Theological Modernism, Cultural Libertarianism and Laissez-Faire Economics in Contemporary European Societies
Statistical Data Included

Nancy J. DAVIS

Through analyses of national surveys of 12 European countries and Israel, we test hypotheses relating moral cosmology to cultural and economic attitudes. Modernists are theologically more individualistic than the religiously orthodox in that they see individuals, not a deity, as responsible for their fates and as the ultimate moral arbiters. We hypothesize that modernists, as theological individualists, are culturally individualistic or libertarian in supporting freedom of choice on cultural issues of abortion, sexuality, religious education, and gender roles. We hypothesize as well that modernists are economically individualistic in believing that individuals are responsible for their own success or failure and that the solution to poverty and unemployment is greater effort by the poor and jobless themselves, not government aid or private charity. In our analyses we find support for both hypotheses. In conventional political terms, modernists are to the left of the religiously orthodox on cultural concerns but to the right of the orthodox on economic issues. What explains this paradox is the individualism that underlies both cultural libertarianism and laissez-faire economics.

In Europe, as in the United States, it is common for scholars to link religious traditionalism with right-wing politics, and religious modernism or secularism with progressive politics (Almond, et al. 1991b: 476; Arnold 1990: 186; Brechon 1996; Coleman 1992: 85; Conradt 1986: 134; Harding et al. 1986: 64; Kirschenbaum 1993; Mayer 1995; Mossuz-Lavau 1992; Percheron 1982; Safran 1991; Soper 1994; Szawiel 1993; Talin 1995; Taylor 1985). While much has been written about the secularization of Europe (e.g., Abbruzzese 1995; Acquaviva [1961] 1979; Bruce 1995; Dobbelaere 1986; Dogan 1995), communities of the religiously orthodox (e.g., Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, the Charismatic Renewal movement in France, Protestant Restorationists in Great Britain) are found in all European countries (Zadra 1991; Arnold 1990; Walker 1987). Both modernists and the orthodox in Europe have successfully mobilized their followers to pursue political objectives, yet few European academics, politicians, or journalists characterize their populations as so strongly polarized along moral or religious lines as the United States has been portrayed by leading sociologists of religion writing about the "culture war" (Hunter 1991; Wuthnow 1988). Nonetheless, the convention wisdom in Europe is that modernists tend to be left and the religiously orthodox right, suggesting some degree of polarization.

In this paper, we test hypotheses relating moral cosmology to cultural and economic attitudes in contemporary European societies. We begin by showing that what distinguishes modernists (including both believers and secularists) from the religiously orthodox is their greater individualism. Modernists are theologically individualistic in that they see individuals themselves, not God, as the ultimate judges of what is morally right and wrong, and as responsible for determining the course of their lives. We argue that modernists, as theological individualists, are more likely than the religiously orthodox to be individualistic in their cultural and economic beliefs. In the cultural sphere, individualism or libertarianism entails support of individual freedom on issues of abortion, sexuality, religious education, and the division of tasks between husbands and wives. In the economic sphere, individualism or laissez-faire economics holds each person responsible for his or her own economic fate and sees the solution to poverty or joblessness not as requiring more government spending on public assistance programs or more private charity, but greater individual effort on the part of the poor and jobless to pull themselves up. Our hypotheses thus place modernists, in conventional unidimensional political terms, to the left of the orthodox on cultural issues but to their right on economic concerns. What explains the seeming paradox in the political stances of modernists and the orthodox is the individualism that for modernists underlies both their emphasis on individual choice in matters of lifestyle and their insistence on individual responsibility for economic failure or success. In this paper, we test our arguments on data for 12 European countries and Israel, a country with strong European roots.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

We begin by introducing a dimension of religious and moral belief along which individuals can be arrayed and on the basis of which they can be predicted to have different political orientations -- a model of moral cosmology developed by James Davison Hunter (1991). While moral cosmology is correlated with other dimensions of religion, such as religious (faith) identification and religious service attendance (e.g., Hayes 1995a, 1995b; Michelat 1990), we will show that it has independent effects on cultural and economic attitudes controlling for these other dimensions.

Hunter (1991) identified two "ideal types" of moral cosmology, based on the individual's conception of the ultimate source of moral authority. The religiously orthodox are those who believe that there is a divine arbiter of right and wrong, that the word of God as recorded in sacred texts is inerrant and timeless, and that God takes an active role in people's everyday lives. In the God-centered and God-directed moral universe of the orthodox, there are absolute moral standards that hold for all people at all times. [1] Progressives in Hunter's schema, or modernists [2] as we prefer to label them, believe that individuals are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong, that morality must be judged by individuals in its historical and cultural context, and that individuals are responsible for their own fates (Hunter 1991: 44-45). Modernists include religious liberals as well as secularists. Modernism refers to a cosmology that exists in all faith traditions, not narrowly to the modernist split that developed in Catholicism at the end of the 19th century.

While Hunter (1991) used these ideal types to identify the opposed moral camps he saw as engaged in a "culture war" in the United States over cultural and economic issues, we showed in our earlier analyses of the United States that moral cosmologies are best conceived as on a continuum from orthodoxy to modernism, rather than as a dichotomy. In our earlier work, we showed that moral cosmology has political implications for cultural and economic attitudes in the United States and Italy and for economic attitudes in European countries (Davis and Robinson 1996a, 1997, 1999a, 1999b) In this paper, we advance a theoretical argument linking moral cosmologies with beliefs about cultural and economic issues and test this on data for 12 European countries and Israel.

Modernism and Individualism

While Hunter (1991) does not discuss the relationship between his conceptualization of moral cosmology and individualism, the modernist moral cosmology, with its individual-centered universe and individually-determined moral standards and fates, is inherently individualistic. In a discussion of several different individualistic doctrines, Lukes (1973: 101) identifies "ethical individualism," according to which the source of morality, of moral values and principles, the creator of the very criteria of moral evaluation, is the individual; he becomes the supreme arbiter of moral (and by implication, other) values, the final moral authority in the most fundamental sense.

More recently, Kniss (1997) distinguishes two dimensions of the "moral order," one of which concerns "what is the locus of moral authority" (a transcendent authority or the individual's reason) and the other "what constitutes the moral project" (the community or the individual). The former dimension underlies Hunter's schema. On one pole of this dimension is traditionalism, in which "emphasis is placed upon... a social group defined by its relation to some higher authority. Authority transcends any particularities of person, place, or time. It is absolute and not open to criticism" (Kniss 1997: 263). On the other pole is modernism, which maintains that "the fundamental authority for defining ultimate values... is grounded in an individual's reason as applied to and filtered through individual experience," which denies "any traditional transcendent absolute authority," and which sees ethics as situational (Kniss 1997: 263).

Modernists are theologically individualistic as well in that they see individuals as having to provide meaning and purpose to their own lives, as opposed to deriving these from the existence of God. Modernists are also individualistic in their belief that individuals themselves, and not a deity, are responsible for determining the course of their lives. The distinctiveness of modernists from the orthodox in this respect should not be overstated because most orthodox religionists believe that individuals must make a personal decision to follow the will of God. Nonetheless, the orthodox cosmology is far more likely than the modernist one to assume that the course of individuals' lives is determined or profoundly affected by a personal God -- i.e., one whose will affects the fates of individuals -- thus making individuals' fates and outcomes not entirely the result of their own choices and actions (Dogan 1995: 407).

Although we assume theological differences between orthodoxy and modernism, we make no assumption of linear progress from the former to the latter since this fits the historical record of neither Europe nor America (Dobbelaere 1986: 116; Bender 1978). The existence of religiously traditionalist organizations and movements such as comunione e Liberazione in Italy (Abbruzzese 1989; Cavallaro 1976; Zadra 1991), the Fraternite St. Pie X in France (Arnold 1990; Coleman 1992), the Restorationists in Great Britain (Walker 1987), and Gush Emunim in Israel (Almond, et al. 1991a; Weiseltier 1990) attests to the fact that both orthodox and modernist cosmologies are present in even the most industrialized countries.

A Two-Dimensional Model of Political Attitudes

In relating modernism, as a theologically individualistic moral cosmology, to political attitudes, we assume a two-dimensional structure of political beliefs. While it is common in Europe and the U.S. to refer to a unidimensional left-right dimension along which individuals can be arrayed politically, a number of scholars have identified two separate dimensions of political space and have noted that individuals' positions on these dimensions do not necessarily coincide. Lipset (1981) distinguished between cultural conservatism and economic liberalism, the former referring to efforts to restrict freedoms with respect to sexuality, reproduction, schooling, and gender roles and the latter to efforts to reduce economic inequalities. Maddox and Lilie (1984) identified two similar dimensions and, in a review of U.S. national surveys, found little association between them. Similarly, Fleishman (1988), in a factor analysis of attitudes in a national sample of Americans, identified two orthogonal dimensions: "individ ual liberty," including sexuality and reproductive rights issues, and "economic welfare," involving issues of government spending on public assistance programs and the cities and efforts to reduce the gap between rich and poor. The Italian political philosopher Bobbio (1996) argued that the left/right dimension should refer specifically to positions with regard to the ideal of economic equality, while another dimension, "liberty/authoritarianism" is also needed to locate individuals politically. Most recently, Olson (1997) distinguished between "personal-moral" issues and "economic-justice" issues. The former arrays individuals along a dimension of willingness to allow or restrict individual freedom in matters of personal behavior (e.g., sexuality, reproduction, life style, sex roles) and is linked by the author to Bellah and his colleagues' (1985) concept of "expressive individualism," the goal of which is individual self-expression. The latter dimension concerns the willingness to allow or restrict individu al freedoms in the marketplace -- or Bellah et al.'s (1985) concept of "utilitarian individualism," which seeks to maximize individual wealth and well-being.

Our theoretical model builds on this earlier work, especially that of Bellah et al. (1985) and Olson (1997), in assuming a similar two-dimensional structure of political beliefs and in assuming that these dimensions represent distinct forms of individualism.

We argue that modernists, as theological individualists, are more likely than the religiously orthodox to hold individualistic views on both cultural and economic concerns, leading them to be culturally and economically individualistic relative to the orthodox. The "expressive individualism" (Bellah et al. 1985) underlying attitudes toward cultural issues assumes the freedom of each individual to make choices -- choices about sexuality, abortion, religious instruction, and appropriate roles for women and men in the home and workplace. We expect modernists to accept a broader range of sexual expression, to allow women the right to decide whether to continue pregnancy to term, to believe that mandatory prayer or religious instruction in state-supported schools infringes upon the rights of those who do not want to participate, and to feel that husbands and wives should decide for themselves how to divide paid and unpaid labor among themselves. Thus we hypothesize:

[H.sub.1]: Modernists are more culturally individualistic than the religiously orthodox on issues of abortion, sexuality, school prayer, and gender roles.

The theological individualism of modernists should also predispose them to economic individualism or "utilitarian individualism" (Bellah et al. 1985). Economic individualists believe that individuals themselves, not the communities or larger social structures within which they make their lives, determine their economic fates and deserve the credit or blame for whatever outcomes they achieve (Feagin 1975). Directly paralleling the modernists' conception of individually-determined fates and moral choices, for economic individualists,

the operating assumption is that people themselves are in charge and that their destiny is largely theirs to decide.... Being in control of their own destinies and masters of their fate, people can be held to account for how they exercised that control. Some people, as evidenced by their economic success, have exercised their freedom wisely. Others, who have failed to succeed, have no one to blame but themselves, since it was their decision to have opted otherwise (Eisinga et al. 1993: 69).

Economic individualism entails little community or government obligation to the poor and unemployed. The solution to problems of poverty, inequality, and joblessness, in the eyes of economic individualists, is not greater taxation of the rich, government jobs programs to provide work for the unemployed, or private charity, but greater individual effort by the poor and jobless to help themselves. We argue that modernists, as theological individualists, are more predisposed toward economic individualism than the religiously orthodox:

[H.sub.2]: Modernists are more economically individualistic than the religiously orthodox.

Our argument thus builds on assumptions about the inherently individualistic nature of modernism as a theological framework and the implications of this for cultural and economic attitudes. Since the orthodox may rely on sacred texts or church teachings to guide them in political matters, if the Bible or church authorities impelled them in a clear political direction, this might affect their political stances. Yet, the Bible and church teachings have been subject to diverse interpretations and have served as "master frames" (Snow and Benford 1992) of social movements across the spectrum of economic and cultural beliefs (Hill 1993: 13). For example, Roman Catholics, who may look to church teachings as much as or instead of the Bible for a source of moral authority, could find support for individualistic or laissez-faire economic views in the Catholic Church's insistence upon the absolute right to private property and in its rejection of a conflictual view of class relations. They, as well, could find support for communitarianism in the Church's advocacy of the right of workers to unionize and in its emphasis on the duty of the propertied class to provide a living wage to workers (Burns 1992: 193-194; Giammanco 1989: 88-89). [3] Our analyses will show that the effects of moral cosmology on cultural and economic issues have no boundaries of faith, applying to countries where Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism are the dominant faith traditions.

Our expectation that the religiously orthodox seek to restrict individual freedom on cultural issues is, of course, not at all surprising in view of the widely-held assumption that religious traditionalists are associated with right-wing politics in Europe and Israel (Arnold 1990: 186; Coleman 1990: 86; Conradt 1986: 134; Kirschenbaum 1993: 190; Talin 1995: 67; Taylor 1985: 241). The relative cultural restrictiveness of religious traditionalists has been documented in a number of careful studies of European countries (see, e.g., Blaschke 1995; Cesareo et al. 1995; Hayes 1995a, b; Hayes and Hornsby-Smith 1994), although these studies did not conceptualize moral cosmology as we do here and did not assess the effect of this religious dimension net of other religious dimensions such as religious service attendance and faith tradition.

Our hypothesis that the religiously orthodox are more communitarian or less individualistic than modernists on economic issues runs counter to the conventional wisdom about religious traditionalists and modernists in Europe. In addition to our own earlier work (Davis and Robinson 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1997), several U.S. studies have demonstrated a link between religious traditionalism and economic communitarianism (e.g., Tamney et al. 1989; Jelen 1990: 124; Regnerus et al. 1998). Yet the economic views of modernists versus the orthodox have received little attention in European studies. In this paper, we analyze data from 12 European countries and Israel -- allowing us to test our arguments in countries with religious regimes ranging from predominantly Protestant, Catholic or Jewish through mixed regimes to those in which only a minority of the population expresses any religious affiliation. Four Eastern European countries -- Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, and East Germany -- are included in our study, allowing us to determine whether our arguments hold in countries that experienced planned economies for more than 40 years and in some of which religion played a role in overthrowing communist regimes (Kepel 1994; Kurtz 1990/91; Tomka 1995).

DATA AND METHODS

The data that we use to test our hypotheses were gathered from 1990 to 1993 (primarily in 1991) by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Twelve Western and Eastern European countries conducted random surveys of their populations under the auspices of the ISSP. We also include ISSP data for Israel in our analyses, both because Israel is a country with strong links to Europe and because our arguments should apply to the predominantly Jewish population of this country as well. The thirteen countries analyzed here include: Austria (N = 984), East Germany (N = 1,486), Great Britain (N = 1,257), Hungary (N = 1,000), Ireland (N = 1,005), Israel (N = 991), Italy (N = 983), Northern Ireland (N = 838), the Netherlands (N = 1,635), Norway (N = 1,506), Poland (N = 1,063), Slovenia (N = 2,080), and West Germany (N = 1,346). For some analyses, the samples for all countries in the ISSP study are pooled into a single sample. Since the sample sizes vary from country to country, we weighted the sample for each cou ntry proportionate to its population size in creating the pooled sample.

The four items comprising our index of moral or religious cosmology are shown in Table 1. The items contrast the absolute, timeless moral standards and God-centered and divinely-directed universe of the orthodox with the individually-determined, situational ethics and the individual-centered and individual-directed universe of modernists. Note that, in contrast to some operationalizations of orthodoxy as "doctrinal" orthodoxy or the ratification of a specific set of religious beliefs about God, the divinity of Christ, the devil, heaven, hell, etc. (e.g., Ester and Halman 1994; Lenski 1961: 23; Stark and Glock 1968), our measure applies to members of all of the major faith traditions in Europe.

The first item in our index of moral cosmology indicates belief in a transcendent moral authority -- God -- as the basis of right and wrong. The second item measures belief in the divine inspiration and literal truth of the Bible. Religiously orthodox Roman Catholics may rely on Church teachings or papal encyclicals as a source of moral authority instead of, or in addition to, Scripture (Alexander 1985; Arnold 1990; Coleman 1992; Pace 1995). It has also been argued that fundamentalism does not exist in Judaism because there is a strong interpretative Talmudic tradition and the Torah is rarely taken as literally true (Kirschenbaum 1993; Wieseltier 1990). Nonetheless, in response to the question on the divine origin and inerrancy of the Bible, more Catholics (23.7%) and Jews (24.3%) in the ISSP pooled data agreed with the statement that "The Bible is the actual word of God and it is to be taken literally, word for word" than did Protestants (10.6%). Moreover, the reliability of the scale in predominantly Roman Catholic countries and in Israel is increased by inclusion of the item on the Bible and the scale correlates much the same with dependent variables regardless of whether this item is included. The third item indicates the extent to which respondents derive meaning in their lives from the existence of God, capturing the divinely-centered aspect of the orthodox belief system. Finally, the item on belief in a "God who concerns Himself with every human being personally" indicates belief in a deity who oversees and intervenes in the everyday activities of people and is available to them for guidance -- in Dogan's (1995: 407) words, the God of the Old and New Testaments (see also, Harding et al. 1986: 49).

The scale of moral cosmology ranges from 4 to 40 (the four individual items are scored so that each ranges from 1 to 10). Low scores indicate religious orthodoxy while high scores indicate a modernist cosmology. In the pooled samples combining data for all countries, factor analyses revealed that the four items load highly on a single factor, with an eigenvalue of 2.78. The reliability of the scale is high: Cronbach's alpha is .85.

The dependent variables measure attitudes toward cultural and economic issues. Our measures of cultural individualism include a range of attitudes toward abortion, sexuality (premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality), prayer in government-supported schools, and gender roles of wives and husbands in the home and workplace. Unfortunately, only two items measuring economic individualism are available in the ISSP data, thus limiting the degree to which we can identify effects of moral cosmology on economic individualism. The two items refer to the respondent's beliefs that government should be responsible for reducing the gap between the rich and the poor and that government should be responsible for providing jobs for anyone who wants one. [4] Note that the economic items refer specifically to the use of government intervention to reduce inequality or provide jobs and not to the direction of private charity toward these ends, thus limiting the sense in which economic individualism can be considered h ere. The cultural and economic variables are described briefly in the text below; wordings of specific questions are given in International Social Survey Programme (1993). All dependent variables are coded so that the high values represent the individualistic position. Thus, by our hypotheses, moral cosmology (high pole = modernism) should be positively related to both cultural attitudes (high pole = cultural individualism) and economic attitudes (high pole economic individualism).

We estimate the effect of moral cosmology on cultural and economic attitudes, first, with zero-order correlation coefficients and, second, with standardized regression coefficients with controls for other variables that might affect these attitudes. Two other aspects of religion are controlled in the multivariate analyses. Religious service attendance, widely used in European studies to indicate religiosity, is the respondent's estimate of the number of times she/he attends religious services in a year. [5] Faith tradition is measured by a dummy variable series consisting of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, other, and no religious affiliation (omitted category). [6]

Socio-demographic variables that have been found in earlier analyses to affect religious, cultural, and economic attitudes are also controlled in our analyses (e.g., Robinson and Bell 1978; Bell and Robinson 1980; Robinson 1983; Davie 1990; Davis and Robinson 1991; Hayes 1995a, b). Education is measured in years of schooling. Income is family income, with midpoints representing each category. [7] Region is a dummy variable series distinguishing from four to 20 regions in each country. Sex is a dummy variable, with women coded 1 and men 0. Age is measured in years. [8] Missing data on independent and dependent variables are handled using listwise deletion of cases. [9]

Statistical Analysis

Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression is used to estimate the effect of moral cosmology on cultural and economic individualism. We assume that sex, age, education, income, region, religious service attendance, faith tradition, and moral cosmology are causally prior to cultural and economic attitudes. While moral cosmology is itself an attitude or belief, we assume that this is learned earlier in the life cycle by most individuals than are positions on specific cultural and economic issues and that, in adulthood, moral cosmology provides an overarching moral/religious framework from which individuals derive positions on specific cultural and economic issues (see, e.g., Hunter 1991: 46; Wuthnow 1988: 219).

RESULTS

The Moral Topography of Europe

The rhetoric of "culture war" in the United States suggests a moral/religious topography of two peaks separated by a chasm (e.g., Wuthnow 1988: 133). In our earlier analyses, we found that moral cosmology in the United States is instead more or less normally distributed around a single peak (Davis and Robinson 1996a, 1997). European countries have rarely been characterized as split into opposed moral camps, and the distributions of moral cosmologies shown in Figure 1 suggest that none of the 13 countries analyzed here is strongly polarized along moral lines. We have arranged the countries in Figure I from those with the most orthodox populations to those with the most modernist populations. The people of Northern Ireland, Poland, Ireland and Italy are most pulled toward the orthodox pole, while the populations of Norway, the Netherlands, and the former communist bloc countries of Slovenia, Hungary, and East Germany are most inclined in the direction of modernism. Nonetheless, the standard deviations (SDs) in dicate that in each of these countries there is a range of moral cosmologies, making it inaccurate to characterize any country as "orthodox" or "modernist." Note that because the range on the scale of moral cosmologies is in some sense truncated -- i.e., further distinctions could conceivably be made even among those who scored 4 or 40 on the scale -- there is a tendency in some countries for cases to pile up at one of the scale's end points. Nonetheless, in no country does the population appear to be split into separate moral camps. Although the topography of moral cosmologies in these countries suggests little polarization, the analyses of the next section uncover consistent differences in cultural and economic beliefs as one moves across the spectrum from orthodox to modernist.

Moral Cosmology and Cultural Individualism

We hypothesized that modernists, as theological individualists, take more individualistic or libertarian stances than the religiously orthodox on cultural issues, supporting greater freedom of individual choice on abortion, sexuality, religion in public schools, and the gendered division of labor in the home and workplace. This expectation is strongly confirmed in the analyses of Table 2, where we show zero-order correlations and standardized regression coefficients for the effect of moral cosmology on these issues. Positive correlations and coefficients mean that modernists are more individualistic or libertarian, and the orthodox more morally restrictive, on these issues. The zero-order correlations of moral cosmology with libertarianism are significantly positive in all 13 countries for all eight indicators of cultural attitudes, with only one exception (noted below). Modernists are far more likely than the orthodox to feel that abortion is not wrong at all in cases of birth defects or poverty, to believe that premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality are not wrong at all, to oppose prayer in state-supported schools, to disagree that the husband should work and the wife should look after the home and family, and to disagree that family life suffers when a woman has a full-time job. The only exception to this pattern is in Hungary, where cosmology is unrelated to judgment about abortion in the case of serious defects.

[Graph Omitted]

The standardized regression coefficients in Table 2 indicate the effects of cosmology on cultural attitudes, controlling for other variables that might be expected to affect these attitudes -- sex, age, education, income, region, frequency of religious service attendance, and faith tradition. Inclusion of the last two controls presents a particularly rigorous test of the effect of cosmology. Religious service attendance is often used as a measure of religiosity, and since the dummy variable series for faith tradition includes the category "none" as the reference category, we would expect this variable also to parallel our measure of moral cosmology (Michelat 1990). With these strict controls, the effect of cosmology diminishes somewhat, but in every country at least half of the standardized regression coefficients with cultural attitudes are significantly positive. Our hypothesis linking modernism with cultural libertarianism is strongly confirmed.

Moral Cosmology and Economic Individualism

More controversial than the hypothesis just supported is our expectation that modernists are more likely than the religiously orthodox to be economic individualists, opposing government efforts to reduce the gap between rich and poor and to provide jobs for the unemployed. The zero-order correlations of moral cosmology with economic individualism, shown in Table 3, strongly support this hypothesis. Of the 26 correlations of cosmology with economic individualism, 21 are significant in the predicted direction. At least one of the two correlations of cosmology with economic individualism is significant in 12 of the 13 countries; the only exception is Great Britain, where the correlations are positive but not significant.

While the zero-order correlations of moral cosmology with economic attitudes give a sense of how modernists and the orthodox as blocs allign themselves on economic issues, we also assess the effect of cosmology net of socio-economic variables and two other religious dimensions (service attendance and faith tradition). The inclusion of controls reduces the association of modernism and economic individualism in most countries. The proportions of variance explained ([R.sup.2]s) in these economic attitudes by the independent variables are more modest than those explained in cultural attitudes, as other studies of economic attitudes have found (e.g., Form and Hanson 1985; Knoke et al. 1987). Nonetheless, even with these stringent controls, at least one of the two coefficients of cosmology with economic individualism is significant in eight of the 13 countries -- Northern Ireland, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Austria, West Germany, and Norway. In six of the 13 countries, both coefficients are significant. Had w e instead tested the conventional wisdom in Europe, which links modernism with economic progressivism and orthodoxy with economic conservatism (and conducted one-tailed tests in the opposite direction), in no country would modernism have been significantly associated with economic progressivism on either reducing the gap between rich and poor or providing jobs for those who need them (details available on request).

While in every country the proportions of variance explained and the size of the standardized coefficients for moral cosmology are smaller for economic individualism than for cultural individualism, in Israel, Poland, Italy, and Portugal, modernism is the most important factor in opposition to government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, stronger than income, education, sex, age, region, service attendance, and faith tradition (coefficients for control variables are not shown in Table 3 to conserve space). In Austria, Italy, and Poland, modernism is the most important determinant of opposition to the government providing jobs for all who need them.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Our analyses of national data for 12 European countries and Israel lent strong support to our hypotheses linking theological modernism with cultural and economic individualism. We argued that modernists, as theological individualists in their belief in an individual-centered and individual-directed universe, would take individualistic stances, relative to the religiously orthodox, on both cultural and economic issues. The hypothesis that modernists are more culturally individualistic or libertarian than the orthodox was supported in all 13 countries. The hypothesis that modernists are more economically individualistic than the orthodox runs counter to the conventional wisdom that links the religiously orthodox with right-wing, economically individualistic politics. This hypothesis is confirmed in 12 of the 13 countries in bivariate associations, and is confirmed in eight of the 13 countries with strict controls for two other religious dimensions and socio-economic variables. The common wisdom associating ort hodoxy with right wing economic policies is not supported in any of the 13 countries. Where modernists and the orthodox differ in their attitudes toward economic justice, modernists are to the right of the orthodox, not to the left as is commonly assumed.

Our findings demonstrate that, in conventional unidimensional political terms, modernists are to the "left" of the orthodox on cultural issues but to the "right" of the orthodox on economic concerns. This apparent paradox can be explained only by recognizing that there are two dimensions on which political attitudes may be arrayed (Lipset 1981; Maddox and Lilie 1984; Fleishman 1988; Bobbio 1996; Kniss 1997; Olson 1997). What links the political stances of modernists on these two dimensions is individualism. The cultural and economic individualism that we find among modernists has, of course, historical precedent in classical liberalism of the 19th century, which linked individual freedoms of religion, thought, and speech with laissez-faire economics (Burns 1990, 1992; Shively 1997).

The relative cultural and economic individualism of modernists, which we had found earlier in the United States (Davis and Robinson 1996a, 1997), a predominantly Protestant country, has no boundaries of faith, appearing in countries which are predominantly Protestant (Northern Ireland and Norway), Catholic (Poland, Ireland, Italy, and Austria), Jewish (Israel), and equally split between Protestants and Catholics (West Germany). in the zero-order, the pattern is found in four countries which, when the ISSP data were collected, had just overturned communist regimes -- Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, and East Germany, and holds in Poland with rigorous controls for socio-economic characteristics and other religious dimensions.

Modernists and the orthodox appear to differ more strongly and consistently in their cultural than in their economic beliefs, as can be seen by comparing Tables 2 and 3. Yet this may have little to do with how these beliefs play themselves out in the political arena. To the extent that party systems in European countries reflect economic concerns over taxation to redistribute wealth, public assistance for the poor, and aid to the unemployed, more than they address cultural issues of abortion, prayer in public schools, and rights for homosexuals, the economic differences between theological modernists and the religiously orthodox may be of greater political significance than the cultural differences between them (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). While we have examined the effects of moral cosmology on voting behavior in Italy in a separate paper (Davis and Robinson 1999b), we must leave to future researchers to determine how in other European countries the cultural and economic individualism of modernists and the con trary beliefs of the orthodox find political expression.

(*.) The authors are listed alphabetically. Direct all correspondence to Nancy J. Davis, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, DePauw University, 331 Asbury Hall, Greencasde, Indiana 46135, e-mail: [email protected]. We thank Roberto Cipriani, Aaron Culley, Mattei Dogan, Yves Lambert, Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Renato Mion, Enzo Pace, and die anonymous reviewers of Sociology of Religion for their helpful advice on this project. We also thank our respective universities for financial support during our 1997-98 sabbatical year in Venice, Verona, and Paris.

(1.) While Hunter focused on Scripture as the source of moral authority for the orthodox, others have noted that Catholic traditionalists may find absolute moral authority in Church teachings or papal encyclicals, in addition to or instead of sacred texts (Alexander 1985; Arnold 1990; Coleman 1992; Pace 1995).

(2.) We prefer the label "modernist" for this ideal type because it avoids the political connotation that may be associated with "progressive." We prefer Hunter's (1991) label "religious orthodoxy" to "religious conservative" (Wuthnow 1988), which may also be interpreted politically, and to "fundamentalist," which some would limit to the split that developed in 19th century British and American Protestantism.

(3.) See Burns (1990, 1992) for an analysis of the deliberate ambiguity of the Catholic Church's social (economic) doctrine.

(4.) Separate factor and reliability analyses of the cultural and economic items revealed that the eight cultural items do not scale equally welt in all 13 countries and that the two economic items rarely scale well (details available on request from the authors), so the individual items are analyzed separately.

(5.) Religious service attendance is not available for Slovenia and Israel.

(6.) Hayes (1995a, 1995b) distinguishes nonaffiliates who were raised with a religious affiliation ("stable Independents") from those raised with no affiliation ("independent apostates"), but finds no significant differences in moral attitudes between these types of nonaffiliates in her analyses of eight western countries using the ISSP data and of a 1989 British Social Attitudes Survey. Thus, we combine them in our analyses.

(7.) Before-tax income was asked in Austria, Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Norway, and the Netherlands, while after-tax income was asked in East and West Germany, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia.

(8.) For theoretical discussions of how sex, age, education, and income affect attitudes toward economic justice, see Robinson and Bell 1978; Bell and Robinson 1980; Robinson 1983; Davis and Robinson 1991.

(9.) Additional analyses using pairwise deletion yielded substantively identical conclusions to those reached using listwise deletion (details available on request).

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