Religion's Sudden Decline Quotes

“The shift from survival values to self-expression values is linked with increasing tolerance of diversity, an essential component of democracy.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“The vertical dimension reflects the transition from agrarian societies to industrial societies, which brings secularization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and rationalization. These changes are linked with a polarization between traditional and secular-rational values.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“This book claims that secularization has accelerated, but we do not view religion as the product of ignorance or the opium of the people. Quite the contrary, evolutionary modernization theory implies that anything that became as pervasive and survived as long as religion is probably conducive to individual or societal survival. One reason religion spread and endured was because it encouraged norms of sharing, which were crucial to survival in an environment where there was no social security system. In bad times, one’s survival might depend on how strongly these norms were inculcated in the people around you. Religion also helped control violence. Experimental studies have examined the impact of religiosity and church attendance on violence, controlling for the effects of sociodemographic variables. Logistic regression analysis indicated that religiosity (though not church”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Most societies no longer require high fertility rates. Infant mortality has fallen to a tiny fraction of its 1950 level. Effective birth control technology, labor-saving devices, improved child care facilities, and low infant mortality make it possible for women to have children and full-time careers. Traditional pro-fertility norms are giving way to individual-choice norms that allow people a broader range of choice in how to live their lives. Pro-fertility norms have high costs. Forcing women to stay in the home and gays and lesbians to stay in the closet requires severe repression. Once high human fertility rates are no longer needed, there are strong incentives to move away from pro-fertility norms—which usually means moving away from religion. As this book demonstrates, norms concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality are changing rapidly. Young people in high-income societies are increasingly aware of the tension between religion and individual-choice norms, motivating them to reject religion. Beginning in 2010, secularization has accelerated sharply.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“The collapse of Marxist belief systems led to a massive decline of subjective well-being among the people of the former Soviet Empire, a decline that lasted for decades, leaving an ideological vacuum to be filled by rising religiosity and nationalism.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Societies with traditional values tend to emphasize maintaining the family and having many children. This is not just a matter of lip service; a society’s values and its actual fertility rate are strongly correlated. This sets up a self-reinforcing process: traditional values not only inhibit norms that promote economic development; they also encourage high population growth rates that tend to offset the effects of any economic growth that does occur, making it still more difficult to raise per capita income. Conversely, both industrialization and the rise of knowledge societies are linked with declining birth rates, so the pie gets divided up among fewer people, with cultural and economic factors constituting a mutually reinforcing syndrome. The transition from industrial society to knowledge society gives rise to another major dimension of cross-cultural variation on which a wide range of orientations are structured. The horizontal dimension of Figure 2.1 reflects the degree to which a society emphasizes survival values (toward the left of the figure) or self-expression values (toward the right). Postmaterialist values are a core component of self-expression values. Societies that emphasize self-expression values have”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“The vertical dimension reflects the transition from agrarian societies to industrial societies, which brings secularization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and rationalization. These changes are linked with a polarization between traditional and secular-rational values. Societies whose people have traditional religious values fall toward the bottom of Figure 2.1; those with secular-rational values fall near the top. The people of traditional societies emphasize religion; they consider large families desirable and are in favor of showing more respect for authority; they rank relatively low on achievement motivation and oppose divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. The people of other societies consistently fall toward the opposite end of the spectrum on all of these orientations. The people of societies located near the top of this dimension have a secular outlook and show relatively high levels of political interest: state authority is more important for them than traditional religious authority. Traditional values are negatively linked with a society’s level of economic development but positively linked with”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Table 2.1. Percentage saying “Most people can be trusted” Cultural Zone % N Protestant Europe 61 (20,530) Confucian 46 (7,736) English-speaking 42 (10,533) Baltic 31 (4,147) Catholic Europe 28 (22,284) South Asia 25 (10,646) Orthodox 19 (21,321) Islamic 18 (28,990) Sub-Saharan Africa 15 (16,865) Latin America 11 (17,177) Total (160,229) Source: Latest available survey for each country in the Values Surveys. Weber predicted”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Interpersonal trust is an important precondition for developing effective networks, and the Values Surveys consistently shows that the people of Protestant countries have higher levels of trust than those of countries shaped by any other religion. This remained true well into the 21st century, even in an era when few people attend church in Protestant Europe. Table 2.1 shows the results from the latest available survey from each of the 108 countries included in the Values Surveys. As it indicates, the people of Protestant Europe are much likelier to express interpersonal trust than the people of any other cultural zone. In the world as a whole, only 28”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“The emergence of scientific inquiry had already begun this process, but Weber’s emphasis on the role of Protestantism captures a significant factor. Prior to the Reformation, southern Europe was economically more advanced than northern Europe. During the three centuries after the Reformation, capitalism emerged, at first mainly in Protestant countries. In this cultural context, economic accumulation was no longer despised—it was taken as a sign of divine favor. Protestant Europe manifested a remarkable economic dynamism, moving it ahead of a Catholic Europe that had previously been more prosperous. Throughout the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution, industrial development took place mainly in the Protestant regions of Europe and the Protestant-dominated regions of the New World, and by 1940 the people of Protestant countries were on average 40 percent richer than the people of Catholic countries. Martin Luther urged people to read the Bible, and Protestantism encouraged literacy and printing, both of which inspired economic development and scientific study (Becker and Wössmann, 2009). And Protestant missionaries promoted literacy far more than Catholic missionaries”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Thus in the earliest U.S. survey in 1982, 52 percent of the American public said that God was very important in their lives; in 2017, only 23 percent made this choice. In 1982, 83 percent of Americans described themselves as “a religious person”; in 2017, only 55 percent did so. Conversely, in 1982, only 16 percent of Americans said that they “never or practically never” attended religious services; in 2017, 35 percent said that. The decline of confidence in America’s religious institutions was particularly steep, perhaps in response to fundamentalist leaders’ uncritical endorsement of right-wing politicians: in 1982, 46 percent of Americans said that they had “a great deal” of confidence in their country’s religious institutions; in 2017, only 12 percent said this—only about a fourth as many as in 1982.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“religiosity. Although intergenerational population replacement involves long time lags, cultural change can reach a tipping point at which new norms become dominant. Conformism and social desirability effects then reverse polarity: instead of retarding the changes linked with intergenerational population replacement, they accelerate them, bringing unusually rapid cultural change. In the shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms, this point has been reached in a growing number of countries, starting with the younger and more secure strata of high-income societies.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“very important in their lives; among those born between 1994 and 2003, only 11 percent said this.2 These age differences do not reflect some universal aspect of the human life cycle, through which people grow more religious as they age; such age differences are virtually absent in Muslim-majority countries where little cultural change is occurring. But in high-income countries, we find large and enduring differences between the religiosity of older and younger birth cohorts, and the young do not get more religious as they age.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Throughout most of history, religious institutions were able to impose pro-fertility norms. But the causal relationship is reciprocal and the dominant direction can be reversed: if pro-fertility norms come to be seen as outmoded and repressive, their rejection also brings rejection of religion. In societies where support for pro-fertility norms is giving way to individual-choice norms, we find declining religiosity. In societies where religion remains strong, little or no change in pro-fertility norms is taking place. But religiosity has been growing in some societies, particularly in formerly communist societies, and there it has been accompanied by growing emphasis on pro-fertility norms and declining acceptance of individual-choice norms. The declining need for pro-fertility norms opened the way for gradual secularization, with the young being most open to change. Consequently, in high-income countries the younger birth cohorts are much less religious than their older compatriots; among those born between 1894 and 1903, 42 percent said that God was”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“Until recently, natural selection helped impose pro-fertility norms. But a growing number of societies have attained high existential security, long life expectancy, and low infant mortality, making pro-fertility norms no longer necessary for societal survival and opening the way for a shift to individual-choice norms. Normally there is a substantial time lag between changing societal conditions and cultural change. The norms one grows up”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“A long time lag intervened between the point when high fertility rates were no longer needed to replace the population and the point when these changes occurred. People hesitate to give up familiar norms governing gender roles and sexual behavior. But when a society reaches a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security that younger birth cohorts grow up taking survival for granted, it opens the way for an intergenerational shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms that encourages secularization. Although basic values normally change at the pace of intergenerational population replacement, the shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms has reached a tipping point at which conformist pressures reverse polarity and are accelerating changes theyonce resisted. Different aspects of cultural change are moving at different rates. In recent years, high-income countries have been experiencing massive immigration by previously unfamiliar groups. They have also been experiencing rising inequality and declining job security, for reasons linked with the winner-takes-all economies of advanced knowledge societies. The causes of rising inequality are abstract and poorly understood, but”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“starvation, violence, or disease, it assured people that the future was in the hands of an infallible god and that if they followed his rules, things would work out. This gave people the courage to cope with threatening and unpredictable situations rather than give way to despair, increasing their chances of survival. Having a clear belief system is conducive to physical and mental health, and religious people tend to be happier than nonreligious people (R. F. Inglehart, 2018, Chapter 8). The belief system need not be religious; Marxism once provided a clear belief system and hope for the future for many people—but when it collapsed, subjective well-being collapsed along with it.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“advocated celibacy, but these societies have disappeared. Virtually all major religions that survive today instill gender roles and reproductive norms that encourage women to cede leadership roles to men and to bear and raise as many children as possible—stigmatizing any sexual behavior not linked with reproduction. Throughout history, religion has helped people cope with survival under insecure conditions. Facing”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“But intergenerational population replacement has made individual-choice norms increasingly acceptable—initially among the younger and better-educated strata of high-income societies. Experimentation with new norms occurs, and when it seems successful, spreads—with the prevailing outlook gradually shifting from rejection to acceptance of the new norms. As attitudes become more tolerant, more gays and lesbians come out. Growing numbers of people realize that some of the people they know and like are homosexual, leading them to become more tolerant and encouraging more LGBTQ people to come out, in a positive feedback loop (Andersen & Fetner, 2008; R. Inglehart and Welzel, 2005).”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?

“There are several reasons secularization is accelerating. One generally overlooked cause springs from the fact that, for many centuries, a coherent set of pro-fertility norms* evolved in most countries that assigns women the role of producing as many children as possible and discourages divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any other form of sexual behavior not linked with reproduction.”
― Ronald Inglehart, Religion's Sudden Decline: What's Causing it, and What Comes Next?