Least Religious Countries 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Least Religious Countries 2021

worldpopulationreview.com

48 pointsTanakaTarou68 comments

Here are the 10 countries/territories in which religion is least "important in daily life" according to the OP: Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Norway, Czech Republic, Japan, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, Finland, France.

Here are the 10 countries/territories in which religion is most "important in daily life" according to the OP: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Niger, Somalia, Indonesia, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Malawi, Burundi, Mauritania.

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. If I had to randomly choose a country in which I would be forced to live, I would rather it be in the top-10-least-religious group than the in the other (top-10-most-religious) group.

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

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.

> 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'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.

"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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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" ?

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.

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.

Can someone provide context on what it means for Israel to be on this list?

I generally think of Israel as being defined by religion. It's in the "holy land", and it seems like almost every news article about Israel includes something about a religion.

A small group of friends are doing a book club on I/P and I asked a couple of them who’ve been to Israel on birthright trips if they felt the population was religious or not. Their anecdotal perspective was that there is a large group (maybe majority) who are not religious.

Seeing my home country (New Zealand) rank higher in how important religion is I’m wondering how people are interpreting religious.

I’m thinking of friends and family in NZ who (outside of some weddings or funerals) never go to church or (I assume) pray or have a strong personal spiritual life. But these same people would classify themselves as ‘Christians’ simply because they put up a Christmas tree each year.

The same applies to all my Jewish friends I can think of, except that maybe a dinner with friends on a religious day that is more a reason to socialize than for any religious purpose.

Many Israelis identify as being Jewish or Muslim, but for many of them it's a cultural identity or tradition far more than a religion.

> Many Israelis identify as being Jewish or Muslim, but for many of them it's a cultural identity or tradition far more than a religion.

Which is funny because a "cultural identity" is what being 'religious' meant in the past. Religion as a set of practices and beliefs that are 'separate' from everyday life would be quite alien to people in the ancient world, and for most of human history. Having religious and secular/public spheres of life is actually a quite Christian, and especially Protestant, way of view the world.

Tom Holland had a good talk on this:

> Books that take for granted the existence of Greek or Roman religion are everywhere. But did ‘religion’ as we understand the word today actually exist in the ancient world, or is it a word so freighted with Christian - and specifically Protestant - assumptions that to apply it to antiquity is to risk anachronism?

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeCTC_r4vMI

The separation of Church and State makes little sense in the eyes of most worldviews through history. There's a reason why the word "church" is used and not temple or mosque.

it goes to the failure of the survey probably, as it might fail to define what it means to be religious. i.e. there are many many "traditional" Israelis, who might do a form of friday night dinner every week, with kiddush (blessing over wine) and all. They might then go to a movie afterward. They keep kosher in a sense, but not in a strict manner. However, they might not consider themselves "religious" because they are using the term relative to "orthodox" or "ultra orthodox" people, and they don't consider themselves "religious" in that context. Heck, my across the hall neighbors who don't consider themselves religious, due it almost every week with their kids. Personally, my observation is that in the US, we would consider someone who takes part in religious ritual every week to have a significant form of religious attachment.

It might also be that Israel has a large "secular" contigent. Some that consider themselves "jewish" but "agnostic/athiest", and some that don't consider themselves jewish at all. There's a large debate in Israel if this cohort is growing or shrinking. If one just looks at Tel Aviv, it seems huge, but Tel Aviv is a bubble, and there's a large amount of traditional people almost everywhere else. It just so happens that a very large portion of Israle's population is in the tel aviv area.

They have Israel at 30% "feel religious" but also 51% "religion is important in daily life". I imagine "belief in God" would be higher still. It all depends on which question you ask. Perhaps a lot of Israelis are not the "religiously inspired" type but they do believe it to be the truth.

Then what's the point in this list?

I was wondering the same thing. And particularly, why did they choose "feels religious" for their headline stat?

The majority of Israelis are not very religious, and Israel was never intended to be some kind of theocracy. Most of the early Zionists viewed the Jewish people as an ethnic group rather than a religious community. As it turns out, despite their growing influence in Israeli politics, a lot of Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not see Israel as a valid Jewish state because it was not established by the messiah (including some groups that live in Israel and enjoy various public benefits).

I find this really interesting...but can we talk about that opening map? It's something I'm seeing a lot of more recently and wondering if I'm broken or the people making them are. I don't think of myself as colorblind, but I only see 'red and purple' on the map. Why did they use tiny variations of those two colors to cover 10 different categories? Or can some people clearly differentiate the shades easily?

One of my most standard criticisms. It's like people don't spend any time at all researching dataviz color scales.

A quick Google search will bring you to Viridis. Use that or one of the many similar versions in other hues.

Also: the title of the chart is "Least Religious Countries", but the chart is colored so that the top of the scale is "100% Importance of Religion in Daily Life," i.e. the most religious.

So, just for some added context. religion fell of the map in Australia about 5-7 years ago when there was a Royal Commission called into Institutional responses to child sexual abuse. For a few years there you'd hear some really shocking stuff on the radio about terrible events happening to kids at the hands of those in power in the churches. The Australian 2011 census has recorded pretty high engagement with religion, and after that 2016 there was a 10% decrease in direct reporting of affiliation.

Those colors are horrible to me. I’ve got no idea what any country is outside of either redish or purpleish. At least label a few hard to distinguish choices with a numerical value.

I fully agree. And I’ve done those silly “arrange these similar colors” challenges and got pretty good scores. So I’m not sure who this is for.

I doubt this is what they’re doing, but vagueness can definitely be used for political or personal aims.

The palette is so terrible that I wouldn’t rule out deliberate obfuscation; maybe not on the part of the authors, but perhaps on the part of someone else involved.

I’d be curious how they define religion. I consider politics a religion these days.

That is weird because it doesn't offer salvation or answers for questions of existence or purpose or cosmology

Read "Sapiens", by Yuval Harari. He extensively discusses that.

In the US, politics (Democracy) seems to be widely considered a "sacred institution", literally. If you observe how people talk about it in forums, this seems very true to me.

There's one huge gap there which is China, they don't have any data there. If you click on it in their world map it shows NaN%.

Considering their enormous population it matters a lot on the world as a whole.

If you read the article, one of the first sentences has this to say about China:

_When analyzing the WIN/Gallup International polls' data, China is the least religious country. Less than 10% of residents stated that they feel religious in this nation, and over 60% are "convinced atheists." _

Yeah I saw they mentioned it a few times, I'm just surprised they left it out of their own comparions. Because I would indeed imagine it's the least religous overall.

Of course in China a lot of religion is hidden because it's unwanted by the CCP. It was the same in Russia during Soviet rule but you can see the opposite happening now (very strict adherence to religious and traditional morals).

If you think critically about the role of religion, especially in the context of organizing a society around shared ideals, it isn't hard to see how this conclusion was reached.

Include the cult of the expert, scientism, technocracy or politics as an all encompassing belief system. I'd wager that you'll find that many of these non-religious regions are highly devout. Consider the tolerance or lack thereof in some of these examples.

https://observers.france24.com/en/20190626-china-tibet-portr...

https://bitterwinter.org/xi-jinping-portraits-replace-cathol...

https://mosemaryandme.com/products/anthony-fauci-devotional-...

https://hyperallergic.com/554171/anthony-fauci/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche#Religious_features_of_Ju...

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/961507953/without-their-messi...

>This fact seems to place the person committed to scientism in a cognitive predicament much like that of the religious believer, i.e., deeply committed to the eventual revelation of a mystery, a truth that from our current circumstances is in principle unknowable. For scientism, this truth is the belief that we will one day be able to offer an exhaustive inventory of reality in purely natural terms.

http://repository.essex.ac.uk/17390/1/%5E%20Final_Religion%2...

This oft-cited paper¹ shows that almost all measures of societal health are negatively correlated with religiosity, across the world. Of course that doesn’t prove that faith causes such things as teenage pregnancy, crime, and drug abuse, but it’s provocative.

[1] http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.pdf

You can infer the same from the map provided by the link, right?

The map clearly shows that the most religious regions are precisely the most dysfunctional: Africa, Latin America and Southern Asia.

> doesn’t prove that faith causes such things as teenage pregnancy, crime, and drug abuse, but it’s provocative.

As a Latin American I suspect it is the other way around: a society that doesn't solve problems makes people despaired for any solution, even the ones that don't solve anything, like religion. Whe you can't get a remedy then at least you want a placebo.

> even the ones that don't solve anything, like religion

Is this a fact supported by peer reviewed science?

It amazes me how there are still believers. People like being drunk and can suppress reality if there is mob comfort in it.

So many central and west Asian countries less or equally religious to India? Yeah that doesn't make sense.

People often point out how the US is an outlier in religiosity as a western, wealthy nation, but I've always wondered how it would break down if you corrected for its diversity. For example, there are a lot of first and second generation Italian immigrants in the US, how does that population compare to Italy? There are a lot of Mexican immigrants, how does that population compare to Mexico? The older groups from protestant countries, how do they compare to Germany or the UK, and so on.

There is a strong correlation b/w science and non-reglious countries. The case of saudi arabia is interesting. Although it is wealthy the country does not have the capability to manufacture.

Why would they bother though? All they have to do is pump oil and buy whatever they want with the proceeds :) It's one resource that only becomes more valuable (even after we move to 100% green energy oil is still used for production of plastics etc).

If that correlation existed no one would need to worry about middle eastern WMDs.

In the UK we have a welfare state to meet some basic needs; entertainment, sport and consumerism to distract us from existential concerns, the rule of law to provide justice in this life, and education to teach us through comparison that all religions can not possibly be true, by implication none of them are.

In other countries where daily life is grindingly miserable and short; more people might place their hope in a future life and hope for some kind of eventual justice.

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