Are all Socialists Anti-religious? Anti-religiosity and the Socialist Left in 21 Western European Countries (1990–2008)

Abstract

The political situation in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century has led some to suggest that socialism is some kind of secular religion as opposed to ‘normal’ religion. In modern Europe, however, there have been vibrant Christian socialist movements. This article looks into the different attitudes of socialists towards religion and answers the question whether it is pressure of religious activity or pressure of religious identity that makes socialists resist religion. The results from a multilevel analysis of three waves of the European Values Study (1990–2008) in 21 Western European countries specifically point to an increase in anti-religiosity by socialists in countries marked by Catholic and Orthodox religious identities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their valuable comments and suggestions and the members of the Lobocop group—an open discussion group for cultural sociologists at Erasmus University Rotterdam (especially Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal) for fruitful discussions and valuable insights. The data used in this article come from the ZA4804: European Values Study Longitudinal Data File 1981-2008 (EVS 1981–2008) data set, which can be found on the Gesis.org web site: http://www.gesis.org/en/services/data-analysis/survey-data/european-values-study/longitudinal-data-file-1981-2008/.

Notes

1. “Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice … the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man—a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man—has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this reality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism … no longer stands in any need of such mediation… Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion.” (qtd in Geoghegan 589)

2. We follow Russell Dalton in using this distinction in types of religiosity.

3. Martin (General 23–4) argues that Protestant monopolies also exist, mainly in Scandinavia, but that they feature individualistic values. This creates a different cultural dynamic in which there is no collective anti-religious reaction, as evident in Catholic countries. Instead, there is a climate of religious indifference.

4. We used the integrated data set that has been made available through the Gesis.org web site.

5. See Cora Maas and Joop Hox who state that for this kind of analysis, a country-level sample size of at least 50 is preferred. This does not mean that some respondents are counted double, since these data sets do not consist of panel data.

6. Others would say that it is not Western Europe, but the United States that is the odd one out (e.g. Bruce, Secularization 157). For the sake of our argument this is not important and we follow Martin in his view of Western Europe’s secularisation.

7. We excluded Northern Cyprus since it is part of Turkey.

8. We left out Greece (1999) because only one of the four items concerning economic values was used there.

9. See https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/, access date: 8 March 2013.

10. The modest score on Cronbach’s alpha is partly due to the fact that only three items were measured. However, increasing this measure with other indications of socialist values, as available in the EVS data set, does not significantly increase the reliability nor does it influence the outcomes of the multilevel tests that we did. In fact, it decreases the number of valid respondents because several of the items that would be included contain a large number of missing values, because they were not consistently asked in all countries and/or in every wave of the survey. Therefore we have worked with this measure and the measure of voting behaviour.

11. Although there are many differences between the two church denominations, in the literature, they are seen as cultural counterparts, both creating collective national identities. This leads us to consider them as a single variable in this operationalisation.

12. We also checked for level of income. Including this variable did not significantly alter our findings. However, it is a variable with many missing values (23%); therefore we did not include it in our model. We also did a model check with the different EVS waves as dummy variables, which did not influence our findings either. For the sake of clarity, we left these dummy variables out of the model presented.

13. The alternative question that asked for people’s level of education was not consistently asked in all countries or in all three waves of the survey.

14. The fifth model is a better fit on a .900 probability scale. The explained variance of socialism (0.006) has a standard error of 0.0015 and thus measures a significant score.

15. The effects in our model are not standardised, but a standardised model would give a similar output, with gender showing a 50% stronger effect than socialism. Since this is consistent with other findings and not directly relevant to our hypotheses, we have not elaborated on this difference further.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Egbert Ribberink

Egbert Ribberink is a PhD student at the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His primary research interests include atheism, anti-religion, and the secularisation of Western Europe. Peter Achterberg is Professor of Sociology at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is a cultural sociologist with a general interest in studying cultural, political, and religious change in the West (see www.peterachterberg.com). Dick Houtman is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His latest book, co-edited with Birgit Meyer, is Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (Fordham University Press). CORRESPONDENCE: Egbert Ribberink, Centre for Sociological Research, University of Leuven, Parkstraat 45, box 3601, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.