Secular rule of law independently reduces believers’ distrust of atheists

Evidence

In a study spanning 54 countries across the globe, we took advantage of cross-cultural variability in atheist distrust to evaluate the first hypothesis. First, we measured average levels of distrust of atheists for each country, relying on a standard measure that assesses how willing people are to vote for atheist political candidates. We then borrowed a per country measure of “rule of law” developed by the World Bank, which assesses a government’s ability to establish effective institutions. Rule of law directly measures the degree to which secular authorities create and enforce laws that help guarantee several aspects of individual coordination and cooperation. It includes factors such as quality of contract enforcement, firmness of property rights, low perceptions of corruption in the police, and high levels of trust in the courts. There is also wide variability in the world on this measure, with countries in Northern Europe, Canada, Australia, Chile, Japan, and the United States scoring very high, whereas most developing countries score low. Finally, we included only believers in our samples (excluding self-described atheists), and took into account a host of other variables that served as controls. We found that, all else being equal, believers from countries with a firmly established secular rule of law showed markedly reduced distrust of atheists compared to believers from countries with weak secular rule of law. In other words, this finding says that two equally fervent believers express different levels of distrust toward atheists depending on whether they live in a society with strong or weak rule of law. … There are two important insights to appreciate about this finding. First, rule of law was associated with less atheist distrust not just because people in countries with strong rule of law trust people in general. We know this because this finding did not change even after we included levels of trust toward people in general in our statistical models. We found that rule of law specifically reduced atheist distrust, above and beyond contributing to general levels of trust. Second, rule of law reduced atheist distrust even after controlling for individuals’ demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, education, and income. More importantly, we found that rule of law remained a significant source of reduced atheist distrust even after we removed the contributions of two known country-level factors that are associated with diminished atheist distrust: human development as measured by the United Nations (combined measure of economic wealth, longevity, and education levels) and individualism. What this means is that believers in countries with strong rule of law distrust atheists less not simply because these countries happen to have high levels of human welfare, and not simply because these countries value the autonomy of individuals and their rights to freely express themselves. Matching countries on human development, individualism, and religiosity levels, those with stronger institutions have believers who are markedly less likely to distrust atheists. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core integration: this is the secular-institutional mechanism that can substitute for the Big God religious mechanism — directly relevant to the Japanese authorities’ secular control apparatus replacing religious solidarity in Silence.
• DEFINE: Defines the World Bank ‘rule of law’ measure as secular institutional effectiveness in contract enforcement and coordination.