Do countries lose religion as they gain wealth?

CBC News: Do countries lose religion as they gain wealth?

Poor nations have the highest proportion of people who identify as religious

The world's poorest nations are also some of its most religious – but does that mean religion can't flourish in a prosperous society?

Gregory Paul doesn't think it can. After constructing a "Successful Societies Scale" that compared 25 socioeconomic indicators against statistics on religious belief and practice in 17 developed nations, the Baltimore-based paleontologist concluded in a 2009 study that "religion is most able to thrive in seriously dysfunctional societies."

Gregory, who is a freelance researcher not affiliated with any institution, compiled data on everything from homicide rates and income inequality to infant mortality and teenage pregnancies and found that the societies that scored the best on socioeconomic indicators were also the most secular.

"The correlation between religiosity and successful societies is somewhere around 0.7. Zero is no correlation and one is a perfect correlation, so it's a really good correlation, and it's not just an accident," he told CBC News. …

… Sociologists have argued that the social benefits of religion take on
greater importance, the fewer resources and the less control people
have over their own lives.

"Religion becomes less central as people's lives become less
vulnerable to the constant threat of death, disease and misfortune,"
Norris and Inglehart write in their 2004 book, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.

"As lives gradually become more comfortable and secure, people in more
affluent societies usually grow increasingly indifferent to religious
values, more skeptical of supernatural beliefs and less willing to
become actively engaged in religious institutions." …

… "The United States is one of the wealthier societies, and yet, it's
still quite religious," said Phil Zuckerman, a sociology professor at
Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who has studied secularization in
Scandinavian countries and wrote a book about it called Society Without God.

"I think it's when you have what we might call 'existential security'
— so, wealth and prosperity are part of that, but by that we [also]
mean the bulk of people in society have access to housing, health care,
jobs. They live in a relatively stable, democratic society without much
in the way of existential threats to their lives or their culture." …

… "Europe and the United States seem to be going in very different directions," said Marcus Noland,
a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics
in Washington, D.C., who has written about religion and economic growth.

"One of the arguments is that the United States has a much livelier
and open market for religion than do, say, countries in Scandinavia,
where you have established churches." [Notably Rodney Stark]

But Zuckerman and other sociologists attribute the U.S.'s outlier status to socioeconomic inequality. …