Where is religiosity growing and where is it shrinking?

September 23, 2011 8:36 AM

Where is religiosity growing and where is it shrinking?

I'm looking for statistics to understand where religious observance (whether this is self-identification, church/mosque/synagogue/and so on attendance, or other means) is on the increase, and where it is on the decrease.

I might be entering the wrong terms into Google - what I've found doesn't really look all that trustworthy. Thanks!

posted by iftheaccidentwill to Religion & Philosophy (5 answers total)

Best answer: Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart) is a very thoroughly researched book about trends in religiosity in countries around the world. If you want a gloss on the book: most industrialized countries are becoming more secular, while most Third World or developing countries are staying very religious, but the United States is an exception to this rule. The book backs this up with details on church/synagogue/mosque attendance and lots of other indicators, and it gives many different theories on why we might be seeing these trends.

I recommended the book and discussed it further in the third comment to this thread, under a different username: What are the causes of religion's decreasing influence in the modern world? And why has the United States maintained high levels of religiosity compared to other developed countries?
posted by John Cohen at 8:57 AM on September 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life would be on place to start. They're mostly focused on the US, but they do have some research on other regions.
posted by nangar at 9:03 AM on September 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

The catch is that the answer to this question entirely hinges on what you consider religious observance. You listed various measures (self-identification, church/mosque/temple attendance, etc.), but which one you sort by will change the results dramatically. This is true to the extent that it's still unresolved among scholars whether secularization is actually happening (broadly: more concrete measures like church etc. attendance suggest that the West is becoming more secular; fluffier measures or those that allow more flexibility about religious affiliation [e.g. Jews who practice elements of Buddhism, spiritual but not religious people, etc.] often show that religiosity in the West is on the rise. If you're counting by certain measures (e.g. government support of religion - e.g. money from taxes in Germany going to support the Church), you can even demonstrate that Europe - supposedly the old bastion of secularism in traditional secularization theory - is more religious than many other parts of the world! I hate to provide an answer that undermines your question, but I do think you need to decide on how you want to measure religiosity before we can direct you to resources for statistics...

(Just to give you a sense of my background, so you can decide how much of a pinch of salt you want to take my comments with - I'm not a professor or anything, and am not published on this topic, but I am a grad student working in this rough area [I focus on America and the Religious Right, but have a degree in "Religion, Ethics, and Politics", and have taken grad courses on Secularization, Evangelicalism, etc.].)
posted by UniversityNomad at 10:24 AM on September 23, 2011 [1 favorite]

In considering trends related to the waxing and waning of religiosity in particular societies, demography matters a lot. There are particular religious groups that traditionally have large families; strong traditions keep most of these children within the group, and these many children grow up to have many, many more children, while fertility rates among other, generally less religious groups, are falling below replacement rates. So the proportion of people within a population who are religious can go up quite dramatically over a generation or two.

It's challenging to research this issue without wading into a swamp of xenophobia, reciprocal prejudices and sticky-wicket issues of reproductive choice. One author who marshals all the numbers without losing his dignity is Eric Kaufman, in Shall The Religious Inherit The Earth?
posted by Corvid at 12:09 PM on September 23, 2011

Response by poster: I think there is enough here to go on, thanks. I'm finishing up the last chapter of my MA thesis (department of religion), and was looking for statistics against which to measure an argument I've been reading. Looks I got that - awesome. Cheers all.
posted by iftheaccidentwill at 2:49 PM on September 23, 2011