American Christians like to connect their god with American democracy, either simply assuming that the latter exists because of the former or even explicitly arguing that the latter depends on the former. But what do the cold, objective facts tell us? According to a study from the University of Z�rich, the less important people rate "God" as important in their lives, the more democratic their country tends to be... and vice-versa.
The relationship is statistically significant, with an r-squared of 0.16 (which means that about 16% of the variation in god-belief can be 'explained' by variation in democracy - or vice-versa). ...As usual, those dastardly Scandinavian countries, with their strong social welfare programmes, liberal morals, and strong social ethics, come out on top on both scores.
Just a note on the data. The religion numbers come from Waves 4 and 5 of the World Values Survey (I used Wave 5, unless a country was only represented in Wave 4). I used the "Importance of God" question because it's the only one asked consistently in both Waves.
The democracy number "uses 100 empirical indicators to measure how well a country complies with the three democratic principles of freedom, equality and control as well as the nine basic functions of democracy" (Science Daily).
Source: Epiphenom
The findings here are completely consistent with a multitude of other studies which have found that lower rates of religion correlate strongly with lower rates of crime and corruption, more wealth, health, and happiness, better science literacy and education, less inequality, generally less social dysfunction and... even more telephones. That last one is a curious correlations, but it suggests greater social connections and greater penetration of technology and modernization in daily life (not just society and industry generally, but how people life day-to-day).
It's unlikely that there is a direct connection between the two -- it's more likely that both are the products of other factors, like greater wealth, greater modernization, and lower inequality. However, it's plausible that there are some implicit connections as well. After all, it's common for religions to be authoritarian to varying degrees. Most religions we have originated from times when authoritarian systems were the norm across all of society, so that's hardly surprising.
It might thus be the case that growth in real democracy and real equality weakens people's acceptance of unequal, authoritarian religious systems. The less people accept "kings" (literally or metaphorically) in politics or economics, the less they may be willing to accept any sort of king in religion -- and so long as popular religion has nothing better to offer, this would lead to the dropping of religion entirely.
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