Secularisation may lead to economic development of a country when it is accompanied by a greater respect for individual rights, a study measuring the importance of religion in 109 countries has found.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that a decline in religion influences a country’s future economic prosperity.
While it is well documented that rich countries tend to be secular whilst poor countries tend to be religious, it is still unclear if secularisation causes wealth or the other way around, researchers said.
The subject has long been debated by classic scholars of social science including French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who claimed that religion fades away once economic development has satisfied our material needs.
German sociologist Max Weber has argued that changes in religion drive economic productivity.
Researchers from the Universities of Bristol in the UK and Tennessee in the US used data from birth cohorts from the World Values Survey to get a measure of the importance of religion spanning the entire 20th century (1900 to 2000).
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