Does Religious Salience Boost or Reduce Personal Feelings of Agency?

It was commonplace among secular sociologists of my generation (educated in the early 1990s) to accept the Marxist notion that religion was the "Opiate of the Masses," depressing social mobilization, revolutionary fervor, and the sense on the part of the poor and oppressed that they could change their material conditions. I believed this to be true for a long time. In 2016 and 2017, I got the chance to test this proposition when the Open Societies Foundations gave me a grant to explore the willingness of ordinary people in Mexico City and Bogotá, Colombia, to donate money to local social change organizations. We asked 960 randomly selected persons in each city a whole host of questions in painstaking, 40-minute-long, face-to-face conversations. At the very last minute, I threw in a question: "To what extent do you agree with the statement, 'people like me can make a difference in the world?'" It wasn't directly related to our research topic, but it didn't cost much to add a single question, and I was intensely curious. For years, I haven't had the opportunity to explore the statistical determinants of responses to this question. Last month, however, I finally found the time, thanks to a partnership with my friend and colleague, Richard Wood, the director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California. Rich is a noted sociologist of religion and was interested in learning more about any light my surveys could shed on religion and public opinion. We decided to build a statistical model in which "individual sense of agency" was the dependent variable, and "religious importance," defined by answers to the question, "How important is religion in your daily life," was the independent variable of interest. We threw in a bunch of controls and ran a bunch of robustness tests. Lo and behold, we found the exact opposite of what Marx would have suspected. The more important religion was in the daily lives of respondents, the more likely they were to feel a sense of individual efficacy and agency. Wow! I did not expect that. I'd love to do more research on the topic with funding to conduct surveys in other world regions, using newly worded questions to get at the religion-agency relationsihp. To read the full article, check out this link on the IACS website: Opiate of the Masses? Survey Evidence from Mexico and Colombia.

About James Ron

James Ron is an international research consultant who taught and did research in institutions of higher education for 22 years. Before that, James was a journalist with the Associated Press and an investigator with Human Rights Watch.

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