Religious Outlier | Hacker News Reader

Religious Outlier

nytimes.com

61 pointstokenadult76 comments

Keep in mind that a lot of people came to America fleeing religious persecution [0]. Many of our ancestors chose to cross the globe and start brand new lives rather than give up their religious beliefs.

Take a nation made up of very religious people with a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, add in huge supplies of natural resources and a legal/property system designed to encourage development and investment, and after a few centuries you get a prosperous and religious nation. In light of history, it's not that surprising that the US would be an outlier.

[0] A few select groups: Puritans from England (1630), Quakers (1680), Anabaptists from Europe (late 1600s-1700s), Catholics from Ireland (late 1800s), Christians from Russia (1917), Jews from Germany (1939).

You can say that the Puritans fled religious tolerance in England. But the first groups went to the Netherlands. There, they eventually couldn't stand how their neighbors were socially influencing their kids to be more tolerant. They felt they were blending in and losing their identity. When they then went to America, in a sense what they were fleeing was religious _tolerance_. (There were other groups that went directly to America, of course).

Interesting -- the fact that the US is physically large may thus have contributed to religiosity: people could more easily choose to raise their children "free" from the nefarious influences of people who were different. (c.f. "group polarization" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization )

Since you're mentioning the denomination for everyone else, Russian Christians = Eastern Orthodox.

There were several Christian denominations who fled from western Europe to Russia during the time of Catherine the Great, as she provided them with asylum. Many of those groups fled from Russia starting in 1917, including Eastern Orthodox, Jesuits, Mennonites, and many others Christian denominations, as well as quite a few Jews.

I see your point about Catherine the Great and Mennonites, however:

Jesuits = an order, not a denomination; Jesuits are Catholics

Eastern Orthodox = 90+% of Russians belong to this denomination; not one of the groups welcomed by Catherine and fleeing later

The opposition between wealth and spirituality is well known and ancient. In a Christian context, you see it in such biblical remarks as "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25) and "You cannot serve both God and money." (Matt. 6:24). Vows of poverty are widely practiced throughout Christendom, from the severe vows taken by monks to the more lax popular view that the heavy pursuit of wealth is sinful or at least misguided. I don't know how other religions view wealth, but I would be surprised if the opposition was uniquely Christian.

The wealthy tend to reject religion. That's well-known among the religious.

Why do the poor tend to embrace it? Well, I can give one answer. Apparently . . . it helps. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13369

   This paper examines whether participation in religious 
   or other social organizations can help offset the 
   negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged 
   environment. . . . Overall, we find strong evidence 
   that youth with religiously active parents are less 
   affected later in life by childhood disadvantage than 
   youth whose parents did not frequently attend religious 
   services.

The opposition between education & spirituality is also well known, as we see in the story of the garden of eden (genesis 1-3). Or in the lower levels of belief among college graduates.

Just some thoughts I've had on USA vs. Europe R&D.

I've noticed that computer science research/development in Europe tends to be more theory-based, as if the goal is to create a little world where everything makes sense; like the courtly protocols of a medieval sovereign. I'm thinking Dijkstra (who wanted a respectable profession), German academics I've known, and strikingly in some French papers and software I've come across.

Whereas work in the States seems to be more outcome-based and pragmatic. There's Edison, BASIC and Microsoft, and also Ethernet (which is deliberately non-deterministic.)

Of course these are just statistical patterns, and every individual person will exhibit both tendencies.

So, my theory is that, culturally, not having a sovereign or a court gave people the freedom to do whatever works, without it looking elegant. But it's also scarier to live that way - hence, religion.

Now compare that chart with most/least violent countries:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murde...

The least violent countries appear to be less religious.

Do they?

Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Indonesia, Tunisia, Italy are all quite religious but near the bottom of the murder chart you linked to.

I'm not saying every case... but the difference between the United States -- the most advanced, richest country in the world -- as compared to say Denmark, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Ireland etc. ...

Correct me if I'm wrong here but you seem to be using only cases that fit your theory. Seems like confirmation bias.

Indonesia, one of the poorest and most religious countries, is also one of the least violent (#57; USA: #24).

That's a good point. Interestingly, that religion is Muslim. But if we compare countries with similar GDP the U.S. is put to shame. Even Germany beats us for being less violent, and less religious.

You're working very hard here to twist the world into your preconceived view. Are you sure it fits?

I'm an atheist too, but I still believe in good statistics.

No, I'm the last person to "twist the world" to my views. I believe in observation and evidence. Do I have a theory that there is a correlation between religion and violence? Yes. Have I explored that correlation beyond glancing at a few charts? No.

But if we only compare countries with similar GDP (per capita, presumably) to the US then the sample size becomes tiny and the US is an outlier on the religiosity scale. You seem to be trying to imply a correlation exsits between religiosity and violence based on a single outlier from a tiny sample.

Indonesia is also very corrupt (111th out of 180 in Transparency International's index, and I have encountered the police corruption there first-hand). I wonder whether the corruption might be so bad that people wouldn't report murder to the police, and so the official statistic might be lower than it should be?

The former anti-corruption chief of Indonesia was jailed earlier this year for conspiracy to murder. I could imagine that if he's not the only government official organizing murders, then that might not reliably be reported to the police.

(This is poorly-informed speculation and I wouldn't be surprised if some knowledgeable person writes a scathing correction. Better information would be appreciated.)

At one time it was compulsory for all Indonesians to officially have a religion. Is it still so? I believe the reason was opposition to Communism by the Indonesian government.

Without meaning to imply anything, I'd also be interested to see how both of these variables correlate with quality of (public-funded) education.

Small negative correlation: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/603536

(I have the full text of the paper, but I've not actually read it.)

Strange that Russia is listed under "other" -- last time I checked, the Russian Orthodox Church was still cited as the dominant religious institution there, despite decades of repression under the Soviets.

I'm also surprised that Israel would rank so low on the vertical scale, considering how polarized the population is in terms of ethnic and religious differences. Maybe the survey respondents are trying to compensate for something?

israel is not a very religious country, at least in terms of the Jewish population there.

Polarisation doesn't require a high percentage of the population to give a damn; just for those that do to be really really loud about it.

There are also a lot of people who identify as ethnically Jewish (and are passionate and vocal about it) but not religious.

I wish they had included Norway; it is literally off the chart in terms of GDP (they'd have to extend it to the right), and I suspect that the religiosity measure would be similar to Sweden and Denmark-- but as I said, I'd like to see the results to be sure.

Australia and New Zealand are not on the list but I suspect they'd come down in the bottom right quadrant. If you took the U.S. off the chart I would certainly suggest a causal relationship. In very general terms: the wealthier the society, the more educated and independent-minded the people, and the less likely to embrace religion.

I wonder how the chart would look if you separated out all the U.S. states. I'm not from the U.S. so I'm not sure about this, but I wonder if there are distinct differences between where the various U.S. states would fall on the chart. In other words, is the correlation between the wealth of a given state and its religiosity?

Allright, that' settles it. I'm moving to Hong Kong.

I'm not sure who in HK they asked, but just about every shop and restaurant there has a tiny altar and they build giant holes in buildings for the purpose of allowing dragons access to the water. It seems way more religious in everyday kind of ways than the US.

C'mon do they REALLY believe in dragons? Or is it more like how people hang horseshoes above their doorways?

How do people hang horseshoes above their doorway? Not because of superstition?

Yes, but I believe there exists a half-hearted superstition. It doesn't hurt to hang a horse-shoe above the doorway IF luck really exists.

Dragons are significant enough to change the architecture of buildings. My understanding that the apartment building depicted at the link below was not originally designed with a hole for the dragon residing on the hill behind it. I don't know how to measure people's beliefs, but if the reasoning behind a very expensive change is "dragons," then 'thar be dragons.'

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25367601@N03/2409132269/

Like the post above regarding Japan, it's cultural symbolism. The only thing approaching religion in Hong Kong is money. Religion, as we in the West think of it, in terms of guiding entities, monuments, and communal gatherings is almost absent.

I think our language fails us a bit, and we need better delineation between religion (e.g. Christian), group philosophy (e.g. Hindu), and personal philosophies.

What I mean is, religion isn't a very useful work in the context of comparisons.

Yeah, the comment about Japan definitely spoke to how European-oriented cultures make a difference between religion and culture that may not exist in the same way elsewhere. At one level, the poll accepts what people say (how they interpret their own activities) instead of some external reporter observing their activities and calling apples, apples. The distinction between religion and culture, or lack thereof, made for an early controversy among Christian missionaries: were "the ceremonial rites of Confucianism and ancestor veneration were primarily social and political in nature and could be practiced by converts" or not?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy

I can't speak for Europe, but maybe I can shed some light on Japan.

Christianity had started to spread to Japan by 1600 from the Portugese, but after Hideyoshi Toyotomi unified Japan, he made Christianity illegal. After Toyotomi died, the Tokugawa government cracked down even harder, and Christianity was basically eliminated from Japan by 1700, leaving the hybrid Japanese Buddhist/Shinto religion where the Emperor was God-on-Earth as the sole major religion.

After Japan lost WWII, part of the surrender terms was that Emperor Hirohito had to admit he's not a god. During the occupation of Japan, MacArthur's team scrubbed away a lot of the traditional power and prestige of the Japanese native religion, leaving the country largely secular and atheist. They do have strong cultural values and ethics though, which serves some of a similar function that traditional religion does.

This statement sounds really horrible, but every time I hear about what good things have happened to Japan after losing WWII, I'm kinda almost sad we didn't lose.

They certainly don't have a crazy, out of control amount of military spending... not that Japan doesn't have a lot of its own problems. But it seems like they've really had lemons turn into lemonade.

For both Japan and Germany, losing WWII led to an economic miracle, but it might be worth pointing out that losing to the Allies was almost certainly very different than losing to the Axis would have been.

Quite true.

Japan and Germany's economic success was to the benefit of the Allies in the long run anyway.

That's what usually happens when you go a little out of your way to be nicer than you could have been: it turns out that, just by coincidence, some of those times come back to help you later. :)

Also, todays Japan and Germany are a far cry from 1930s Japan and Germany because the loss of the war changed both substantially.

I can't speak for Japan, a total lack of experience in that department, but Germany is still licking some of its wounds 55 years later.

Don't forget that East and West Germany got reunited in fairly recent times and the shockwaves of the reunion have not yet subsided.

Actions have consequences. Could Germany be even more prosperous if it hadn’t started a war? Possible. But if that’s what they wanted then they shouldn’t have started a war with the explicit goal of, well, world domination.

Germans today are just as rich as the French or Britains, much richer than Poles or Russians. Germany has the fourth largest economy in the world (behind China, Japan and the US). The world owes us nothing, we owe the world.

>>losing to the Allies was almost certainly very different than losing to the Axis would have been.

Well... there is e.g. Ukraine and the holocaust. Then there are the Japanese camps, etc.

But was it really worse in e.g. France or Norway compared to Soviet rule? Consider the low survivability of the national elites sent to Siberia. Check e.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Estoni...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Brothers

Estonia was certainly unusual in that the occupying Soviets even managed to kill almost as many Jews as the occupying Germans. The reprehensible behaviour of Soviet armies in their sphere of influence nevertheless isn't enough to make me disappointed the Axis didn't win...

I met a Jewish man who had survived the holocaust,(he spent about a year in Auschwitz before being liberated) and then decided to go back to Soviet controlled Hungry, where he was born. He explained to me that he believed living under Soviet rule was worse then living under Nazi rule.

I'm pretty confident (no sources sorry, but thats not the point) that the vast majority of people would disagree with him, but it goes to show you that one side wasn't necessarily better than the other.

Of course I'm sure American control wan't nearly as bad - but that could just be my American bias talking.

> They certainly don't have a crazy, out of control amount of military spending

Because the Japanese were forced to include in their post-WW2 constitution that they would no longer have a military for any purpose other than self-defense. As a result, the American taxpayer pays for the US military to be stationed in Japan for the purpose of offensive attacks against threats like North Korea, Russia, and China, thus indirectly also funding Japan's self-defense. This means Japan's self-defense expenses also drop, not to mention any offensive attacks (as long as the US agrees with them, which it probably would) come free of charge to the Japanese.

Not quite. Japan can and does defend itself just fine against neighbours like North Korea, Russia, and China.

The American taxpayer does something different than you state. In actuality, they fund the projection of force everywhere that the US has interests. To relate back to the example of Japan, this means that the American taxpayer funds the defense of the things the US wants from Japan, not truly the defense of Japan itself though the defense of the former can often aid the defense of the latter. This holds true essentially everywhere else the US chooses to project force and the distinction is absolutely critical but too easily forgotten.

EDIT: in case the above sounds a bit too much like some kind of anti-American rant, the point I should have made more explicit in response to the parent is this: parent makes it sound like Japan is restricted from defending itself against the listed neighbour countries and therefore requires outsiders to do so. This is not true, and since it is not true, one should periodically ask themselves why the US has forces there (and everywhere else.)

There's a much more boring reason behind it too, though: Japan's military isn't nearly strong enough to hold off North Korea or China by itself, and if Japan's military was strong enough to match its neighbors, all the other countries in Asia would be very uncomfortable about it. It just keeps everyone happy (and trade flowing) to keep Japan militarily weak, and the best way to do that is to guarantee them the protection of our military.

It's not free of charge. Japan pays U$2 billion a year for the US military presence.

http://www.japantoday.com/category/commentary/view/japan-bal...

Just an FYI to justify my East Asian Studies degree: the Emperor as God-on-Earth Shintoism is largely a creation of the Japanese government and elites, extending from the late Meiji era (i.e. a couple hundred years after genociding the Christians) into the military junta that was ended by WWII. Shinto previously existed in Japan as a set of diverse minor traditions and local legends, and would have been mostly unrecognizable as a religion prior to it being used as a founding myth to justify the new regime.

Looking at the reading list for the course I learned that in (almost a decade ago now), I think the source is probably W. Scott Morton, "Japan Its History and Culture", but don't quote me on that.

Fun historical trivia note: the Japanese constitution forbids government support of religious schools. The reason for this is late 19th-century American anti-Catholicism. How the heck did that happen? Well, Protestant nativists afraid that Irish & etc Catholics were going to breed quickly and overwhelm "real" Americans passed a series of so-called Blaine Amendments in American states (failing at the national level), which forbid giving money to sectarian schools with the express purpose of forbidding Catholics to fund their schools with tax dollars. Some genius in MacArthur's constitutional drafting committee copy/pasted one of them into the Japanese Constitution.

For additional potent irony, I'd lay even money on the Blaine Amendments being declared unconstitutional (in the US, obviously) within the next few years. They will then survive only in 21st century Japan, protecting it from 19th century Irish immigrants.

Interestingly, whether these are facts or not, they aren't what is taught in Japanese schools. Try throw these questions at a Japanese. He/she would think you are talking about conspiracy.

Well, heck, you should see what American schools have to say about Columbus

what do they say?

I'd be interested to see how the US would appear on this chart divided up by state.

Not exactly the same variables, but similar enough: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007...

The US outlier may be explained by other variable. For example, church attendance may be positively or negatively correlated with wealth, depending on the state, which suggests a more complex relationship, at least in the US.

Besides being a very rich country (at least globally), the US have other very particular features, like multi culturalism, etc... There was also an interesting article in the economist about the more competitive market for religion in the US compared to other countries - I unfortunately cannot find it back.

   Americans: For the sake of America
    British  : For the sake of Queen
    Muslims  : For the sake of Quran
    Hindus   : For the sake of Caste

This is a weird piece of chart-junk. Where is the giant China ball on the graph? Why is Hinduism grouped under other? Why separate out Catholic and Protestant?

I would guess:

-China didn't allow the Gallup survey.

-Hinduism is predominantly practiced in just a few countries, and India has a lot of non-Hindus.

-Because it was responsible for a lot of historical conflict & indicates a significant difference in religious structure. Also an American paper is more likely to Eurocentric.

On the last one, what's likely to be confusing from an American point of view is that it isn't actually Catholic and Protestant groups, but Catholic and non-Catholic, with a large part of the latter being Eastern Orthodox (Ukraine, Greece, Serbia, Romania).

As usual, when discussing popular anthropology, this reveals the writer's prejudices more than anything else.

The ordinary protestant would hate being confused for a Catholic, especially when a chart listing GDPs is concerned.

It's similar to this chart, the world value survey:

http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_publish...

Northern Europe in a corner, and the U.S. an outlier among the western countries.

I am not convinced there is a such a strong pattern though definitely there is correlation: I would have preferred it a bit more if he drew a best fit to drive home his argument.

That said there is no doubt that USA is extremely religious among rich countries.

I don't see an outlier - aside from a muslim cluster at the top left corner, the rest of the data looks quite random.

"Religion was born when the first con man met the first fool." --Mark Twain

Wish this is wrong for USA

They got Russia wrong. As usual.

I hate plots that don't have labeled axes.

What has that got to do with the chart in the article which has clearly labeled axes?

Haha, I see it now. My fault for missing it, although in my defense they're put in a non-standard location.

But the US is poor - sure the normal person may have a lot of money, but that isn't the same as being rich, since they still have the mindset of poor people. You can see that in the amount of stuff people buy - you are apt to buy more if you feel your station in life could fall at any given time, as a hedge against future problems.

It is not so strange that this mentality is so widespread, even if it is divorced from reality, because the US was founded by the absolute low of the lower classes from Europe, and it isn't old enough that most people have lost their roots.

Why not also point out in the graph, most Muslim countries are poor. Muslim countries also seem to have a greater muslim influence in the government too. In the US we've kept the church out of government but tried to keep at least some of the morals at the same time.

This guy definitely has an angle going on. Perhaps instead, the US is a good example of how a moral system based on a higher power instead of man, natural rights, can help create a government and country better than the rest as long as it keeps the church (in my mind the political arm of religion) away from government. Instead of being an anomaly, we are the goal.

> the US is a good example of ... a government and country better than the rest

> Instead of being an anomaly, we are the goal.

:-D

As a non-American I think this is just hilarious. But as an American you probably think that all non-Americans are anti-Americans and, therefore, you don't give a shit.

I think he was just pointing out an alternative conclusion. I think it is an interesting point that the world's only superpower is also unique in the relgion-to-wealth factor. I'm not convinced that's what causes it, but it's certainly possible.

Australian, btw.

-- Ayjay on Fedang

But the author wasn't arguing religiosity makes the country worse. More the other way around, actually.

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