How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [24]
According to the University of Chicago sociologist of religion, Andrew Greeley, in an economic explanation, one of the reasons is that as the century progressed a free market of religious competition increased and diversified, causing religions and churches to compete with one another for customers. In a paper delivered to the 1997 American Sociological Association meeting in Toronto, entitled “Pie in the Sky While You’re Alive: Life after Death and Supply Side Religion,” Greeley demonstrated that belief in an afterlife rose from 65 percent to 84 percent among Catholics, and from 24 percent to 40 percent among Jews; the latter statistic is surprising because belief in life after death normally decreases proportionally with education, and Jews are among the most educated of all religious groups. (Protestants remained steady at 80 percent.) Even those with no religious affiliation showed an increase in belief in life after death, from 31 percent to 50 percent. These statistics, says Greeley, fly in the face of our intuitive thoughts about the rise of science and the decline of religion: “A furious battle is raging in social science about religion. Traditional theories have emphasized the decline of religion as part of an inevitable process of ‘secularization.’ In the face of scientific progress, the growth of rationality, and the elimination of superstition, religion is seen retreating, as Durkheim said it would, to the periphery of society.” But Greeley’s data, along with the polls cited above, show that Durkheim, along with Time and Nietzsche, were wrong. Why? Greeley tests an interesting theory of supply-side religion:
They argue that the “demand” for religion is relatively constant since the need of “compensation” because of death and suffering is a given in society and that the different levels of religious behavior that one can observe in various regions of a country like the United States and in various countries are the result of the available “supply” of religious services. In a controlled religious marketplace, they assert, religion becomes a lazy monopoly because the Established Church (or Established Churches as in Germany) need not compete for “customers.” On the other hand, when there is no legal monopoly various “firms” must compete for “customers” and hence provide more industrious personnel and more services. In such situations religious activity increases.
Economic theories of religion date back at least as far as Adam Smith’s 1776 publication The Wealth of Nations, in which he observed that market forces govern churches no differently than they do secular firms. But Greeley looks to a deeper cause that he thinks can be found in two fundamental principles of human biology and psychology, which together form the beginning of our answer to the question of how we believe: “Humankind is born with two incurable diseases, life from which it inevitably dies and hope which hints that death may not be the end. A conviction that life does not end with death is a tentative endorsement of the validity of hope.” The “product” sold by these religious “corporations” competing in the spiritual “marketplace” is life after death. Sales are on the rise. All market indicators are positive. Indeed, Greeley found that only 0.8 percent of Americans call themselves “hard-core atheists” (who believe there is no God or life after death), and a mere 3.4 percent “soft-core” atheists (who are at least “open” to the possibility of God and life after death, but do not presently believe).
Greeley, and his colleague Wolfgang Jagodzinski from the University of Cologne, based their findings on data gathered from 19,381 respondents interviewed from 1973 to 1994 in the General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. They found a statistically significant increase in belief in life after death across generations, especially in the immigrant shift from old-world monopolies to the new-world open marketplace. Greeley explained the demographics of his study:
Unnoticed by scholars