Secular countries are prosperous and likely to be wealthier than religious countries reveals researchers after conducting a new study.
Data collected on countries ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe on values held by countries and their respective GDPs revealed that countries were religion was not of significant importance tended to grow economically more than those with religious importance, TOI reported.
This study was conducted by the University of Bristol where the team led by Damian Ruck has definitely answered the impact of secularism on the country’s economy.
The researches have found that the poorest nations are those who tend to be highly religious.
“Our findings show that secularisation precedes economic development and not the other way around,” said Damian.
“However, we suspect the relationship is not directly causal. We noticed that secularisation only leads to economic development when it is accompanied by a greater respect for individual rights.”
Their study was published in the journal ‘Science Advances’, where the team used data from the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey.
A variety of questions about family views on homosexuality were taken into account since 1990.
Dr. Alex Bentley, a research teams partner from the University of Tennessee said, “Over the course of the 20th century, changes in the importance of religious practices appear to have predicted changes in GDP across the world. This doesn’t mean that secularisation caused economic development, since both changes could have been caused by some third factor with different time lags, but at least we can rule out economic growth as the cause of secularisation in the past.”
An overall analysis of the study suggest that tolerance was indeed the key success for any society in a nation.