Way back in March of 2022, I wrote an article advocating for secularism in government. Quoting from my own works might be rather egotistic, but here’s a little of what I said then: “I think if people only did things for which they could articulate a rational and morally defensible reason, we’d all be better off. If the rationale for a decision or an action is that someone has told you that it’s what God wants, you need to need to give your head a serious shake. There has to be a better reason.” 

Every now and again I am struck by news items or data which provides evidence that religious fervor continues to disrupt sensible political discourse, and those items convince me that politics is just the wrong place for God.

Around the world we’re seeing an attack on democracy and in many cases the pretext for authoritarian rule is that the leaders are doing God’s will. Leadership in Hungary, in Turkey, and in India are pushing Christian, Muslim and Hindu agendas within their borders, to the detriment of minority religions.  Vladimir Putin has aligned himself with the Orthodox Catholic Church and uses their support to justify his invasion of Ukraine. Buddhist rulers are slaughtering Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar. In the United States, the Republican Party has become linked to Evangelical Christianity and are spouting a dangerous blend of religious and racist bigotry. 

This week Heather Cox Richardson, an American historian and columnist, provided us with an introduction to Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House in the United States. Forgive me for the lengthy quote, but let me remind you that in selecting this guy, the Republican party were choosing the person second in line to be President. If Joe Biden drops dead of old age, and Kamila Harris gets assassinated, Mike Johnston will be the new President. Here’s who he is:

(The House chose) Representative Mike Johnson (R-LA) in part because he was obscure enough to have avoided scrutiny.

Since then, his past has been unearthed, showing interviews in which he asserted that we do not live in a democracy but in a “Biblical republic.” He told a Fox News Channel interviewer that to discover his worldview, one simply had to “go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” 

Johnson is staunchly against abortion rights and gay rights, including same-sex marriage, and says that immigration is “the true existential threat to the country.” In a 2016 sermon he warned that the 1960s and 1970s undermined “the foundations of religion and morality in the U.S.” and that attempts to address climate change, for example, are an attempt to destroy capitalism.… In 2021, Johnson was a key player in the congressional attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election ….outside his office he displays a flag associated with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) network that wants to place the United States government under the control of right-wing Christians. On January 6, 2021, rioters took these flags with them into the U.S. Capitol.

The New York Times quotes Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who wrote “Speaker Johnson really does provide a near-perfect example of all the different elements of Christian nationalism…included insisting on traditionalist family structures, “being comfortable with authoritarian social control and doing away with democratic values.”

So, this evangelical Christian, relying on his faith-based interpretation of a 2000 year old document is anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-immigrant and anti-democracy. He’s an election denier, a climate change denier, and he proposes that America stop supporting Ukraine. Being “comfortable with authoritarian social control” has a pleasant sound to it, doesn’t it? It means that a benevolent paternalistic government, led by a white Christian fundamentalist will tell you how you ought to behave and will step in to correct you, should you set your foot on the wrong path.

Johnson, of course is not alone in his binding of religion to social conservatism policy. The Economist reports that Ron DeSantis’s wife, Casey, tweeted out a campaign advertisement, in which Mr DeSantis appears as the “fighter” whom God chose to protect his “planned paradise”.

In Hungary, President Viktor Orban, is pursuing Christian fundamentalist, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ policies. With gerrymandered electoral laws and cronies in important positions, he controls most institutions. The Economist says “He makes much of Hungary’s Christian identity (around three quarters of Hungarians say they are Christian, though only 15% attend church on a weekly basis)…. He rails against “Muslim invaders” and on July 23rd he told crowds that “we do not want to become peoples of mixed race,” even though Hungary’s population is at least 84% white.

The Economist tracks the growth of Evangelical Christianity which it calls the fastest-growing religion in Latin America.  “In the 1970s enterprising pastors, inspired by those in the United States, introduced a strand known as neo-Pentecostalism. This preaches the “prosperity gospel”, a radical reinterpretation of the Bible which claims that earthly wealth is a sign of divine blessings….Evangelicals promoted the idea that Brazil was going through a “moral crisis because of a lack of connection to Christian values”… Fears over relaxed abortion laws and “gender ideology”, or more liberal views over sexuality, have increased the clout of evangelicals.”

Christianity is not the only religion placing its stamp on national policy. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the President, is a devout Muslim.  Per the Economist, “Turkey’s leader has empowered a generation of pious businesspeople, and binned restrictions on women’s wearing of the headscarf. He has overhauled education, allowing more religious teaching, and opened thousands of imam hatip schools, designed to educate Islamic preachers”. While the rest of the world has responded to inflation by raising central bank interest rates, Turkey lowered theirs, resulting in disastrous inflation and a terrible hit on their economy. Why did they do that? “As a Muslim, I’ll continue to do what is required by Nas,” Mr Erdogan said last December, referring to Islamic teachings, which forbid the receiving or charging of interest.”. 

And Iran? Well, here’s what Human Rights Watch has to say about this strict Muslim dictatorship – “Iranian authorities unleashed brutal force to repress nationwide protests after the death of a 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman in the custody of the country’s abusive morality police, arresting thousands of protestors and killing hundreds. The country’s security and intelligence apparatus, in partnership with Iran’s judiciary, continued its harsh crackdown on dissent, detaining journalists, labor activists, women’s rights defenders, and peaceful dissidents.’ Remember how Mike Johnson is reportedly comfortable with “authoritarian social control”? Iran’s morality police are what authoritarian social control really looks like.

There is a load of information out there that shows that nations where religions really matter are more likely to espouse oppressive social policies. A really interesting report from the Pew Research Center in October of 2018 surveyed opinions in Europe and it drew a distinction between Western European countries vs Eastern Europe. I’m going to try not to get too deep into the data here, but what was shown was that countries where religion was felt to be an important part of national identity were, by and large, less tolerant. People in countries with strong religious identity were less likely to welcome a Muslim or a Jew into their family, were more opposed to abortion, and were more opposed to same sex marriages. 

In June of the same year, Pew Research had an article looking at the relationships between religious observance and several other parameters. A colour-coded map demonstrated that religion is very important to people in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. And the data shows that where religion is very important to people, they’re mostly not doing very well. Pew reports that “the higher the life expectancy in a country, the less likely people are to attend services frequently… In a similar way, a country’s wealth – as measured by per capita gross domestic product (GDP) –is associated with its average rate of daily prayer. Countries with higher levels of wealth typically have lower levels of prayer, and vice versa. In every surveyed country with a GDP of more than $30,000 per person, fewer than 40% of adults say they pray every day – except in the United States. On this measure, the U.S. (where 55% of adults pray daily) is a major outlier; of 102 countries studied, it is the only one with higher-than-average levels of both prayer and wealth.”

Correlation is not causality. Did people turn to religion because their lives were shitty, or are their lives shitty because they turned to religion?  The Pew argument postulates that tenuous life expectancy, low income, and low education cause people to tend towards religious observances in search of hope and comfort, and that seems very probable. For poverty, war and oppression, religion may be the cause or it may be the effect, but it does not appear to be cure.

An apologist for religions might defend autocratic rulers in religious countries with the observation that national policies that express the deeply held religious convictions of the people are appropriate – that laws of a country should reflect the religious and moral teachings of its people, and what’s wrong with that? The problem is that religions are prescriptive and judgemental, and prone to persecuting those who don’t agree with their version of God. And whenever Civil law becomes enmeshed with the less than even-handed application of God’s law, oppression is the result.

Decisions by a government ought to be based on facts, data, logic. Erdogan’s decision to ignore financial counsel and lower interest rates in a time of inflation was not based on facts or logic, and it has almost ruined the Turkish economy.

 A December 2022 Pew Research survey of more than 10000 adults in the US tells us that there is a correlation between religious affiliation and climate change denial. “Religious Americans who show little or no concern about climate change also say there are much bigger problems in the world, that God is in control of the climate, and that they do not believe the climate is actually changing… about four-in-ten say they’ve prayed for the environment in the past year.” Strong religious affiliation in the US correlates with Republican party membership, and climate change denial is a key part of the Republican extremist “Freedom Caucus” group. Let us hope that Speaker Johnson never becomes President Johnson. Climate change denial based on your belief that God is in control of the climate and that prayer will solve the problem will not lead to strong effective government policy

So religious affiliation leads to dangerous and oppressive social policies, correlates with poverty and reduced life expectancy, and may lead to some illogical and flawed decision making. I took a look at the links between religion and democracy index and the Quality of Life index rankings of different countries. From a ranking of how important religion is felt to be in different countries, I selected a number of countries with differing levels of religiosity. I then looked up where those countries sit on the Democracy and Quality of Life indices. And then I created a ranking of my own simply by adding together the democracy and QoL rankings. The results are tabulated below.

Country	% Religion	Democracy Rank	Q0L Rank	DEM/QoL Sum
China	3	156	54	210
Japan	10	16	11	27
France	11	22	21	43
Hungary	17	56	37	93
Australia	18	15	1	16
Norway	19	1	20	21
Spain	22	22	7	29
Canada	27	12	19	31
Israel	36	29	32	61
US	53	30	27	57
Turkey	68	103	68	171
Brazil	72	51	88	139
Egypt	72	131	97	228
Iran	78	154	124	278
India	80	46	94	140
Nigeria	88	105	128	233
Indonesia	93	54	89	143
Pakistan	94	107	110	217

China is a major outlier. Although it has the lowest religious observance ranking, it has a very big number in my integrated ranking. But with that major exception, the table demonstrates that the higher religious importance is ranked within a country, the poorer they are likely to do in their democracy and QoL summation. This is a somewhat randomly selected sub-set of a much larger list of countries, but I believe that the sub-set is reflective of the whole. 

It is interesting to find the US appears to be the break-point on my table. They are the only country in my sub-set with a religious commitment ranking of more than 50% and a Democracy/QoL sum less than 100. So, if you’re in a country that is more religiously affiliated than the US, you’re likely in trouble. And if you’re in the US, these data tell you that you’re lurching towards a God-inspired mediocrity.

Lesson for Canadians?  When your political candidate tells you that they are a good upstanding Christian (Muslim, Sikh, Jew), challenge them. You should ask them to explain how that impacts policy. Ask them to assure you that religion plays no part in their political decision-making, and that they will rely on fact and data, not the Bible or the Koran, in making important decisions that can affect the direction of the country. The political arena is the wrong place for God.