Moralization of Religiosity Explains Worldwide Trends in Religious Belief

Religion is an enduring part of human culture, but religious belief is declining in some societies. What explains which regions secularize and which individuals leave their faiths? We propose that secularization is inversely related to the “moralization of religion:” the belief that religion is essential to morality. Moralization of religiosity likely emerged as a by-product of the historical rise of prosocial religions, but we propose that it has an additional side-effect—it discourages deconversion due to perceived reputational costs. We further suggest that cultural differences in the moralization of religiosity foreshadow patterns of nation-level secularization and individual-level deconversion. Our model is supported by historical cross-cultural, retrospective longitudinal, survey, and experimental studies (N = 221,202), which show that the moralization of religiosity inhibits both secularization across nations and deconversion across individuals, and also fosters prejudice against nonbelievers.