The issue of religion and politics has once again come up in the hot air. The violence surrounding Rasmus Paludan’s public Koran burning is an example. Another is the religious basis behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the support of the Russian Orthodox Church for this abuse.
We also have the ongoing discussion about religious free schools in our country and in the United States, the Christian right’s strong support for the increasingly anti-democratic Republican Party. One can also point to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which three decades ago was mainly a secular affair but which is now to a very large extent based on religious beliefs.
These examples indicate that one must ask oneself the question of whether it is good to mix religion and politics. Will society get better if you connect these things or is it the other way around? Those who drive the claim that we should allow religious independent schools often argue that religion has a positive impact on society.
What is a good society can of course be discussed from a variety of perspectives. What has come to have a large place in social science research is to start from the measures established by the UN, among others for what is to be counted as human welfare. These are based on Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s capability theory. Sen, who is both an economist and a philosopher, bases his theory on the fact that human welfare should be seen as people’s opportunities to realize their own life choices. Poverty, inequality and lack of access to education are then all seen as examples of low human welfare.
The more religious practice in a society, the lower people perceive the moral standard in society.
Another measure that has been widely used is the extent to which people consider themselves satisfied with their lives. This measure is used for “The world happiness report” which has been published annually since 2012 by the UN’s Sustainable development solutions network.
Together with three colleagues from other Nordic countries, I wrote a special report last year for this publication where we had the task of answering the question. why the Nordic countries year after year placed at the very top of these measurements. None of the answers we gave were about a significant religious practice.
Almost any measure you use In terms of human welfare, the Nordic countries are among the foremost. At the same time, it can be stated that these countries are also among the most secularised in the world. This gives an indication that secular societies are good at creating a good life for their citizens. People in secular societies tend to be happier with their lives than people living in societies strongly influenced by religions.
If you look at measures such as the degree of corruption in a country or the degree of trust between people, you see the same type of connection. Societies with a large proportion of people who profess faith in some god and who participate a lot in different kinds of religious practice are usually more affected by corruption and low trust between people. In a study with survey data from 70s countries The researchers found that how much the individual claimed to be a religious person “tended to promote a wide range of corrupt behavior”.
The issue of trust is perhaps particularly interesting. When people answer the question of whether they believe people can be trusted in general, they probably base their answer on a general evaluation of the general moral standard of the society in which they live. And then the result is that the more religious practice in a society, the lower people perceive the moral standard of society to be.
These connections exist although at the overall level of society, while giving an indication that linking politics and religion is probably not a good idea, they do not provide a definitive answer as to whether this connection also exists at the individual level. Do you become a higher moral, tolerant, truthful, forgiving and ethical person by practicing religion or is it the other way around?
There is now a lot of experimental research in the social sciences where subjects have to deal with ethically complicated situations. For example, they can choose to either just try to benefit themselves at the expense of the other participants, or to choose to cooperate for what is best for the group or act altruistically. A comprehensive review of this researchwhere one has tried to see if there is a difference between religious and secular people, finds no significant differences at all.
In other words, it is not so that the participants in these experiments who claimed to be religious act less selfishly than those who are secular. An experimental study from the United States also finds that religious students who participate in these experiments tend to be less truthful than secular ditto. Other studies find no difference in ethical-moral behavior between religious and secular people.
A particularly interesting study has compared children who grow up in religious homes with those who grow up in secular. The study is based on over 1,000 children in six countries (Chile, Jordan, China, Canada, Turkey and the United States). The result of this study is that children who grew up in secular families in all of these countries were more altruistic, and less prone to revenge. Studies from the United States show that children who grow up in religious families tend to to harbor more racist views and be more nationalistic than those who grow up in secular families.
All in all, there is not much to suggest that it is a good idea to link religion and politics. Against this, it can possibly be argued that the two ideological orientations that have hurt the most in modern times, Stalin’s communism and Hitler’s Nazism, were both atheistic. But it can also be argued that they were in themselves just new denominations.
However, my argument is not that the practice of religion in itself is something bad, but only that it is not a good idea to confuse religion and politics. This has, for example, consequences for whether we, as now, should allow religious independent schools that are financed with tax money in our country.
In addition to the research results above, it can also be added that such schools come into conflict with what is stipulated in the Swedish constitution, namely that everyone who fulfills a public administration task (in which the public school is of course included) has to observe two principles, namely “impartiality and objectivity ”. That a religious free school could observe these principles when one has to teach about religion falls on its own unreasonableness.
A reasonable compromise would be to instead provide grants to organizations and communities that conduct such teaching outside the compulsory regular school.