Is There a Religion Trap? Atheism, Agnosticism, and Innovation

Abstract

There is a religious trap haunting the contemporary world, raising a barrier to economic growth and innovation. The trap impacts two types of nation-states. One group consists of those plagued by tribal rivalries, ripped asunder by conflicts breaking out between groups worshipping different deities, ultimately bereft of strong national identity. A second group of states are those under the political influence of elites whose legitimacy is wedded to first Axial Age doctrines, for instance Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Clustered within this group there are some nations where the scope of educational endeavor is narrowly confined, precluding an open-minded outreach to advances in science and commerce achieved in regions of the globe where that status of first Axial Age elites has been marginalized, notably in Europe. The first section of the paper advances a historical argument explaining why the dominance of first Axial Age elites was eroded during the European Enlightenment, ushering in nationalism and the knowledge economy in European soil, spreading outward to other regions of the world afterword. The remainder of the paper investigates the influence that barriers to the intrusion of these two modernizing tendencies exercises on economic advance in the contemporary world. In particular it provides using a variable that measures the percentage of the population self declaring agnostic or atheist, it demonstrates when the recorded levels of agnosticism and atheism are low in a country there are impediments to innovation and economic growth in that country.