Beyond Church and State: Private Religiosity and Post-Materialist Political Opinion among Individuals in Sweden

Some people have religious faith or practice religion without the direction of an established religious institution.1 In this article, I refer to them as the privately religious. In his study of intergenerational value change, Ronald Inglehart mentions a possible correlation between post-materialist values and private religiosity: “Post-materialists have more potential interest in religion than Materialists. But, as it would seem, most organized religions today have little to say about the meaning and purpose of life—at least in terms that are meaningful to the Post-materialists.”2 This statement has political implications. Indirectly, Inglehart points out a correlation between private religiosity and political opinion: as the world modernizes, people tend to be increasingly privately religious, and the same people tend to develop political opinions that Inglehart associates with post-materialism. This transformation, outside of church and state, I call the evolved theory of intergenerational value change. If post-materialists tend to be privately religious and pursue the kind of politics Inglehart suggests, political opinions corresponding to the values post-materialists are said to embrace ought to have a relatively strong support among privately religious people.