Secular rule of law substitutes for religious monitoring of believers

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. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s Big God mechanism from Norenzayan ch.2-3: if belief in watchful gods enforces cooperation, strong secular institutions (rule of law) should relax believers’ need to distrust nonbelievers — this is the empirical payout of that mechanism.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘rule of law’ operationally via World Bank measures (contract enforcement, property rights, police corruption, court trust) — the anchor variable for the chapter’s cross-societal test.