Why did religiosity decrease in the Western World during the twentieth century? Raphaël Franck Laurence R. Iannaccone

Why did religiosity decrease in the Western World during the twentieth century? Raphaël Franck Laurence R. Iannaccone

• Secolarizzazione (+ ricchezza - religiosità) vs Securizzazione ( - rischi - religiosità)
• Dati: la frequenza USA è stabile; in occidente crolla.
• Ip. secu.: la Chiesa spiazzata nei servizi di welfare
• L' ipotesi secu. sembra prevalere anche se l' ip. seco. conserva un suo valore. Ad ogni modo, mentre opporsi a seco. sembra impossibile, opporsi a secu è più realistico e offre l' alleanza dei liberisti
• ......
• Indice
• 0 Abstract
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Data
• 2.1. Long-run data on church attendance 2.1.2. Trends in church attendance 
• 2.2. The causes of the decline in church attendance: the secularization hypothesis and the religion-market model 
• 2.2.1. Income
• 2.2.2. Human capital 
• 2.2.3. Urbanization and industrialization 2.2.4. The welfare state
• 3. Econometric methodology
• 3.1. Baseline specification 
• 3.2. Reverse causality
• 4. Results
• 4.1 Wealth and human capital
• 4.2 Urbanization and Industrialization
• ........
• Abstract
• L' articolo...... It tests the secularization hypothesis, which argues that economic growth decreases religiosity, and the religionmarket model, which considers that governmental interventions in religious affairs have an impact on religiosity.... conclusione: ... Such findings therefore suggest that many individuals were historically observant because churches offered welfare services
• 1. Introduction
• religiosity almost always focus on church attendance,
• some scholars such as Hadaway et al. (1993) have gone so far as to hypothesize a form of invisible secularization in which America’s “actual attendance rate has declined since World War II, despite the fact that the survey rate remained basically stable.”2
• There are actually two major theories of religiosity: the religion-market model and the secularization hypothesis.
• Teoria 1: ..., the development of the welfare state is thought to decrease church attendance by crowding out the churches’charitable activities... (Gruber and Hungerman, 2007; Hungerman, 2005, 2009)
• Indeed, Gill and Lundsgaarde (2004) find there is a negative relationship between public spending and church attendance in cross-sectional data for a sample of countries in 1995.
• following Weber (1905), proponents of the secularization hypothesis such as Chaves (1994) and Bruce (2001) consider that religious participation is “demanddriven”.
• Teoria 2.... McCleary and Barro (2006a) find in a study of religiosity in 68 countries in the 1980s and 1990s that economic development has an overall negative effect on religiosity.
• Still, studies by Finke and Stark (1992), Iannaccone and Stark (1994), and Stark (1999) among others, argue that there is no empirical evidence to support secularization theories.
• The ISSP data unequivocally show that church attendance decreased in the West during the twentieth century.
• the data show that the decline in church attendance was particularly pronounced after the 1960s, when most Western countries experienced high growth rates and the development of the welfare state.
• Before the 1960s, individuals would look to churches to obtain welfare services and insurance against adverse consumption shocks. Afterwards, those individuals for whom personal religion did not have any meaning stopped attending church because the welfare state provided them with a secular alternative for receiving affordable education
• ...
• 6. Conclusion
• This article provides a test of the secularization hypothesis and of the religionmarket model
• span the 1925-1990 period,
• Our results provide scant evidence for the secularization hypothesis. They do not support the claims that the growth in income had a negative effect on religiosity. In addition, they fail to find any negative effect of fertility, education, industrialization and urbanization on church attendance. Conversely, our findings are consistent with the claims of the religion market model, which argues that governmental interventions have an impact on religious participation.
• the development of the welfare state significantly decreased religiosity... churches funded welfare services which the State did not provide; they became secular when the welfare state crowded out
• Policy. there are still countries notably in the Middle East and in Central Asia, where extremist religious movements are pointed out as a major source of political instability and violence. This paper thus suggests that the promotion of a secular welfare state may represent the best way to undermine these movements
• while this paper shows that the growth of the welfare state explains the decline in church participation during the twentieth century, it also calls into question the relevance of the factors, like education and wealth, which have traditionally been used to explain the demand for religiosity. As such, this study suggests that other factors, such as habit formation, may perhaps provide a better explanation of the demand for religion.

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