Via Pearsall Helms, via Pandagon, I stumbled upon this blog entry which suggests that Saudis are less religious than Americans (or other Arabs for that matter). The evidence?

...but I was quite surprised to see that American led this list with 45% of its citizens attending services at least once a week. Jordan was right behind at 44, Egypt and Morocco at 43, Turkey at 38, Saudi Arabia 28, and Iran 27...The question of how religious countries are is, of course, more complicated but service attendance is the old standby measure.

...Percentage of citizens who consider themselves religious: 98% Egyptians; 85% Jordanians; 82% Iranians; 81% Americans; and 62% of Saudis.

Yes, a warning sticker should be put on this sort of survey data. In The Churching of America Roger Finke and Rodney Stark offer the following statistics for American church membership:

1776......17% 1850......34% 1860......37% 1870......35% 1890......45% 1995......65%

From this are we to conclude that the United States was a godless republic at its founding? Does this explain the relative religious heterodoxy of early American presidents like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson in contrast to the pious platitudes toward orthodoxy which are mandatory for any contemporary candidate for executive office?¹

I think a more nuanced answer is that in a republic of agrarian farmers church membership is something that is less salient because of the relative isolation of individuals on rural farmsteads or hamlets. The lack of affiliation is simply a function of transporation constraints, that is, church membership tracks the rise of the movement of Americans to urban centers where congregational worship is more natural (recall that Christianity was at its founding an urban religion, the people of the countryside were pagani). Additionally, one has to recall that many of the American states had established churches during the early republic, this does not point to a secular population at all. Thomas Jefferson's assertion: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God," was not a statement that would likely be an expression of the normative attitude toward pluralism. In contrast, a common hostility toward Roman Catholicism (a deviation from Protestant convention far less egregious than "twenty gods" or "no God") persisted deep into this century as (a hostility which began its long recession with the rise of normative Protestant congregational membership in much of America).

The digression above is just to point out that such simple comparisons like this do not map well on to the American common sense understanding of what it means to be "religious" or "nonreligious" (frankly, this often difficult to tease apart in a intranational, as opposed to international, context²). Simple juxtapositions are problematic because they neglect the peculiarities of context. The significance of assenting that one is "religious" has to be weighted with full knowledge of what it means to be religious in that given society. For example, my parents are socially conservative religious people in the United States, but in Bangladesh they are liberal to moderate in their religious and social orientation. Also, on a specific minor note, one might wonder as to the sex ratio of the people being surveyed in some of these nations, in Saudi society I am skeptical that women would attend "religious services" in a formal manner at the same rate, so male:male comparisons might be more informative.

Take home message: simple evidentiary talking points are hard to extract from this sort of data, whether you are on the Right or Left, without caveats, qualifications and analysis.

1 - For me the most persuasive explanation of the relative heterodoxy of the early presidents in comparison to the baseline orthodoxy is that limited sufferage meant that traditional elite openness to doctrinal heterodoxy was reflected at the polls.

2 - To go back to church membership, the Catholic Church tends to have laxer standards in terms of counting people as on the "rolls" of a particular parish or congregation. At the other extreme some Protestant denominations are very strict about purging those who do not maintain fidelity in terms of attendence.