Many posts have discussed international views of religion.
Ryan Burge on the World Values Survey:
The most recent version of the survey is Wave 7, and it was fielded between 2017 and 2022. It contains 64 total countries, but some don’t have responses to religion questions, so we are left with 54 countries. Which is still a lot.
...
One final scatterplot before I close up today. This one is just a simple replication that is widespread in my corner of the world: specifically, the secularization hypothesis. This is the idea that as a country becomes educationally advanced and economically prosperous, it will be less religious. I created a composite index of religiosity based on a number of questions about religious belief, belonging, and behavior. Then I grabbed a measure of GDP per capita to assess economic prosperity.
What about outliers above the line? One big surprise is Puerto Rico. Its GDP is $40K but their religiosity index is .83. The combination of a strong Catholic Church and the rise of Pentecostalism probably explains a lot of that. Then you’ve got a bunch of Eastern Orthodox countries who are more religious than they should be based on their GDP: Cyprus, Greece, and Romania all fit this pattern.
Where does the United States fit? Well, it’s still an outlier. The religiosity index is .62, and GDP is nearly $70K. In order to fit the trend line in this scatterplot, GDP would need to drop to just $28,000 or religiosity would need to dip to .47.
