Does Religion Still Guide Our Lives?

Imagine someone asks you a simple question: "Do your religious beliefs and practices really lie behind your whole approach to life?" For some people around the world, the answer is an obvious yes. For others, it barely registers.

In some countries, nine in ten people build their lives on faith, while in others, fewer than two in ten feel the same way.

This study asked over 200,000 people in 22 countries exactly that question, and the answers reveal a staggering gap. Researchers found that religious centrality, the sense that religion shapes everything you do, is highest in countries like Indonesia (94%), Tanzania (91%), Egypt (90%), and Nigeria (89%). At the other end, Japan sits at just 7%, with Sweden (13%) and Germany (18%) not far above. The Americas and Israel fall somewhere in the middle.

But the story gets more interesting when you look at who, within each country, says religion is central. Older people tended to report higher religious centrality than younger people in most countries, though not everywhere. In Israel, younger people actually scored higher. Education told a mixed story too: in poorer countries, more education tended to go along with less religious centrality, but in wealthier countries like the US and UK, the pattern sometimes reversed. One of the most striking findings involves people who never attend religious services.

Across all 22 countries, about 30% of these non-attenders still said religion was central to their life. In African countries, even people who identified as having no religion often said religion guided their life: 86% of non-religious Tanzanians, for example. This suggests that in some parts of the world, religion shapes daily life so deeply that it persists even without formal attendance or affiliation. The study also found that among people who attend religious services weekly or more, religious centrality was remarkably similar across countries: about 89% regardless of where they lived. The big differences between countries showed up mainly among people who rarely or never attend. This is the first study to compare religious centrality using nationally representative samples from such a diverse set of countries, and it sets the stage for future research on whether religious centrality influences health, happiness, and other aspects of human flourishing over time.