What accounts for the apparent rise in agnosticism, atheism, and other forms of irreligion in economically advanced nations and the corresponding decline of religion? Some sociologists have proposed what is known as "secularisation theory" to explain this. Put briefly, secularisation theory holds that societies with increasing levels of education, scientific knowledge, and technological attainment will also experience lower levels of religious belief and rising unbelief. To simplify, this perspective posits that science and education encourage decline in religion. (Secularisation theorists differ over exactly why and how that is supposed to happen.) In that simplified form, secularisation theory has an obvious and very serious problem: the United States is the most educationally, scientifically, and technologically advanced country in the history of the world, and yet religious belief remains quite high.
In response to this major defect, some sociologists have formulated more refined and elaborate versions of secularisation theory that attempt to take into account the apparent uniqueness of religiosity in the United States. Other social scientists have concluded that religious trends in developed countries cannot be adequately explained by secularisation as such and have suggested other theoretical approaches.
Rodney Stark and other social researchers have developed what they call the compensator theory of religion as an alternative to secularisation theory. The condition of living in a world with both resources and dangers leads humans, acting rationally, to seek rewards and avoid costs. Compensators, sometimes available as alternatives to immediate rewards, are defined as "postulations of reward according to explanations that are not readily susceptible to unambiguous evaluation". Compensators include explanations, understood as "statements about how and why rewards may be obtained and costs are incurred". One class of general compensators is made up of those supported by supernatural explanations, and religion is said to refer to systems of general compensators based on supernatural assumptions. From this sociological perspective, religion thus succeeds to the extent that it meets human needs.
William Sims Bainbridge has written a paper applying the compensator theory of religion to an exploration of the possible sources of atheism. The paper has been published online in The Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and is available through the journal’s home page at no cost. (Free registration is required.)
Dr Bainbridge outlines an argument based on compensator theory that atheists, compared to religious believers, have fewer and weaker social obligations. He finds atheism to be more common among men than among women, and more common among single or cohabitating persons than among married or divorced persons. Atheism is also more common among those with no children under 18 than among those with one child, and much more common than among parents of two or more children. A very strong negative correlation was found between the proportion of a country's population professing atheism and the fertility rate. The higher the percentage of atheists in the population, the lower the nation’s fertility rate.
These results must be handled with great caution, however, because the source of most of the data was an international online survey conducted in 2001. The data, therefore, do not comprise a random sample and do not represent the population as a whole. The results refer only to the actual respondents and are not generalisable to a larger population. Dr Bainbridge used this survey sample largely because, in a true random sample, the number of respondents who say that they are atheist is so small that the sample size would have to amount to tens of thousands of individuals in order to obtain enough atheists to generate reliable estimates for the entire population of atheists. Such a large overall sample size results in an extremely expensive survey. The online survey, by contrast, had a relatively high proportion of atheist respondents, and so was more suitable for exploring possible sources of atheism from a sociological perspective.
Dr Bainbridge forthrightly acknowledges the limitations of the survey data. His findings are also supplemented with more conventional sample data when possible. He admittedly presents an exploratory investigation of sources of atheism. Sociologists of religion have thus far devoted little direct attention to atheism, in part because of the lack of representative survey data. Clearly, larger random surveys and more in-depth study are called for.
One particularly interesting aspect of Dr Bainbridge’s study is that he incorporated the recent fertility collapse in advanced industrialised societies into his provisional theory of atheism.
The relevance of the fertility collapse to secondary compensation is that a failure to reproduce means fewer social relationships carrying family obligations. This tendency could be magnified in societies with a welfare state or where at least many of the former nurturance obligations people have had with each other are taken over by the state or by such things as health maintenance organizations, extensive public education, and the mass entertainment industry. To reduce secondary compensation, the state does not need to fulfill the obligations it takes on; it merely needs to take those obligations away from its citizens. I am suggesting the possibility of a pernicious feedback loop, in which a decline of religion leads to reduced fertility, which in turn reduces the secondary compensation that is at least partly responsible for religion’s strength.
If this view is correct, this would appear to be how atheism grows: As the state has taken away social welfare functions formerly performed by such smaller social groups as families and churches, inter-personal social obligations have declined; then religious allegiance declines and atheism grows, followed by a decline in fertility, leading to further decrease in social obligations and religion and increased atheism. Pernicious feedback loop indeed.
This would appear to have implications for the political preferences associated with adherence to atheism. It also has implications for the view that the self-aggrandising, self-proclaimed omni-competent state is the beast of Revelation 13. But those are other discussions.
(Just to be clear, I should say that my view of both secularisation theory and compensator theory is that they are sociological tools that may have some usefulness in understanding religion from a human perspective. As a Christian, I am persuaded that the ultimate truth about religion is God’s revelation of himself in Christ; but that does not prevent me from recognising that helpful insights can be obtained from sociology–or economics or anthropology or statistics, etc.)
Finally, William Sims Bainbridge does not mention any academic credential or appointment in his paper. The only contact information is an e-mail address. He has a web site, which contains no clear indication of his own religious beliefs, if any. The CV posted there says that he has a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard.
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