Quotes from Ronald Inglehart

Table 2.1. Percentage saying "Most people can be trusted" Cultural Zone % N Protestant Europe 61 (20,530) Confucian 46 (7,736) English-speaking 42 (10,533) Baltic 31 (4,147) Catholic Europe 28 (22,284) South Asia 25 (10,646) Orthodox 19 (21,321) Islamic 18 (28,990) Sub-Saharan Africa 15 (16,865) Latin America 11 (17,177) Total (160,229) Source: Latest available survey for each country in the Values Surveys. Weber predicted

There are several reasons secularization is accelerating. One generally overlooked cause springs from the fact that, for many centuries, a coherent set of pro-fertility norms* evolved in most countries that assigns women the role of producing as many children as possible and discourages divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any other form of sexual behavior not linked with reproduction.

The vertical dimension reflects the transition from agrarian societies to industrial societies, which brings secularization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and rationalization. These changes are linked with a polarization between traditional and secular-rational values.

Until recently, natural selection helped impose pro-fertility norms. But a growing number of societies have attained high existential security, long life expectancy, and low infant mortality, making pro-fertility norms no longer necessary for societal survival and opening the way for a shift to individual-choice norms. Normally there is a substantial time lag between changing societal conditions and cultural change. The norms one grows up

The shift from survival values to self-expression values is linked with increasing tolerance of diversity, an essential component of democracy.

advocated celibacy, but these societies have disappeared. Virtually all major religions that survive today instill gender roles and reproductive norms that encourage women to cede leadership roles to men and to bear and raise as many children as possible—stigmatizing any sexual behavior not linked with reproduction. Throughout history, religion has helped people cope with survival under insecure conditions. Facing

The collapse of Marxist belief systems led to a massive decline of subjective well-being among the people of the former Soviet Empire, a decline that lasted for decades, leaving an ideological vacuum to be filled by rising religiosity and nationalism.