I recently read an article by Phil Zuckerman, associate professor of sociology at Pitzer College, an article adapted from his 2008 book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. Zuckerman conducted interviews with residents of Sweden and Denmark, two countries known for their relative absence of religious belief and conviction, in order to support his claim that

…it is not the most religious nations in our world today, but rather the most secular, that have been able to create the most civil, just, safe, equitable, humane, and prosperous societies. Denmark and Sweden stand out as shining examples.

While he clarifies that he is not making a causal argument, i.e. that the alleged high level of social health in these countries is caused by the low levels of religiosity, he states that he wishes “to soberly counter the widely touted assertion that without religion, society is doomed.” He aims this counterargument at those who claim that religion is the foundation for a moral and just society, for human dignity, and for happiness and contentment.

He offers as evidence of the moral and societal good of Sweden and Denmark – countries where “faith in God is minimal, church attendance is drastically low, and religion is a distinctly muted and marginal aspect of every life” – such data as overall rates of violent crime (including murder, aggravated assault, and rape) which are among the world’s lowest; relatively high levels of government care for the poor, the elderly, and the orphaned; and these countries’ high rankings on an “international happiness scale” (Denmark ranks #1 in terms of its residents’ overall level of happiness). We could also point to statistics about life expectancy, literacy, income, gender equality, education, infant mortality, homicide, AIDS, and teen pregnancy. It is the case that relatively secular countries show better in such categories.

He concludes with this:

It is a great socioreligious irony — for lack of a better term — that when we consider the fundamental values and moral imperatives contained within the world’s great religions, such as caring for the sick, the infirm, the elderly, the poor, the orphaned, the vulnerable; practicing mercy, charity, and goodwill toward one’s fellow human beings; and fostering generosity, humility, honesty, and communal concern over individual egotism — those traditionally religious values are most successfully established, institutionalized, and put into practice at the societal level in the most irreligious nations in the world today.

What are we to make of Zuckerman’s data and conclusions? Several things come to mind.

First, while Zuckerman claims not to be making a causal argument between secularism and societal well-being, he is very content to let his readers draw the causal connection themselves. A more careful examination requires that we consider alternative explanations for the appearance of relative national contentment.

For example, Zuckerman himself mentions the relative cultural and ethnic homogeneity of these Scandinavian countries, although he doesn’t ask how this characteristic might affect the conjunction he describes. In the United States, a nation of immigrants, we value deeply the diversity of our manifold nationalities and willingly embrace the much more difficult task of intercultural and interethnic community building that our diversity requires. We ought not understate the relative social placidity in countries not nearly so diverse as others, nor the challenges that lie ahead for such homogeneous societies as significant demographic changes occur in these next decades.

Then there’s the question of the definition of societal health itself. The data to which Zuckerman points may make Sweden and Denmark legitimately worthy of our admiration in certain respects. But what about other data?

Consider this data published by the Washington Post —

Table 1: Birth, Abortion and Pregnancy Rates; and Abortion Ratio, By Country, Ages 15-19, Mid-1990s
Country	Births per 1,000	Abortions per 1,000	Pregnancies per 1,000	Abortion ratio
Sweden (1996)	7.8	17.2	25.0	68.8
France (1995)	10.0	10.2	20.2	50.5
Canada (1995)	24.5	21.2	45.7	46.4
Great Britain (1995)	28.3	18.4	46.7	39.4
United States (1996)	54.4	29.2	83.6	34.9

Note that 68.8% of all pregnancies among late teenagers in Sweden ended in abortions, whereas the ratio in the United States – certainly a horrifying number in itself – was 34.9%. Can we truly consider a country where more than two-thirds of unborn children are killed to be a “civil, just, safe, equitable, humane, and prosperous” nation? Apparently Zuckerman thinks so.

Consider also the 2008 data on fertility rates showing that, while the United States has climbed in the last several years to the replacement rate of 2.1 live births per woman, Denmark’s rate is at 1.74 and Sweden’s at 1.67. While these countries may display some features of societal well-being, their below-replacement birth rates suggest that such well-being won’t continue indefinitely.

Zuckerman’s measures of “happiness” are also questionable. A written response to his article includes these reports:

Among 45,859 American adults responding since 1972 to National Opinion Research Center surveys, the percentage of “very happy” people ranged from 28 percent of those who never attended religious services up to 48 percent of those who attended more than once a week.

 

Moreover, new data that compare more than 90,000 Europeans in dozens of discrete European regions (of which there are, for instance, a dozen in Britain) offer a striking result. In the words of Andrew Clark (Paris School of Economics) and Orsolya Lelkes, “People are more satisfied in more religious regions.”

And finally:

New Gallup data from surveys of over 2,000 people in each of more than 140 nations worldwide suggest that faith also appears to foster generosity of money and time. Worldwide, highly religious people (who attended a service in the last week and say that religion is important) are about 50 percent more likely than others to have donated money to a charity in the last month (despite having lower incomes) and to have volunteered.

There are ample reasons to question Zuckerman’s claims about the relatively greater happiness and contentment of the non-religious.

But even if he were correct in this claim, we do well to question the criterion of contentment itself, and for at least two reasons. As one writer has put it, Zuckerman “confuses a contented life with a good life.” The reported satisfaction of Swedes and Danes may disguise a variety of darker actual conditions and more pessimistic actual experience, including a lack of purpose or the absence of any transcendent meaning for life. The reality of significantly higher suicide rates in both Sweden and Denmark than in the United States should cause us to question the “happiness” on which Zuckerman’s alleged conjunction between secularism and societal well-being depends. It may be that citizens in these countries have in fact lost their souls in the midst of societies where material needs are largely met by governments supported by heavy taxation, where cultural insulation inhibits huge and character-building challenges that many in other regions of the world face, and where questions of ultimate meaning have simply withered away – questions which across the centuries have promoted the best, as well as the worst, of which human beings are capable.

Finally, in biblical perspective, we might consider that the “contentment” that Zuckerman takes as an indicator of the value of the non-religious may in fact be the design of the Evil One, who delights, as Screwtape has reminded us, in keeping people content, in fact in opiating them, with lesser things so that they are numb to their real, deeper needs. In such settings, the devil has, we might say, won the battle already and need not fight with more overt tactics.

Nevertheless, Zuckerman’s alleged conjunction is worth considering, for it prompts us once again to reflect on the essential and biblical connections between faith and obedience, between doctrine and practice, between religion and ethics.