A global assessment of the relationship between religiosity and financial satisfaction

ABSTRACT

This article explores the economics of religion with a specific focus on divergent effects of religiosity on people’s financial satisfaction. There is ever-growing literature on the sociology of religion-life satisfaction nexus but there is still dearth of research on how religiosity may affect citizens’ outlook toward their economic affluence and finances. We argue that religiosity has to be understood under two major vantage points, through which it can affect financial satisfaction. Specifically, we maintain that social, community-related religiosity and individual, devoutness-related religiosity have distinctly pivotal and empirically quadratic effects on people’s financial satisfaction. This finding is illuminating to understand how social dynamics may shape people’s stance and outlook toward their subjective financial well-being and how this may have repercussions at the individual and societal levels. We test our arguments in light of the global World Values Survey data via a multilevel estimation framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial satisfaction
• individual religiosity
• social religiosity
• secularization thesis

Highlights

• Associations between religiosity and financial satisfaction are investigated at the individual level.

• Religiosity levels of individuals are measured in two dimensions to differentiate social religiosity and individual religiosity.

• Multilevel estimation method is utilized for analysis of cross-country survey data from the World Values Survey.

• Empirical results reveal nonlinear relationships between religiosity measures and financial satisfaction levels of individuals.

• Findings of this study reveal that levels and types of religiosity indicators are significantly associated with subjective welfare of individuals.

Declaration of interest statement

Authors declare no conflict of interest for this study.

Notes

¹ We have to note that many major religions, including Christianity and Islam, have diverse viewpoints and renditions regarding the pursuit of economic fortunes and Godliness both within and across denominations. More in-depth exploration of the subject is within the scope of theology. Here, we aim to offer an economic analysis of religiosity and financial satisfaction

² Some other scholars examine the specific effects of certain religions and congregations on life outcomes (Ferriss, 2002; Greene & Yoon, 2004; Krause, 2008; Lim & Putnam, 2010; Yeniaras & Akarsu, 2017). Since our dataset covers a more diverse set of countries throughout the world, we prefer to have a wider focus and instead analyze divergent effects of individual and social religiosity, which go beyond specific religions and congregation types.