Elsevier

Evolution and Human Behavior

Volume 38, Issue 5, September 2017, Pages 604-615
Evolution and Human Behavior

Original Article
Testing theories of secularization and religious belief in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.01.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Several theoretical approaches have been proposed to explain variation in religiosity, including versions of secularization hypotheses, evolved cognitive biases, and cultural transmission. In this paper we test several theories that aim to explain variation in religiosity and compare them in a representative sample collected in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (N = 2022). These two countries represent a natural experiment in religiosity; despite their high level of historical, institutional and cultural similarity, their populations differ markedly in the rate of religious belief. We examine the predictive power of cognitive biases (anthropomorphism, dualism, teleology, mentalizing, and analytic thinking); institutional insecurity; and exposure to credibility displays of belief in childhood on various factors of religious belief. We find that individual differences in cognitive biases predicted 8% of the variance belief in God, but predicted 21% of the variance in paranormal beliefs and almost no variance in religious participation. Perceived institutional insecurity explains little variance in any of these variables, but cultural transmission, measured as exposure to credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) and church attendance in childhood, predicted 17% of the variance in belief in God and 30% of religious participation, and mediated 70% of the difference between these two countries in belief in God and 80% of the difference in religious practice. These findings suggest cognitive biases may explain the existence of belief in the supernatural generally, but cultural transmission through credible belief displays is a more plausible explanation for why people adopt and maintain a specific set of religious beliefs and practices.

Introduction

Religion exists in some form or another in every human culture and appears to have done so for all of human history (Bellah, 2011, Wright, 2009). This observation has led to several theories about the evolutionary origin of religion in the human species (e.g. Atran, 2002, Barrett, 2004, Boyer, 2001, Boyer, 2008, Johnson, 2015). Many of these theories claim that religion is a natural by-product of our evolved cognition (see Atran & Norenzayan, 2004)—it is a consequence of how we perceive and interpret the world around us.

Despite the cultural prevalence of religion, not everyone in every culture is religious and there are an increasing number of cultures that claim a non-religious majority (see Lanman, 2012, Zuckerman, 2008). This seems to fly in the face of the ‘religion is natural’ hypothesis and has sparked some debate over whether anyone can truly be an atheist (Barrett, 2010, Bering, 2010, Geertz and Markússon, 2010). Though an evolved capacity for religion does not preclude individual differences in religiosity (see Willard & Norenzayan, 2013), the religious landscape is much more complex than this (Gervais et al., 2011, Norenzayan and Gervais, 2013).

Alongside theories looking at the biologically based evolutionary origin of religion, a different set of theories have developed examining the variation in religious decline (e.g. Bruce, 2002, Norris and Inglehart, 2004, Stark and Bainbridge, 1985). These theories are founded in ‘the secularization hypothesis’, which proposed that as levels of economic development, education, and modernization increased, religious beliefs and practices in the general population would decline (see Berger, 1967, Durkheim et al., 1912, Martin, 1968, Weber, 1904, Wilson, 1966). Other perspectives have drawn on cultural transmission and evolution to account for this variation in belief (Atran and Henrich, 2010, Gervais et al., 2011, Norenzayan et al., 2016).

All of these theoretical perspectives focus on different aspects of religion and they should not be seen as rival hypotheses. Rather, they are likely to all uniquely contribute to the mosaic of traits that make up religious belief. Up until now, published studies have focused on showing how these factors individually play a role in the explanation of religiosity. However, no study has looked at these theories together and empirically gauged the relative contribution each of these theories makes to the overall variation in religious belief. Instead of asking whether there is evidence to support the significant effect of any given theoretical perspective taken in isolation, a more fruitful approach to understand religion and religious decline would be to evaluate the magnitude of these effect within a single sample. This is the goal of the present study—to look at which components of religiosity are explained by each theory and examine the strength these theories have in predicting these components. We do so in the unique environments of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, two historically and culturally very similar countries with marked differences in religiosity.

There is evidence to support some causes of secularization put forth by secularization theorists. Education does seem to contribute to lower levels of religiosity (Hungerman, 2014). This effect appears to be stronger for non-science education than for science education (Kimball, Mitchell, Thornton, & Young-Demarco, 2009), and is weaker for people who were raised in highly religious families (Ganzach, Ellis, & Gotlibovski, 2013).

More support has been found for versions of the secularization hypothesis that take the role of religious emotions into account (Gorski, 2000, Gorski, 2003, Sommerville, 1998, Sommerville, 2002). This includes the noteworthy work of Norris and Inglehart (2004) who reframed the secularization hypothesis as the existential insecurity hypothesis. Religion here is taken as an emotional buffer against the existential fears of things such as death, disease and destitution. As societies modernize, most begin to address the roots of these fears by making the environment more secure with institutional programs like insurance, healthcare, and welfare. The existential insecurity hypothesis gives a functional explanation for the variation in the effects of development on religiosity around the world. According to this hypothesis, religion should decline in places where secular institutions reduce the fear of personal catastrophes (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). Correspondingly, there is some evidence to suggest that suffering can increase religiosity (Gray and Wegner, 2010, Sibley and Bulbulia, 2012), which supports the idea that reducing suffering (or the fear of suffering) may reduce religiosity.

Cognitive bias theories claim that religious beliefs are by-products of our innate cognitive systems (see Atran and Norenzayan, 2004, Barrett, 2004, Bloom, 2005). These theories propose that supernatural beliefs reliably emerge from how we perceive and interpret the world around us. Supernatural beliefs exist because they are based in intuitions that arise out of the heuristic functions of theory of mind (Barrett, 2004, Guthrie, 1993). The idea that religion is based in intuition has been supported with a couple of recent studies. These studies found people who are less intuitive and more analytic are less religious on average, and that making people think analytically reduces their ratings of religiosity (Gervais and Norenzayan, 2012, Shenhav et al., 2012).

Cognitive bias theories suggest that the number of people who follow a specific set of religious traditions can be pushed around by culture, but most people will retain some supernatural beliefs (including belief in God) even if they consider themselves ‘non-religious’ (Geertz & Markússon, 2010). Those who maintain supernatural beliefs will be, in part, determined by individual differences in the strength of these cognitive biases (Willard & Norenzayan, 2013). Cognitive biases should not be able to explain why one population is more religious than another—this is the responsibility of culture (see Gervais et al., 2011). These theories aim to explain why supernatural beliefs including religious ones exist in every culture across human history. As potentially biologically based mechanisms, we should expect variation in how prone people are to these intuition to predict variance in religiosity across population, but not between them, particularly in highly related populations.

The third set of theories—theories based on biases for cultural learning—broadens the potential reasons for individual religiosity by introducing a different type of cultural factor: the exploitation of evolved cultural learning mechanisms (Atran & Henrich, 2010). Though many different cultural learning mechanism are likely at play (e.g. Henrich and Boyd, 1998, Henrich and Gil-White, 2001), one in particular, credibility enhancing displays (CREDs; Henrich, 2009), deals specifically with the type of non-verifiable beliefs that make up much of religion (Willard, Henrich, & Norenzayan, 2016). This theory proposes that when a new member of a culture—such as a child—is faced with learning a new belief, that new member will look at how others behave to determine the truth and importance of learning that belief among other potential beliefs. Behaviors that credibly display the authenticity of that belief will increase the likelihood that the learner will adopt and maintain that belief. Participating in potentially costly rituals—such as church attendance, tithes, and sacrifices—signals to others you hold your religious belief as both true and important. This, in turn, increases the chance that those beliefs are adopted and maintained by the next generation (i.e. increases the fidelity of transmission).

The Czech Republic and Slovakia offer a unique opportunity to test the role of these different theories in religious belief and secularization. These two countries share similar recent histories, cultures, languages, and institutions. They were the same country from 1918 to 1993, when they peaceably split into two separate republics. Soviet communists ruled both countries between 1945 and 1989. Despite this, their religious trajectories in the past half-century have differed dramatically; Slovakia maintains a religious majority while the Czech Republic is one of the least religious countries in the world. Notably, the Czech Republic seems to be the outlier in the region; most other previously communist countries are similar to Slovakia in that they maintained high levels of religious belief after the fall of communism (Froese, 2004). The similarities between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, paired with their enduring difference in religious belief, make them an ideal natural experiment for testing theories of religious belief.

The Czech Republic and Slovakia do have some basic demographic differences. The Czech Republic is more urban, has a higher population density, and is somewhat wealthier with a more educated population than Slovakia. Slovakia also has a higher unemployment rate than the Czech Republic (Eurostat, 2016). Though some of these factors, especially urbanity and education, have been related to declines in religious belief (see Albrecht & Heaton, 1984), the differences here are not large enough to account for the vast difference in religiosity (Froese, 2005). What is more, the Czech Republic is by no means the wealthiest or the most urban country in Europe, yet it still boasts rates of disbelief that are much higher than its more economically developed neighbors.

There are some important historical differences between these two countries. The communist regime actively suppressed both public and individual religiosity during their rule in Czechoslovakia and tried to substitute it with the party-oriented Marxist ideological propaganda. Religion played only a minor role in public life during this time, and two generations in both countries had limited exposure to religion and religious rituals. However, in Slovakia and Poland, the Roman Catholic Church served as a symbol of opposition and sanctuary against the oppressing regime. This was not the case in what is now the Czech Republic. This tie with national identity and resistance appears to have maintained the importance and credibility of the church during the communist oppression. This was manifest in the religious revivals in these two countries in the 1990s. In contrast, the Czech Republic showed only a minor temporary increase after the fall of the iron curtain, and has continued to decline in recent years (Hamplova and Nespor, 2009, Lužný and Navrátilová, 2001, Minarik, 2014, Nešpor, 2004).

A history of skepticism towards Catholicism may partially explain why the communist suppression of religion had such a different impact in ongoing religiosity in the Czech Republic than it did in either Slovakia or Poland. The Czech people had a history of separation between church and state and were skeptical of the political power of the church (Hamplova and Nespor, 2009, Lužný and Navrátilová, 2001, Minarik, 2014, Nešpor, 2004). Still, despite this history of skepticism, 76.4% of Czechs considered themselves Catholic and 93.9% belonged to a religious group as recently as 1950 (See Fig. 1.1) (Hamplova & Nespor, 2009). Even in 1991, shortly after the fall of communism, 43.7% of Czechs claimed a religious affiliation in the nation census. This suggests that a large portion of adult Czechs today were raised in religious households or their parents were raised in religious households. Most of the abandonment of religion has happened in the past 65 years.

Section snippets

Current research

Whatever the potential historical impacts on the religiosity in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the present day difference can be exploited to assess different theories of religiosity. With this goal in mind, we collected individual difference measures on perceptions of equality and security in government institutions, cognitive biases (anthropomorphism, dualism, teleology, mentalizing, and analytic thinking), and credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We

Analysis 1: demographic model

Three regression models were run to test the impact of demographic variables on three outcome variables: belief in God, paranormal belief, and religious practice. These models contained relevant demographic variables (see Table 1) to assess how much variance is explained by these demographics alone. We were specifically interested in the role of income, level of education, and urbanity (measured as size of place of residence) in explaining variance in religious belief and practice. These serve

Analysis 2: institutional insecurity and the existential insecurity hypothesis

Next we turn to another type of secularization hypothesis: the existential insecurity hypothesis (Norris & Inglehart, 2004). As secular institutions replace many of the roles of religious institutions, and systems like welfare and healthcare assuage basic fears, the importance of religion in people's lives declines. One immediate problem with applying this hypothesis to explain differences between these countries is that both the Czech Republic and Slovakia have very similar institutions (

Analysis 3: Cognitive biases as a basis for belief

In this section we look at the impact of analytic thinking and cognitive biases on religious practice, belief in God, and paranormal belief. Model 1 adds a measure of analytic thinking to the base model to test if higher levels of analytic thinking leads to lower levels of religious belief (Gervais and Norenzayan, 2012, Pennycook et al., 2012, Shenhav et al., 2012). Model 2 includes dualism, anthropomorphism, teleology, and mentalizing. Analytic thinking is left in and functions as a control

Analysis 4: credibility enhancing displays

An individual's intuitive sense of the supernatural or the functional roles religion plays in reducing existential insecurity might explain some part of religiosity, but much of the strength and believability of these beliefs comes from social learning cues (Gervais et al., 2011). New members of society learn what to believe and the importance of these beliefs from observing their parents and their broader social network. At the same time, there is variability in the fidelity with which

Analysis 5: combined model

In the final analysis we combine all the predictors into one model to see if the relevant predictors keep their explanatory power. This allows us to test the prediction that these theories all independently contribute to religiosity. We look that the overall variance explained, and predictors of who remains religious or converts to religion as an adult.

General discussion

The theories presented in this article all contribute to explaining the package of beliefs and practices we call “religion” across these two countries in different ways. Cognitive biases predict individual difference in supernatural beliefs, but not participating in religious practice in our sample. The idea that certain innate biases leave us prone to supernatural belief explains why religion would arise in every culture but cannot explain the persistent diversity in religious beliefs and

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ara Norenzayan and Justin T. A. Busch for their helpful comments on this project and paper. This research was funded by SSHRC Insight Grant 435-2014-0456 “The Cognitive Origins of Religious Belief and Disbelief” to Ara Norenzayan. A.W. is grateful for the financial support provided by the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) at the University of British Columbia (SSHRC 895-2011-1009).

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