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Losing My Religion as a Natural Experiment: How State Pressure and Taxes Led to Church Disaffiliations between 1940 and 2010 in Germany
Author(s) -
Stolz Jörg,
Pollack Detlef,
De Graaf Nan Dirk,
Antonietti JeanPhilippe
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal for the scientific study of religion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.941
H-Index - 71
eISSN - 1468-5906
pISSN - 0021-8294
DOI - 10.1111/jssr.12704
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , german , german reunification , natural experiment , state (computer science) , west germany , natural (archaeology) , political science , sociology , demographic economics , development economics , economic history , history , economics , archaeology , mathematics , algorithm , computer science , statistics
Abstract The sociological literature has produced a remarkably consistent picture of the quantitative patterns of religious disaffiliations in Western countries. This article argues, and demonstrates, that strong changes in a social context may lead individuals to disaffiliate rapidly, leading to very different aggregate effects from those in the “western model.” We use the unique situation of the separation of Germany from 1949 to 1989 and its subsequent reunification as a “natural experiment” to show just how much the relationships routinely found can be disrupted under changed conditions. The state socialist “treatment” affected religious disaffiliations in East Germany profoundly as it (a) made disaffiliations 10 times more probable in the East than in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, (b) shielded East German church members from factors that led to mass disaffiliations in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, (c) reversed the education‐disaffiliation link in the East, thus making disaffiliation more likely among the less educated, and (d) led to an especially strong increase in disaffiliations in the East right after the reunification