What The World Values Survey Reveals About Global Belief In God
(ANALYSIS) When I was in graduate school our program required each student to have two majors and a minor field. I knew one of my major fields was going to be American politics — that was an easy choice. I was also made aware that it was easier to get a job teaching public administration than traditional political science because the positions were relatively plentiful and the number of grad students with training in PA were low, so I picked that up as a second major.
And, for reasons that still escape me to this day, my third field became comparative politics. I have no earthly idea why I chose it because at that time the only other country I had visited in the world was Canada. But, I think I took about nine hours in comparative politics. The most memorable course was taught by the brilliant Fred Solt and was titled, “Comparative Political Behavior.”
It was basically a class about how different societies engage with the government of their countries. And after poking around in my Dropbox, I found the syllabus. I still remember reading about elections in the Soviet Union that had a number of spoiled ballots, because every citizen had to vote and there was only one choice on the ballot. It was their form of protest.
Well, for the final project, I knew I wanted to write about religion and I knew I wanted to write an empirical paper. My only option was to use the World Values Survey. But here’s what I distinctly remember about the project — my little Dell laptop could not load the entire data file without crashing. There just wasn’t enough RAM to do the job. So I had to ask Dr. Solt to send me a curated dataset that only contained a handful of countries for analysis.
I don’t have that problem now, of course. I can load the full file. The most recent version of the survey is Wave 7, and it was fielded between 2017 and 2022. It contains 64 total countries, but some don’t have responses to religion questions, so we are left with 54 countries. Which is still a lot.
What follows is me just giving you all a whole bunch of “here’s some cool stuff I found in the World Values Survey when it comes to religion.”
One simple question in the WVS was: Do you believe in God? As you can clearly see above, there are a lot of countries in the dataset where almost everyone believes in God. In fact, there were a dozen countries where belief was at least 99%. There were 31 where belief was at least 90%, as well.
The countries represented here are concentrated in several regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East/North Africa shows up a whole lot on the top of the list.
You can read the rest of this post 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 X at @ryanburge.