Cultural diversity of religion across and within 117 countries

Jeanet Bentzen, Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen, Lena Sperling and Ara Norenzayan

No 22150, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Humans show marked diversity in cultural values, beliefs, and preferences. We analyze survey responses from 640,110 individuals in 117 countries (representing 89% of the World's population), and 2,333 sub-national districts, surveyed in the World Values Survey and the European Values Study. Across multiple sets of comparable cultural traits, we find that religion consistently emerges as the cultural trait that exhibits the largest cross-country divergence (measured by variances or the Cultural Fixation Index, used in evolutionary psychology). For example, personal emphasis on religion varies 5–10 times more across countries than emphasis on family, politics, or work effort, and religion is the most divergent quality valued for raising children. Likewise, differences in religious group membership across countries exceed those in other voluntary affiliations. These cross-country differences in religiosity stem partly from differences between religious traditions, but mostly from individual differences in religious involvement intensity. Our findings underscore the importance of religion in shaping cultural differences across societies.

Keywords: Culture; Cultural diversity; Religion; Religiosity; World values survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 N30 O10 O57 Z12 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP22150 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:22150

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP22150

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().