A highly cooperative society can shed religion within a century.

Evidence

Denmark tops the lists of societies high on cooperation, social cohesion, and public trust. Denmark is also synonymous with “welfare state,” and in less than a century, has become one of the least religious societies on earth. (A majority of Danes do not believe in God, and few go to church, and if they do, it’s only for special occasions.) Denmark presents us with a puzzle: How did Danish society lose its religion so dramatically and so quickly? And how do the Danes keep the wheels of cooperation going without God? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 552

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Sets up the puzzle that Norenzayan’s ‘Big Gods as supernatural surveillance’ thesis must confront—cooperation without supernatural monitoring, challenging the causal claim that Big God monitoring is necessary.

Related

• Denmark maintained high social trust while rapidly losing religious belief (similarity 0.92)
• Secular cooperative societies emerged through institutions that displaced religion (similarity 0.83)
• Large atheist welfare states can replicate religion’s pro-social effects without gods (similarity 0.82)
• Secular institutions can replace religion’s community-building and cooperation functions (similarity 0.81)
• Secular societies reached large-scale cooperation through religion then discarded it (similarity 0.79)