Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
World Values, Western Values, and the Fate of Religion

World Values, Western Values, and the Fate of Religion

Last updated on: August 17, 2023 at 6:46 am by Philip Jenkins

0 Comments

World Values, Western Values, and the Fate of Religion 2023-08-17T06:46:40-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I have a long-standing admiration for the very influential scholar Ronald L. Inglehart. A couple of years ago, I posted at this site about Inglehart’s book on Religion’s Sudden Decline. My blog raved about the book, and Inglehart’s editor said he would pass it along to the great man himself, who would be pleased – not realizing that sadly, Inglehart had died just the previous day. That story has nothing directly to do with a recent media piece about Inglehart’s life work, which should be required reading for anyone interested in religion generally, or Christianity specifically, and certainly if they are using a global perspective. It provides a critical vocabulary for any such discussions.

The lengthy story in question appeared in the Economist under the title “Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s: People’s principles were expected to align as countries got richer. What happened?” Because that magazine enforces a tough pay wall, I will summarize the piece here, and I will sketch Inglehart’s underlying theory. I will also suggest some challenges to those ideas, drawing on a case-study that is counter-intuitive, and quite surprising.

Security, Trust, and Values

In the early 1980s, Inglehart was fascinated by the prospect of many millions of people moving from the old world of peasant societies to some kind of modernity, and asked how their values would change in the process. This became the foundation of the much-cited World Values Survey, WVS.

Central to his thought was the theme of security. As the Economist article notes, “the key to his work was to understand that a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups, while at the same time tradition and organized religion offer them solace.” People adhered closely to those older groups and their collective values, while treating other groups – and the larger society – with suspicion and hostility. That was the idea expressed in somewhat more benevolent form by Margaret Thatcher in 1987, when she declared that

There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbors.

Members of Traditional/Survival worlds would agree heartily with that statement, except for the final clause about looking after neighbors. Such societies often look kindly on authoritarian political structures.

Towards Security and Modernity

Over time, security grows. National incomes grow, governments expand their involvement in health and welfare. Society becomes more stable, food supplies more reliable, lives more predictable. People live (much) longer, and infant mortality rates plunge. Growing out of this new security, the new world’s values tend to be secular, individualistic and rational. You can largely trust “others” and need not necessarily dislike or fear foreigners.

The WVS Cultural Map commonly used to track these changes has two axes, respectively Traditional /Secular, and Survival/Self-Expression:

*Traditional values emphasize the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.
*Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. These societies place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable. (Suicide is not necessarily more common.)
*Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security. It is linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.
*Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, growing tolerance of foreigners, gays and lesbians and gender equality, and rising demands for participation in decision-making in economic and political life.

Sweden, to take an obvious example, ranks extremely high in the Secular/Self Expression quadrant. Most African countries tend to be in the opposite Traditional/Survival zone: think Egypt or Nigeria.

I offer here a 2004 version of the famous Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which illustrates that WVS evidence, stressing that much has changed since!

Creative Commons License.

The equivalent 2023 map can be found here – I will not reproduce it, for copyright reasons, but you can find it easily enough.

Over time, countries tend to move towards that upper right quadrant, of Secular/Self-Expression, and the ones already located there, eg Britain, move ever more steadily in that direction over time. Other English-speaking countries have likewise moved decisively towards those Scandinavian exemplars of “Protestant Europe.” In the most recent iteration, the United States has finally made that transition, from its rather anomalous position as a more Traditional/religious society, as it has moved much closer to the values of secular Europe. In this view, “Western values” – secular and individualistic – do not represent some kind of universal Great Truth, but rather are what naturally develops from these larger social and economic processes.

As I argued in my 2020 book Fertility and Faith, total fertility rates (TFR) offer a superb gauge of these changes, and do a fine job of predicting shifts in religious belief and practice, whether measured by nation or region. To maintain its population, a society needs a TFR of 2.1, and anything below that constitutes low fertility. Sweden’s rate cratered at 1.50 in 1999, and rose only to 1.66 by 2020. Not surprisingly, US fertility rates have suddenly started looking very Scandinavian indeed. And as I posted at this site a while back, we witness a steep “decline of death,” as death becomes something that is an ever less familiar part of daily existence. That change is a crucial component of modernity, and just think through the religious consequences.

Presumably, then, if we take a long enough perspective, all countries will eventually end up in that upper-right section. And indeed, the proportion of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has collapsed over the past forty years, due in no small part to qualitative improvements in China. But the point of the Economist story is that the move in values has been slower and patchier than the model predicts, as many countries that were Traditional/Survival have doubled down on that, including states like China that try to enforce those traditional outlooks with fearsome modern technology. Some countries, such as Venezuela, have retreated towards the Survival. Russia has moved towards the religious, as well as the Traditional/Survival. “Obstacles and detours” are much in evidence.

Security, Faith, and Secularization

Let me focus here on the implications for religion, which are actually not as explicit in Inglehart’s theory as we might like. The theory certainly used religion as a gauge, but look at those axes, so that Traditional and Secular counterpose each other. Obviously, the two words are not exactly opposites. A society can be very traditional without necessarily being religious. The Inglehart-Welzel list of criteria for defining these various categories (see above) is distinctly European and post-Christian, in ways that often do not mesh well with other faith traditions. It is also very much of its time. These are not fundamental value questions valid in all times and places, but rather the issues and concerns that happened to be agitating Euro-Americans in the late twentieth century.

Often too, the difference between “old” and “new” model societies involves the basic definition of what religion is. In a more Secular/Self-Expression society, religion is something you do, what you believe. In a Traditional/Survival society, it is what you are, almost a tribal identity. That is nothing to do with any inherent characteristics of the religion itself, it is just how it operates in a society marked by particular values.

Generally, though, the model does offer a good gauge of secularization, and especially if you trace how countries move during those intervening five year periods between waves. You clearly see this movement in Europe and Latin America, and the convergence of Protestant and Catholic Europe – or at least, the regions that could once be plausibly labeled with those religious terms. Over time, the grand shift of the model – crudely, let’s call it modernization or development – ensures that older religious systems give way to very different structures. Religious societies become secular, whether we measure that by statistics for belief or practice.

Much of the change reflects new roles for women, who find employment and experience education. Those changes in turn bring them into the work force, where they find a particular kind of existential security, and where life away from husband, family or clan becomes a possible option. Smaller families are far less involved in religious affairs. As I would argue, fertility and faith decline together, usually so rapidly that it is very hard to determine which factor hits first, and affects the other.

Like I say, this is a very rich set of theories, but the absolute foundation is that of security, and just as much, the feeling of being secure. Closely related to that is the sense of trust, or rather of trust in this world and its people. Look at trust, look at security, and you have a great foundation for trying to understand the social structures of religion.

So should we start drafting obituaries for religious faith? A couple of caveats are needed. I have already mentioned the first, which is that the latest WVS data seem to show real backtracking in this long term process. That might be a blip, or not.

Also, “religion” is not a simple one size fits all category, something that is either there or not. There are different kinds of religion, or different kinds of system that can be classified as religious, depending on local approaches. Religions are dynamic, and they adapt – commonly, while firmly denying that they are doing any such thing, and asserting that they are just doing what they have done since time immemorial.

Sweden. Sweden??

Finally, might the move to that individualist/secular Utopia be a self-limiting cycle? Look at Sweden, which I have cited earlier as the textbook model for secularization, for individualism and for values based on self-expression. As an unavoidable part of that package, Sweden’s fertility rate fell to unsustainably low levels, which in turn meant bringing in lots of immigrants to keep the society functioning. Most of those migrants came from societies that were distinctly non-secular. Twenty percent of Sweden’s population is now foreign born, and the Muslim share of overall population is at least eight percent. (By way of comparison, the current US proportion of foreign-born is below fourteen percent, but the non-Christian share is much smaller). A secular liberal society thus creates the inevitable conditions for the increasing role of non-secular and (often) non-liberal populations.

Conversely, the old stock society reacts to that change by reverting to non-liberal and quite Traditional/Survival policies. The most significant development in that country in recent years has been the dramatic rise of the Sweden Democrats, a party with fascist antecedents, although it has since cleaned up its act quite considerably, purging most of the blatant Nazis and skinheads. Even so, SD has parlayed its anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural credentials into an impressive 21 percent of the national vote, making it the country’s second largest party. SD provides essential outside support to the Swedish ruling coalition created last year, an alliance of three other firmly Rightist parties.

The Sweden Democrats used to be more explicit about their roots, using pictures of burly Viking warriors with shields inscribed “Keep Sweden Swedish!” (You can trace their evolving symbols and iconography here). Or to return to the phrase I quoted earlier, “a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups.” Hold on, wasn’t that meant to be something we found in those old style poor Traditional/Survival societies, and not the modernized secular individualistic ones? Not in places like, well, Sweden? Now, the SD are absolutely not a religious party in any sense, and they represent no kind of Christian revival. But they certainly do manifest an unabashed revival of ethnocentric Traditional/Survival values of a kind that are surprising for prosperous Europe.

In passing, I am always amused to hear Americans hymn the praises of “Scandinavian social democracy,” which indicate that they (the hymners) have managed to miss the last couple of decades of that region’s history.

To take a related example, Germany is another very prosperous and developed country that stands high in the Secular/Self-Expression quadrant. Exactly like Sweden, it is also a land of historically low fertility and high immigration, which has opened the door to a far Right populist party very much like the Sweden Democrats, in the form of the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. AfD is in the news currently as it is running at an alarming 21 percent in the polls, which is coincidentally the share of the vote that SD picked up last year in their country. A panicked German government is seriously considering banning AfD. Yes, obviously, Germans don’t want any kind of Nazi revival, but more immediately, they don’t want their party system to end up like Sweden’s.

In such instances, modernization and development demand massive social changes, which undermine people’s sense of trust and security, which in turn makes them rethink the values that led to that modernization and development in the first place. Threats and insecurity take many forms.

So maybe the processes are not as linear as we might initially think, still less inevitable.

Previous Post

August 16, 2023

Infinite Fountain of Light: Reclaiming Jonathan Edwards from the Theobros

Next Post

August 18, 2023 Medieval Christians’ Most Burning Questions Answered: “Why do we say ‘Amen’ to end a prayer?”

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"The TV sitcom BEWITCHED was an old favorite of mine"

philipjenkins

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"From now on whenever I see a clipper ship, see a certain brand of Scottish ..."

Terry

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"There are no such things as witches. They were just unmarried or elderly women with ..."

Dot Newkirk

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"The book of THE KEEP is wonderful, but I was not such a fan of ..."

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was the last king of Israel before the Assyrian conquest?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jehoahaz Hoshea Shallum Amon