Volunteering and Country-Level Religiosity: Evidence from the European Union

Research on volunteering has emphasized the positive role played by individual religiosity on this type of civic engagement. There are fewer studies on the relation between contextual religiosity and volunteer work. Several of them have concluded that the higher the macro-contextual religiosity, the higher the propensity to get involved in volunteering. Thereby, researchers might be inclined to conclude that secularization is a threat to this social participation. This article shows that such a conclusion is unfounded. From a data set including the 27 countries of the European Union and using a multilevel analysis to control for the compositional effects of the national sample, we obtain a negative correlation between macro-contextual religiosity and volunteering. From these results, we suggest that the relationship between volunteering and contextual religiosity cannot be considered as deterministic but it has to be comprehended in a more global cultural context.