journal puts paid to the widely touted notion that without religion society would collapse. According to Mr Paul, the reverse is true. Religion flourishes where a society is dysfunctional and poor. When affluence is present and people feel secure through the provision of health care and social services, religion quickly loses its hold. In other words, those societies that have moved furthest away from religion have higher levels of contentment, stability and affluence.

Unlike many others in his field, Paul does not think that humanity is hardwired for religion, nor that belief in a higher being is necessary for a society to achieve a high level of functionality.

“Popular religion,” Paul says, “is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment.” Simply put, it means that without safety nets such as universal healthcare (which more prosperous democracies have), people depend on the “supernatural entities that could be petitioned for aid and protection.”

“In view of the reduced levels of religiosity consistently extant in populations that enjoy secure middle class lives,” Paul writes, “it can be postulated that if socio-economic conditions had been similarly benign since humans first appeared, it is unlikely that religion would have developed to nearly the degree seen in actual human history, and atheism would have been much more widespread and possibly ubiquitous since the beginning.”

Paul’s study (entitled “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions”) also contains this interesting passage:

If deep religious devotion is either genetically programmed to the same extent as language or materialism, or the result of a supernatural connection with an intelligent creator entity, then religious belief and practice should remain similarly universal in all populations regardless of the environmental conditions they dwell in, unless an atheistic authoritarian government suppresses mass religiosity. Instead, the ease and speed with which hundreds of millions of westerners have voluntarily abandoned dedicated piety in recent decades indicates that religiosity is a standard, albeit not unanimous, psychological response to sufficiently dysfunctional environmental circumstances as outlined above, and is superficial enough to be readily abandoned when conditions improve to the required degree. This sociological based conclusion is in accord with, and potentially supported by, the similar inference arrived at by Inzlicht et al. (2009) based on examination of neurological activity associated with religiosity.

This latest study seems to build on and extend the observations and conclusions of Mr. Paul that I shared back on Sept 27, 2005.

For more on the inverse relationship between religion and happiness, see the entries I posted on July 8, 2008 and July 10, 2008.

(Interested in learning about the inverse relationship between religion and health instead? See the entries I posted on May 11, 2006, Nov 11, 2007, and June 11, 2009.)

(Are you most interested in learning about the inverse relationship between religion and morality? Check out the entry I posted on July 30, 2007 as well as the related links.)