Religiosity & Income Inequality

The article discussed here was published in Social Science Quarterly, June 2011, entitled “Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity.” The authors include Frederick Solt, Philip Habel, and J. Tobin Grant, professors at Southern Illinois University. I discovered this article because of a recent pique of interest in the sociology of religion & the relationship between economic inequality and the presence of religion in the United States. This article caught my attention because of its method of quantifying religion and its scientific approach to the objective analysis of the data. Also, the authors of this study were asking a lot of questions that I have found myself and others asking frequently: 

In what respects is religion a means of control for the rich? (and what evidence is there for this?), Is religion a consolation for the poor? and How does religion cause inequality to continue?

In sociology, researchers critically analyze religion just like any other organization, social structure, school or business. This is called the Structural-functionalist approach in sociology- to study religion’s function and impact on people and society. The objective of the Solt-Habel-Grant study is to determine to what extent a nation’s economic inequality has an effect on the religiosity of its members. In the first statistical analysis, the researchers evaluated two cross-national surveys from 1981 to 2007, compiled by the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey (WVS/EVS), which measured cultural values and beliefs of over 200,000 people in 76 countries worldwide. They used this data in correlation with the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) to produce a bivariate plot of average religiosity by income inequality.

In the second statistical analysis, the researchers focused on the religious trends in the United States, as it may also be of further help to explain how economic inequality affects religion over time. Since there is not conclusive data on religiosity, or aspects of religiosity (as surveyed by the WVS/EVS) in America on such a time-scale, one of the authors, J. Tobin Grant, developed their own Aggregate Religiosity Index (ARI) which shows the levels of religiosity in America for each year from the 1950’s to 2000’s.

Although it is not the most accurate measure of household income (for reasons the researchers explain), they used the Gini index data for income inequality from the U.S. Census Bureau because it is the only set of data that spans this 50-year period that they were studying.

Grant’s (2008) Aggregate Religiosity Index (ARI) measured religiosity by analyzing both religious attitudes and religious practices. Religiosity was surveyed across the following criteria: religious self-identification, importance of religion to one’s life, importance of god to one’s life, get comfort from religion, attend religious services, take time of pray, etc. The terms which define what it means to be “religious” include belief in God, belief in an afterlife, belief in heaven or hell, belief in sin, or belief in a divine soul.

There are many variables which affect the levels of religiosity in any specific country that need to be taken into consideration. Especially in the cross-national survey, there is much historical analysis that needs to be done to understand precisely if and how greater economic inequality makes people more religious. “Correlation does not mean causation.” Americans have a long-standing tradition of Protestantism which makes America an interesting case study because freedom of religion is not compromised in the United States (due to the First Amendment). With decreased government involvement in religion, people are freer to believe in whatever religion they want, or to not believe.

In studying the link between religiosity and inequality, the researchers used a statistical method called vector autoregression (or VAR). The VAR method is designed to show the causal relationship between two or more variables. The independent (or controlled) variable is economic inequality. The dependent (or measured) variable is religiosity. In the statistical analysis of the cross-national survey, there was an assumption (or hypothesis) that inequality causes people to become more religious. The VAR method allowed them to figure out if religiosity possibly had an effect on inequality. When the data was analyzed, they found that inequality did in fact have an impact on religion, and not the reverse.

First, nations with higher rates of economic inequality have overall higher rates of religiosity. Second, it is not conclusive that nations with higher rates of economic inequality have higher rates of religiosity among the wealthy. Muslim countries are overall highly religious, and ex-Communist nations had considerably low levels of religiosity, as expected. The main conclusion of the research is that greater inequality does increase religiosity, although the ‘relative power theory’ is the only theory that strongly supports this conclusion.

The study cites three theories, which the researchers use to support the evidence found in the surveys: ‘secularization theory,’ ‘deprivation theory’ and ‘relative power theory.’ Secularization theory supposes that as a society becomes more affluent, it starts to reject religion. In other words, as this theory suggests, if a nation’s average (median) income increases as the economic inequality stays constant, religiosity will in effect decline. The authors explain how this is evident on the graph of U.S. religiosity because, as the average household income has steadily increased for more than half a century, religiosity has declined overall. Secularization theory of course does not explain the successive “spikes” in the graph, which correspond to fluxes in average income inequality. 

  Deprivation theory is the idea that “people who meet obstacles in their lives or are in unsatisfactory situations will search for alternative goals to compensate and that religion offers such compensation." “Deprivation was seen by generations of scholars as the cause of both personal religious commitment and sect and cult formation” but it does not adequately emphasize the significance of factors like economic inequality and class. High levels of economic inequality are also the leading cause for higher crime rates. The United States has more people per capita in prison than any other country in the world and that statistic is often coupled with the increasing gap between the poor and the wealthy.

       Relative power theory explains how the wealthy few can spread their religion to the masses more widely when there is greater economic inequality. It is well-known that religious organizations get most of their monetary contributions from wealthy individuals who have invested in the widespread teaching of their beliefs. In conflict theory, we have seen how in places where there are higher rates of economic inequality, the power elite have more control as to what the people of the country do and say.