Religion without WW1

How does religion develop across the world without World War 1?

I imagine Christianity will be bigger across Asia and Africa. I often see people say Europe and the Americas will be more religious which might be true. They will definitely be more right wing or nationalist but that might not necessarily mean they would be more religious. I could see the continuation of widespread nationalism and romanticism coming into conflict with traditional religions especially with the more extreme sects. Maybe some nationalist elements start drifting towards strict secularism or symbolic and romanticized neo-paganism. This could lead to a interesting schism within right wing politics. One side being more nationalist, Darwinistic, folkish, and secular while the other is more of your traditionalist Christians and conservatives. Thoughts?
 
The tragedy of “the Great War,” the unnecessariness of it, the stupidity of it, led to a lot of questioning of everything, including established religion.

In fact, I understand a big reason J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a guy in his twenties and a second lieutenant in the war, wrote Lord of the Rings was to work through some of these ideas.
 
Depends on the place. No WWI means no Soviet state atheism, which means probably a much more religious East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Russia.

Poland, conversely, will be somewhat less Catholic, though nationalistic religiosity as a bulwark against Prussian Lutheranism and Russian-sponsored Orthodoxy will still be a factor.

Christianity will be stronger across the world due to the maintenance of the European empires. Islam will be more moderate on average, if the Ottomans get the oil money and not the Saudis.
 
I'm not sure Christianity being stronger due to the maintenance of European Empires fits the available data points that we have. Mark Noll's recent work on Global Christianity argues quite persuasively that Christian missionary activity struggled during the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th. What strength Christianity has in Africa, India, Indonesia, and China today is largely a post-decolonization phenomenon to the extent that Christianity transitioned from being the religion of the colonizer to the religion of some of the people. If World War I is avoided and tensions are solved in a number of separate smaller conflicts, I'd wager the process of decolonization will be drawn out and inhibit the growth of Christianity. Larger European populations in the colonies would likely further complicate matters.
 
The tragedy of “the Great War,” the unnecessariness of it, the stupidity of it, led to a lot of questioning of everything, including established religion
n
I never understood this argument. After ww2 there was a massive spiritual reawakening, and usually after great catastrophes people tend to get closer to concepts like religion, which provides at least hope for a better life and gives some meaning to life (and I am saying this as a staunch atheist)
 
The tragedy of “the Great War,” the unnecessariness of it, the stupidity of it, led to a lot of questioning of everything, including established religion.

In fact, I understand a big reason J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a guy in his twenties and a second lieutenant in the war, wrote Lord of the Rings was to work through some of these ideas.
I think you would still have questioning of things but it will be more idealistic on one end and very moderate and pragmatic on the other end. Questioning would be different in mindset. People are still more hopeful on their outlook of things and left less conflicted and self questioning. People won’t be left as confused and devastated by the war which means they are less likely to affiliate so easily with any radical groups or ideas that promises security and the return of prosperity. The older generations and people will probably be more moderate while the younger people might become more radicals and unruly. The horrors and impacts of the wars lowered Europeans high youth population by a lot and probably mellowed them out a bit. Without the war they could start out as idealistic about the future and become more unruly and radical as the first half of the century goes by due to the lack of political change while technology still progresses. You could see a mix of the 60s and 1848 revolutions take place in Europe around the 40s with a lack of a major war. The old order will eventually be shaken and questioned but without a major international war that will be mostly done by internal forces.
 
WW1 brought a surge in spiritualist churches of the "get iin touch with the dead" type, I guess it would remain more niche withou the war
 
n
I never understood this argument. After ww2 there was a massive spiritual reawakening, and usually after great catastrophes people tend to get closer to concepts like religion, which provides at least hope for a better life and gives some meaning to life (and I am saying this as a staunch atheist)
The wars lead to various anti-authoritarian movements everywhere, most famously the 68ers. The authority of the church too suffered not just that of the old political elite.
 
significantly less religious US without a cold war
I don't really see this; the lack of a decline akin to that of Europe stemmed more from the lack of physical proximity to the war in the US during WW2 and most importantly, the lack of an established state church in the US to be discredited.
 
This should be relevant for the U.S at least, it comes from the historians subreddit on Reddit.
There's a whole sociological/social-scientific literature on this (a large part of the "secularization" literature deals with this topic, but others write on it, too), and suffice to say there's no agreement. Let me play you the hits and give you the four main theses.

ECONOMIES OF RELIGION Stark, Bainbridge, Finke, Iannaccone, etc. This is the one getting the most play in this thread so far (but without anyone citing any of the actual literature on this). Basic theory: America had an "unregulated market for religion" where people could switch religions freely, meaning religious organizations provided good services--in Europe, with its "regulated religious market", people couldn't switch religions as freely so organizations had no incentive to provide good services. Demand dropped because quality fell. These were the first guys to argue that the "secularization paradigm" might be fundamentally flawed (the secularization paradigm argued that demand dropped because "with modernity", we had no demand for religion). Of course, most scholars pointed out that secularization includes at least three parts (decline of individual belief, separation of spheres, privatization; privatization is definitely more common in Western Europe than America), but economies of religion paradigm only examines secularization as the decline of individual belief. Anyway, their main argument is that secularization has supply-side explanations, not demand-side ones. In America, where there are no supply-side restrictions (anyone can start a church!), demand is high because robust competition means there's something for everyone. Conversely, they argue, in Europe where there are state churches ("monopolies) and it's harder to start new sects (in the technical sense), religious organizations "provide an inferior product" and this is what is driving decreased demand. There are problems with this model, I fundamentally disagree with it, but looking at Europe and America, it does highlight many important things, and it changed the terms of the debate about secularization (which was assumed to be more or less inevitable).

THEY'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT This school, sometimes but not often called "neo-secularization", emphasizes, in the grand scheme of things, that even the U.S. is pretty secularized. How do you measure individual belief? Surveys, right. There are a couple of different kinds of surveys, the most basic kind asks you, "Did you go to church last week?" (or whatever). Jose Casanova found that if you look at time use surveys ("What did you do this week?"), Spain and the US actual report much more similar values of church attendance. This gets into measurement issues: how secular a country is depends on how you define secular (formal affiliation, weekly church attendance, reported importance, position in the public sphere); different measures get you different answers of who is secular and who is religious. Whether these measurements are valid is another issue (people in the U.S., it seems, tend to over-report their religious participation in surveys). There's big literature on the fact that in America, religion is in the public sphere, where in Europe it is not (and remember, the Moral Majority and Evangelical Protestantism only came into American politics in the 1980's--they haven't been a constant force in national American politics); in terms of practice, they argue, they're not so different. There's also argument that positions neither are that religious compared to 300 years and that that's the big story (this is the "separation of spheres" thing--religion is now in it's own "sphere"; Phil Gorski's article "Historicizing the Secularization Debate" is a good place to start here). But as some have pointed out in this thread, Europe and America not necessarily so different as the question assumes and it matters a lot how you count "religious". Steve Bruce's God is dead: Secularization in the West might be a place to start for this one. This argument has some points for it, again highlighting some important things, but also ignores certain realities that there are both qualitative and quantitative differences between Europe and America (and within Europe, as well) that could use explaining.

HUMAN SECURITY Norris and Inglehart, the people behind the World Values Survey, argue that it is intimately tied up in "human security". In fact, they argue, rather than religious regulation, variations in human security explain most of the variations in religiosity (they modified their claims slightly by the time the Sacred and Secular was published in 2011, but I forget what they exactly modified it to). That is to say, in places where things are more unsure (poor Eastern Europe, healthcareless America, to mention nothing of the the Global South), people are more religious. Similarly, in places with large income inequality, religion is also more important (again, they group this within "human insecurity"). As financial security improves in Romania, Poland, Turkey, people will became less religious no matter how you measure it (this theory predicts). Ditto as America gets healthcare and tackles inequality. In wealthy, welfare state-y, egalitarian Western Europe, religion isn't as needed. They say that economic inequality and "existential" insecurity drive religion--it's demand that matters, not supply. This explicitly challenges the "Economies of Religion" literature with quantitative data and regressions (most of the other challenges have come with qualitative data, at most with descriptive statistics) and has done a lot in terms of quieting that school down (you see a lot less economies of religion stuff after about 2004 when Ingelhart and Norris start publishing on this; though it's still popular as one explanation for behavior instead of the explanation--see for example Melissa Wilde's article on voting at Vatican II). However, these explanations originally relied on correlations in small N-samples of developed countries; I can't find the graph right now, but I remember their earliest findings really seemed to be most driven by the US and Ireland; remove those two, and the trend line was relatively flat. Data on more countries from the last wave of the World Value Survey in the late 2000's made them deemphasize parts their thesis, however, it also made other parts robust. Indisputably, they're on to something here but this is relatively new, and no one is quite sure what to make of it yet. This also reminds me I need to reread their book...

CLOSENESS TO REGIME and NATIONAL IDENTITY. This emphasizes that religion is embedded in specific social and political contexts. This explanation is the probably the second oldest explanation for variations in secularization (after the arguments that "rationalization" and "modernization" will doom religion, which aren't even considered here) and dates back at least to Tocqueville. We just went over this in my undergraduate class; even in the 1830's, he could already write:

In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.

So, to explain this a little bit as its developed in the current poli sci literature especially, to go against the political regime in France (or wherever) meant to go against the religious regime. Religion would remain popular as long as the regime remained popular, but when religion came down firmly on one side of a political debate, the other side tended to secularize. Arguably, the same thing did not happen in America until the 1980's (Tocqueville elsewhere mentions that even Catholic priests in America love liberty). However, in countries where there has been daylight between unpopular regimes and religion (think about Poland and Solidarity), this can help the religion, so it works both ways (in post-Communist Russia, you see regime supporters supporting religion, etc). I haven't looked at the numbers myself, but Claude Fischer recently argued in a Boston Review piece that much of the recent declines in religious participation in America over the last thirty years has occurred among political liberals--primarily after the Moral Majority, et al. entered politics in '80s. Before that, religious arguments were frequent from both sides (think: civil rights movement, the social gospel, abolitionism, etc) and religious participation was roughly equal between conservatives and liberals. So religion became associated with one political faction, and this led to its decline in the other political faction (you also see this happening with European socialists a century before).

Nationalism is also important. In some parts of the world, to be an X nationality means to be X religion. To be a Pole means being Catholic, to be a Turk means being Muslim, to be a Greek means being Orthodox, to be Irish meant being Catholic (meaning, this was once the case, but it's changing, some argue), but since the French Revolution, to be a Frenchman did not require being Catholic. This tends to affect more measures of importance and affiliation as opposed to attendance, but it definitely affects all three, if I remember the literature. But this helps understand most of the countries that are most religious in Europe. I discussed the differences between the Czech Republic (one of the most secular countries in Europe) and Slovakia (frequently counted as the second most religious country in Europe, after Poland) in this previous question. This argument is frequent and becoming more important: I recently read a not-entirely-convincing-but-suggestive chapter by Genevieve Zubrzycki about how the Silent Revolution Quiet Revolution (oops) in Quebec changed Quebecois identity, de-emphasizing the Catholic aspect of the identity, and in the decades since then, we've seen a decline religious participation when it was no longer necessary to be Catholic to be Quebecois (aka national identity>religious identity). In America, the argument (long established in books like Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew and things like Robert Bellah's Civil Religion [warning the wiki for civil religion is awful; see this instead]) is that especially during periods of anti-Communism but even before those, it didn't matter which religion you were in America, it only mattered that you were one of them (see, the rise of "Judeo-Christian" as a term, and kids TV shows in the Cold War saying "Remember to worship this weekend at a church or synagogue of your choosing", but even Tocqueville notices this long before the Cold War). Basically, American national identity meant being religious, at least in terms of civil religion (even Jefferson had civil religion), without specifying which kind of religious and, until the 1980's, "being religious" wasn't associated with just one political faction in the U.S.. This is what I think is currently under-emphasized in the literature, and what I try to emphasize when I write on this topic. It definitely doesn't explain everything, but it's not supposed to because the answers aren't that simple.
 
n
I never understood this argument. After ww2 there was a massive spiritual reawakening, and usually after great catastrophes people tend to get closer to concepts like religion, which provides at least hope for a better life and gives some meaning to life (and I am saying this as a staunch atheist)

There are also some glaring exceptions the model does not address, notably Scandinavia and the Netherlands. All those countries skipped WWI and Sweden skipped WWII, and their experiences in the latter war were much less brutal than those of, say, Poland. Yet religiosity is much higher in those lands that suffered more in the World Wars.
 
No WWI does not really lead to more religiosity. If the life of people go well then they are far less interested in religion. Sweden is one example who had not personally experienced the war yet turned out irreligious. Poland experienced the horrors of WW2 yet they are one of the most religious countries of Europe.

Maybe the butterflies of no WW1 leads to a religious Baltics, Czechia and Hungary as there is an absence of communist rule but that's pretty much it.

If no WW1 means an existing Ottoman state this has huge effects on the Islamic World. No funding Salafi scholars with Saudi oil revenue, the control is in Ottoman hands. No disasters Arab Nationalism faced in OTL so no Islamism taking root among Arabs as there is no Israel on Arab land. Central Asia will be more developed as Russia won't turn into a communist state.
 
Without WW1, let’s assume you butterfly away the Bolshevik Revolution. Marx’s Communist Manifesto, with its attacks on Religion, remains more obscure. Socialism means union/labor activism, at least in America. Communism suggests the experimental communal towns established in the nineteenth century (Zoar, Amana, French Icarians) that were often quite faith-based. It was my observation that a great deal of the fear and hate of Communists during the Cold war Red Scare was motivated more by the attacks on religion, than by the economic or political issues. After all, Americans added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and “In God We Trust” to more of the currency in the fifties. Whatever conflict (even a cold war) dominated the upcoming decades probably would not have had a faith based element, so I would definitely say “less religious.”
 
. . . Socialism means union/labor activism, at least in America. Communism suggests the experimental communal towns established in the nineteenth century (Zoar, Amana, French Icarians) that were often quite faith-based. It was my observation that a great deal of the fear and hate of Communists during the Cold war Red Scare was motivated more by the attacks on religion, than by the economic or political issues. . .
I do agree that if a government was merely neutral between labor and capital, or better yet tilting ever so slightly 53% in favor of labor unions, and 47% for corporations, that would be a polar shift giving us a very different world. And in my universe, a considerably better world. :)

But . . .

Because of the perception of disobedience or whatever, anti-union sentiment goes way back. Here’s Adam Smith from the 1700s saying, “Whenever the Legislature attempted to regulate the differences between masters and workmen, its counsellors were always the masters.”
https://books.google.com/books?id=T...ferences between masters and workmen"&f=false

Or, going back even further . . .

https://books.google.com/books?id=d...and the pillory and loss of one ear "&f=false

“ . . . In 1549 an Act [in England] was passed to suppress the confederacies of workmen who had conspired together to determine, among other things, how much work was to be done daily, and at what hours and times; and it was declared that any one convicted of such a crime should for the first offence pay £10 ; for the second, £20 ; for the third £40 ; with the alternative of twenty days' imprisonment, in the first case ; the pillory, in the second ; and the pillory and loss of one ear in the third. But it was soon found that this law was too stringent, and when, next year, the city of London petitioned against it, on the ground that it would drive away their craftsmen and artificers, and impoverish their city, it was 'made void for ever.’ . . . ”
Yes, the 1500s. Now, it’s cool that the city of London helped to get the anti-union law repealed. But it’s sorry that such a law was passed in the first place.
 
I do agree that if a government was merely neutral between labor and capital, or better yet tilting ever so slightly 53% in favor of labor unions, and 47% for corporations, that would be a polar shift giving us a very different world. And in my universe, a considerably better world. :)

But . . .

Because of the perception of disobedience or whatever, anti-union sentiment goes way back. Here’s Adam Smith from the 1700s saying, “Whenever the Legislature attempted to regulate the differences between masters and workmen, its counsellors were always the masters.”
https://books.google.com/books?id=TFlEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq="+Whenever+the+Legislature+attempted+to+regulate+the+differences+between+masters+and+workmen"&source=bl&ots=5Ikrco85xO&sig=rvzgCpcWYJyy4UDJqMBe5f1uakg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiTrI6SxIveAhWn5oMKHZSgAkoQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=" Whenever the Legislature attempted to regulate the differences between masters and workmen"&f=false

Or, going back even further . . .


Yes, the 1500s. Now, it’s cool that the city of London helped to get the anti-union law repealed. But it’s sorry that such a law was passed in the first place.

My favorite part is that working stiffs were able to go Galt successfully.
 
No WWI does not really lead to more religiosity. If the life of people go well then they are far less interested in religion. Sweden is one example who had not personally experienced the war yet turned out irreligious. Poland experienced the horrors of WW2 yet they are one of the most religious countries of Europe.

Maybe the butterflies of no WW1 leads to a religious Baltics, Czechia and Hungary as there is an absence of communist rule but that's pretty much it.

If no WW1 means an existing Ottoman state this has huge effects on the Islamic World. No funding Salafi scholars with Saudi oil revenue, the control is in Ottoman hands. No disasters Arab Nationalism faced in OTL so no Islamism taking root among Arabs as there is no Israel on Arab land. Central Asia will be more developed as Russia won't turn into a communist state.
Israel still could exist. A lot of Protestant sects in Britain and America supported and funded the creation of Israel.
 
I don't know about religion in general, but one aspect of religion that definitely got its pants kicked by WW1 was the religious tied state jingoism. I mean the "Gott mit Uns", "Dieu le veut" and "The Lord is.on our side" variety. So I imagine a no-WW1 1920's to be like the early 1900's colonialism but on technologically fueled steroids. Expect more cannonboat diplomacy and extended land grabs in the pacific, the amazon and the African inlands with missionaries and colonial troops working hand in hand telling the natives that the power of God comes straight through the Queen, or the Kaiser while.at home preachers will sermon about the virtues of the military... at least for another dozen years or so to come. May be if there is a Great Recession as OTL, this might swing religion from the paternalistic Work and pray, live on hay, father, foreman, priest and government, obey, obey, obey to the more solidaristic "Jesus shares" of the soup kitchen preachers. May be we will have to wait until 1968 for that.
 
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