The Fatalistic Imagination and the Continued Salience of Religion in the Modern World: A Test of Resource Compensation/Resource Amplification Hypotheses Using Crossnational Data

The resource compensation hypothesis predicts that religiosity will serve as a cognitive buffer against structural constraints whereby more religious individuals will exhibit lower levels of fatalism than their less religious counterparts. The resource amplification perspective, on the other hand, predicts that religiosity will foster a sense that otherworldly forces control life's outcomes, leading to higher levels of fatalism. Using a precise measure of fatalism from the two most recent waves of the World Values Survey, a comparative examination of three Latin American countries, South Africa, and the United States is carried out. With Mexico as the sole exception, findings from ordered logistic regression models suggest that higher levels of religiosity are associated with lower levels of fatalism, supporting the resource compensation hypothesis. Implications for longstanding debates over the salience of modern religion are considered. An important and underappreciated cognitive function provided by thriving religious denominations and institutions may be to provide a catalyst for personal empowerment that comes through the rejection of a fatalistic mentality. I would like to thank Jeffrey Alexander, Ivan Szelenyi, Philip Smith, and Hannah Brueckner for the helpful comments on early drafts of this article. I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers at Sociological Spectrum for the invaluable comments and suggestions. Notes 1While the 2005 wave of WVS data is in progress, the data were not publicly available at the time the current analysis was carried out. The data used here are from the four-wave data set and were made available through The Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor as study number ICPSR 3975. The data frame also included data from the European Values Survey. 2The WVS includes six distinct weighting variables. For the current analysis, the standard weight variable (mnemonic S017) was used. Analysis using the WVS equilibrated weight variable (mnemonic S018) did not alter the findings. 3In an unpublished paper (currently "conditional acceptance" at Social Forces, and available upon request), I consider the question of denominational variation and fatalism in a broader comparative perspective, with emphasis on fatalism in Islamic nations. The current analysis for Sociological Spectrum is aimed at gauging the impact of religiosity in a limited number of cases and will allow for discussion of the specific cases under consideration. 4The creation of a fatalism index would require a very specific set of measures that are not available on the WVS data set for the most recent waves and the country-level cases used here. A reliable fatalism index would include items that assess feelings of mastery and control but that are not measures of other potential covariates (e.g., religiosity, depression, anxiety, and unhappiness) and are not consistently available across waves, and country-level cases in the WVS data. Standard errors are in parentheses ∗p < .05; ∗∗p < .01; ∗∗p < .001.