Examining The Countries That Are The Most (And Least) Religious
(ANALYSIS) One thing I’m going to try and be intentional about in the new year is focusing on religion data outside the United States. Any casual reader of this Substack knows that almost all the posts here are focused on religion and politics in the this part of the world. But I have tried to branch out and try something different.
There’s a really practical reason why I am so Americentric, though. It just comes down to the data. I am incredibly familiar with basically all the good survey data sources of American religion and politics. That means I have cleaned and organized datasets in a way to make them really accessible.
I don’t even consult the codebook for most surveys now. When I download a new dataset, I typically spend 10 to 20 minutes just scrolling the codebook, trying to figure out what kinds of questions I can actually answer using the survey.
A few weeks ago, I was reviewing a paper for a journal and the data source it used was one that I hadn’t thought about in a while: the World Values Survey. It’s a tremendously helpful dataset because it tries to survey every country on Earth on a semi-regular basis.
Wave 7 of the WVS began in 2017 and went through 2022, and it included a total of 64 countries. So, it’s not the entire planet, but Wave 7 constitutes about a quarter of all countries. That’s not bad. A full list of all 64 countries can be found in this spreadsheet. There’s a nice smattering of basically every region. But, again, this is not exhaustive.
I am just going to focus on a single question today: “How important is religion to you?” This is a very standard question, used by Pew and most other major outlets. There are four options: very, rather, not very, and not at all. Let’s just start with a world map of the share of each of those countries that says that religion is very important to them.
Some pretty stark differences when looking at this through the lens of regions. A ton of dark red in Africa and throughout the Middle East, but also some darker shades to be found in Southeast Asia, as well. The lighter reds are found across North America, Australia and Russia. Latin America is a bit of a mixed bag, really. We will get into that in way more detail further down the post.
But, which of these 64 countries are the most religious? I graphed the 10 with the highest share of those saying that religion is “very important.” This is what I got:
It’s pretty overwhelming to consider that nearly all of people living in some countries say that religion is very important to them. That’s the case in places like Indonesia, Libya, Egypt, the Maldives and Jordan. In each case at least 95% of folks chose the “very important” option. It’s notable to me that these countries are not just one region — some in Africa, some in the Middle East, and South East Asia is represented, too. But note there are none in the West, either.
What about the least religious countries? This is the share of each who said that religion is not important at all.
Obviously a few really jump off the screen in this map — China, Australia and Canada. That’s largely because of their land mass (which is a downside of visualizing maps, by the way — acres don’t mean people). The countries in Africa are light green, and so are many in South America, too. That’s also the case throughout the Middle East.
Who are in the top 10 least religious countries in Wave 7 of the WVS? That’s below.
The ones that stand out here did not jump off the map because they aren’t that large. Over half of people in the Netherlands say that religion is not important at all. It’s the same share of people living in Czechia (this is the Czech Republic, but the WVS uses the term Czechia.) The Japanese are incredibly irreligious, but so is New Zealand (47% and 46%, respectively). China — which featured prominently in the map — is fifth on this list at 43%.
But I wanted to get more granular with this analysis and show you every single country in dataset. I hate when I use the same type of visualization over and over again, but I think it's essential in this case. I tried to subdivide the countries into broad regions so that you aren’t just looking at huge walls of bar charts. So, let’s start with Africa.
There’s not a whole lot to report from these six countries except the fact that Africa is a religious continent. In fact, these are some of the most religious countries on Earth. And it’s not like they are all neighbors, either. Several are in the north, but that’s not the case for Kenya and Zimbabwe. It is worth pointing out that those last two are the least religious compared to a place like Tunisia, but it’s not a really big gap.
But what about the Middle East?
There’s a bit more variation than we saw when looking at Africa. Ninety-seven percent of folks living in Egypt say that religion is very important. In fact, every respondent chose one of the top two options. Jordan is also in this same category. Iraq is just a bit lower, with 88% saying religion is very important. But then there’s some real variation.
I am surprised that Iran is demonstrably less religious than Iraq. Only 71% say that religion is very important to them. I’m no expert on the region, but it’s something worth thinking about some more. Lebanon is quite a bit lower at 64%, and then Turkey is even less religious. Just 60% are in the top category there. It elected Erdogan, a man who won the presidency by appealing to religious voters using culture war rhetoric.
But, to this point, even the least religious countries are pretty religious in the grand scheme of things. When we move to Latin/South America, there’s quite a bit more variation.
To this point, the least religious country I showed you was Turkey, where 60% of folks said religion is very important to them. There are only two countries in this graph that reach that level of religiosity: Puerto Rico and Nicaragua. There is clearly a weaker attachment to religion in this part of the world. For instance, just half of Mexicans chose the top option on the World Values Survey.
There are several countries in this region that I would classify as not ver religious: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In fact, Uruguay is a really weird case. One-third said religion is not at all important, and the same share say it’s not very important. That’s two-thirds of the sample of the country. That stands far apart from other countries in the region, and I would be happy for an expert in that country to try and explain that in the comments, please.
In Southeast Asia, there are a ton of countries and a ton of variation in the results. There are several on this list that are included in the top 10 most religious countries and several that are the least religious, too. Indonesia, the Maldives and Bangladesh are about as religious as you get. Pakistan and the Philippines are not far behind, either.
There are many countries in this region that I would classify as fairly religious, too. Places like Thailand and Singapore fit this classification in my mind. These are places where significant numbers say religion is very important but it’s not the vast majority.
Then, there are a handful of countries that I would place in the category of really not religious. That includes New Zealand, Australia, Japan and China. In each case at least 40% of respondents said religion is not important to them at all. There are others where a lot of folks chose then “not very” option, like Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mongolia and Macao, too. This is easily the most diverse graph in this post. There’s no way to describe the religiosity of Asia in a single sentence; there is just way too much variation.
In Europe, the story is much more straightforward. There are a small handful of reasonably religious countries like Armenia, Greece, Cyprus and Romania. But that’s certainly not the norm.
Instead, the median European country in the World Values Survey is just not that religious. That’s the case for some of the leading economies of the continent: Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. For every person in the Netherlands who says that religion is very important to them, about five say that it’s not important at all. When I call these countries post-religious, this is exactly what I mean. Religious people are a distinct minority in these places.
Let’s end with the United States and Canada as comparison. They share an incredibly large land border and are cultural neighbors in lots of ways, but when it comes to religion there is a big divergence. Sixty-one percent of Americans chose one of the top two categories — it was only 36% of Canadians. A Canadian is basically twice as likely to say that religion is not important at all compared to an American.
I wanted to try and distill this into a single graph. So, here’s what I did. I took the share of each country who said that religion is very important and subtracted the share of each country who said that religion is not important at all. This becomes a proxy for the overall religiosity of each of the 64 countries in the World Values Survey. Here’s the result of that:
Indonesia is at at the top, with a religiosity quotient of 98%, followed by the Maldives at 96% and Jordan at 95%. The other countries that are north of 90% are Bangladesh (94%), Nigeria (93%) and Tunisia (90%). Which countries are at the bottom? Czechia at -44%, Japan at -42% and the Netherlands at -40%. Several other countries are at least negative 20%; they include China (-40%), New Zealand (-32%), Australia (-28%), Andorra (-27%), the U.K. (-23%) and Canada (-20%).
The overall mean for the entire sample was 32.8%. For those wondering, the United States scored a 20.7%, so that’s lower than the average country in the data. The closest comparisons in the data for the U.S. are not other majority White Western countries like Germany or Canada. Instead they are Singapore (24%) and Kazakhstan (20%).
I’ve only scratched the surface of this dataset, and that makes me very excited. There are tons of other posts that will emerge from the World Values Survey. The religiosity of the United States is clearly an outlier — we “should” look more like Germany or Spain. Further exploration will help Americans situate their religious exceptionalism in a global context.
This piece is republished from Graphs About Religion on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge.