Twenty-six percent of Swedes believe in a personal God, as compared to 90 percent of the population of the United States. Twenty-one percent of Danes believe in sin, the lowest proportion in the world. Despite such faithlessness, neither Sweden nor Denmark has spiraled into the chaos our “Culture Warriors” would expect of a people that does not fear any law higher than its own. The new book Society without God presents this information and much more like it in the name of a very simple goal: “to soberly counter the widely touted assertion that without religion, society is doomed.”
Author Phil Zuckerman’s goal is no more ambitious than it sounds—to prove his point, he needs only a single counterexample: a nation that is both irreligious and successful by any reasonable standard. Zuckerman presents two such counterexamples: Sweden and Denmark. The information Zuckerman provides consists of rankings and statistics from the United Nations Development Report, UNICEF, and a few non-governmental organizations. This data shows that Sweden and Denmark surpass the United States on some of the very terms religion is supposed to define, including social justice, charity, and corruption.
Throughout his presentation of this data, Zuckerman mentions only Sweden and Denmark by name, but notes the trend that in ranking after ranking, the top 20 consists primarily of the most secular nations. Zuckerman leaves these correlations completely unexplored, even where the relationship between secularity and success seems easy to explain, as in the cases of gender equality and the status of women. Zuckerman’s sticking to his guns in this way on the one hand severely limits the scope and significance of his argument, but on the other hand protects his argument from getting tangled up in complicated matters of cause.
Consequently, Zuckerman only needs 35 pages to present all of this data and the core of his argument, leaving 152 for his own research. The remaining seven chapters alternate between interviews with a few pinches of theory, and theory with a few quotes from interviews. Zuckerman conducted most of his interviews during the 14 months he spent in Denmark as a researcher for his own Pitzer College and the European Union Center of California. The 150 or so interviewees, while not randomly selected, seem to span a few spectra of Danish society, ranging from devout to oblivious, from professors to secondary school dropouts.
Sadly, the interviews are somewhat biased and rarely contribute anything substantial to Zuckerman’s argument. Also, the theory sections generally seem shallow if not simplistic; from an intellectual perspective, it is hard to find much to appreciate in the body of Society without God. However, the book will remain interesting to readers who are curious to learn how differently people see themselves in a thoroughly secular society. For example, a few interviewees had passed the age of 20 (or 30 in one case) without ever forming an opinion about the reality of a personal God. What Zuckerman found interesting about these people is that they were not agnostics; they simply “hadn’t really thought about [the existence of God] before.”
On the whole, Society without God is a worthwhile book. The writing is generally very fast and smooth, though Zuckerman has an irksome habit of using repetition rather than data to make a point seem plausible (at one point he presents a series of seven extremely similar interview excerpts to illustrate Danes’ obliviousness to religion). Zuckerman’s argument is unambitious but persuasive, and the later chapters are not worthless—at first the irreligiosity of Scandinavia seems strange, quirky, and amusing, but this sense of foreignness fades as the practical advantages of secularism in the lives of Danes become apparent. By the end of even such a brief look at a society without God, it may be our culture that seems bizarre.
