Prompted by Paul Bloom’s piece in Slate, Does Religion Make You Nice? Does atheism make you mean?, I went out and read Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment , the book which which Bloom references. It’s a very slim volume, and though the author is a sociologist its is very thick on ethnographic observations and personal interviews. The societies in question are Denmark, and secondarily Sweden (the author lived in Denmark, but drew upon a great deal of surveys of Sweden as well). Perhaps I’ll have more to say later, but there are three major points which I thought deserve to be noted:
1) Of Danes who avow Christianity as their religion and identify as such, a large proportion, on the order of 50%, lack supernatural beliefs.* Conversely, in the United States, about a similar proportion of those who have “No Religion” avow belief in god. In fact, it is not implausible that Danes who assert a Christianity affiliation have fewer supernatural beliefs, on average, than Americans who assert total lack of religious identity.
2) Danish lack of religious intensity is likely aided by a communitarian sense of immediate and implicit belonging indicated by a homogeneous shared ethnicity. The author explicitly suggests this at several points, and observes that perhaps with the rise to the fore of Muslim populations of some size and religiosity in Denmark that orthodox Danish Lutheranism will likely see a renaissance. Diversity is strength! (for god)
3) I think despite the survey data on offer, it is important not to accept the contention that Denmark is the absolute inverse of the United States. When Danes were asked to identify the nature of their belief in God in 1999, the results were:
21% said “A personal God”
31% said “A spiritual force”
19% said “I don’t know what to believe”
23% said “I don’t believe there is a God”
6% did not respond
In the United States generous estimates would suggest that 5% do not believe in God, and on the order of 80% believe in a personal God. Denmark is not as secular as the United States is religious. At least on paper by this metric, though the author does make a compelling case that God has been driven into the private domain almost totally across Danish society.
* The sort of Trinitarian orthodoxy which conservative Christians in the United States would demand is probably held by about 5% of Denmark’s population, in which case you have the paradox that 85% of the population voluntarily supports the Lutheran church via taxes without acceding to Christian orthodoxy.
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