Photographer: Robert Holmgren
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It's been thought that religion follows poverty because religion provides psychological and emotional support to the poor. But perhaps the opposite is true -- perhaps poverty follows religion because increased religiosity exacerbates the conditions of poverty? There tends to be a high correlation between religion and poverty so either could be the case, but research by Ceyhun Elgin and colleagues at Bogazici University in Istanbul suggest that perhaps we should be looking at the latter more closely.
The first thing they did was to develop a mathematical model, which showed that the idea was plausible. Agents in their model get more satisfaction from charity if they are religious, and so (they found) prefer a lower tax rate. That, in turn, means lower levels of income redistribution. It's all complex stuff and I have to confess that I haven't taken the time to try to understand it, but I'll take their word that this is what they've shown!
Then they to some multiple-regression analyses of real-world data. They found that, after controlling for GDP and also for type of religion (Protestant/Catholic/Muslim), countries with high levels of belief in the afterlife also have high levels of income inequality, low levels of tax, and low levels of government spending.
All this tallies well with what other research has shown. In my own analyses, I found that high levels of prayer are associated with low levels of welfare payments for the unemployed, even after controlling for a range of factors.
Source: Epiphenom
When Karl Marx described religion as an opiate, he wasn't being as critical as many religious apologists seem to assume. If anything, he was praising religion for its ability to alleviate the pain of suffering as he criticized the fact that it failed to eliminate the origins of that suffering. But perhaps Marx was wrong -- perhaps religion causes more of the suffering associated with poverty than we realize.
In that case, religion isn't an opiate that masks the pain of a broken and prevents you from solving the original problem by getting the leg fixed; instead, religion is an opiate that masks the pain even as it transforms your simple fracture into a compound fracture. What's worse, it goes around and breaks all your friends' legs, too, forcing them to turn to religion for relief so it can make those fractures worse as well.
Economic inequality translates into political inequality -- there's nowhere now or in the past where there have been high levels of the former but low levels of the latter. Money is power. Thus when religion correlates with high levels of economic inequality, it also correlates with high levels of political inequality. If religion is feeding economic inequality, then it's also feeding political inequality.
There are few religions that don't depend upon some level of internal inequality in terms of power -- there are a chosen few with religious power and access to religious resources who are then treated as deserving of obedience. I don't think it would be a coincidence that such institutions would end up promoting similar inequality in the wider society around them. In a fully democratic society with little inequality, a religious institution which depended upon extensive inequality would not fare well.
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