The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [93]
European sociologists from the eighteenth century onward, from Karl Marx to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, argued that secular progress killed faith off. It undermined religion’s main precepts by providing believers with an alternative explanation of the world that didn’t rely on angels. And the edifice of costly rules and sacrifices that defined religious communities, providing them with a collective purpose that helped them succeed over the course of human evolution, was taken over by a secular framework of law. Democratic procedure has replaced religion’s menu of norms and taboos, encouraging solidarity through other means.
Secular states gradually took over the provision of education, medical care, and other elements of social insurance like pensions and support for the unemployed. As people became richer, more educated, more socially tolerant, and more politically free, religion lost its purpose. Belief in God declined during the second half of the twentieth century in virtually every Western European country, Japan, and even India. The percentage of Irish who go to church at least once a week fell from 82 percent in 1981 to 65 percent two decades later. In the Netherlands it fell from 26 percent to 14 percent.
STILL, THERE IS A gaping hole in the secularization trend in the industrial world: the United States. Americans remain hooked on God despite spectacular economic progress over the past hundred years. In 2001, 46 percent of Americans attended religious services at least once a week, three percentage points more than two decades earlier. And more than three quarters of Americans reported believing in life after death, 12 percent more than did so in 1947. Religious enthusiasm in the United States is closer to that in less developed countries. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said religion was very important in their lives, according to a poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2002. This was at least twice the share of other developed nations but comparable to rates in Turkey, Mexico, and Venezuela.
The pattern has led a group of American economists and sociologists to posit that the secularization thesis is wrong. If faith declined in other rich countries, it was not due to less demand for religious services but to shoddy supply. Support for religion waned in Western Europe because the Catholic Church was a state-supported monopoly that grew lazy and allowed believers to drift away. Its services became too cheap to matter. By contrast, religion in the United States thrived because of a vibrant diversity that flowered when independence led to the strict separation of church and state. Dozens of churches sprang up to serve the disenchanted market of mainstream Christianity offering high prices and high cohesion. About one in eight American Protestants pray several times a week, compared to about one in thirty Catholics, according to surveys. Protestants are more likely than Catholics to believe in hell and they are more likely to belong to church-related social groups. Twenty-nine percent of Protestants say they try to proselytize strangers at least once a month. Only 11 percent of Catholics do that.
This hypothesis—known as the supply-side or free-market theory of faith—posits that religion survived scientific progress and its alternative narrative of the world because as a club it still offers the real-life benefits to like-minded members willing to sacrifice for their beliefs.
Sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that in 1776 only 17 percent of Americans adhered to a church. But the rate doubled to 34 percent in 1850 and 56 percent in 1926, as scrappy new denominations vied for souls. The most strict and vehement sects, they suggest, like Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, are growing fastest not only because they are aggressive