International Journal of Sociology

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Religion and Ethnicity: Paradoxes and Scientific

Challenges

Lilia Dimova & Martin Dimov

To cite this article: Lilia Dimova & Martin Dimov (2021) Religion and Ethnicity: Paradoxes
and Scientific Challenges, International Journal of Sociology, 51:5, 360-374, DOI:
10.1080/00207659.2021.1964273

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
2021, VOL. 51, NO. 5, 360–374
https://doi.org/10.1080/00207659.2021.1964273

Religion and Ethnicity: Paradoxes and Scientific Challenges

Lilia Dimovaa and Martin Dimovb
a
Agency for Social Analyses (ASA), Sofia, Bulgaria; bGemSeek, Sofia, Bulgaria

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This study investigates connections between religion and ethnicity Received 3 February 2021
based on the ISSP Religion’18 module’s data , collected in 2018/19 Revised 31 July 2021
in 28 countries from all over the world. The focus is on individual Accepted 2 August 2021
religiosity and ethnic self-identities in a general context, personally
KEYWORDS
reported by 39,115 respondents. Implementing a purposefully religiosity; belonging;
designed algorithm the societies have been split up into majority believing; majority vs.
and minority ethnic groups, and statistical modeling was used to minority ethnic groups;
determine the influencing factors for their levels of religiosity. The random forest
key results of the analysis showed a significant division between statistical modeling
religiosity, belonging to a denomination, and believing in God.
These three religious components had different impacts on ethnic
identity - belonging standing out as the strongest one. Ethnic minor-
ities (not only migrants) have a higher level of religiosity, believing,
and belonging, compared to ethnic majorities. Believing in God does
not necessarily mean believing in religious markers like life after
death, heaven, hell etc., which could be considered both as a para-
dox and as a scientific challenge. Furthermore, religious and ethnic
identities have hybrid characteristics and depend on cultural and
economic environment - GDP registered a high correlation with
religiosity.

Introduction
The scientific literature describes numerous theoretical and empirical approaches and
research techniques for studying religion and ethnicity. Most of the publications exam-
ine them individually without seeking a correlation between the two. In postmodernity,
however, cross-cultural comparative research has increased its relevance in historically
determining their origins, functions, as well as in defining the major characteristics in
the context of their interdependence and conditioning.
In her critical review Religion and Ethnicity: Theoretical Connections, Rebecca Kim
(2011) points out that ‘despite this intimate connection, theoretical understanding of
ethnicity and religion remain disjointed’. She argues that ‘the dominant theories in each
discipline follow a similar trajectory and can be divided into theories that predict the
decline of ethnicity and religion as well as those that account for the very opposite, the
continuing significance of ethnicity and religion’. Going deeper, she proved that

CONTACT Lilia Dimova lilia.dimova@consultant.bg Agency for Social Analyses, Sofia, Bulgaria
“This article is part of the special issue on the ISSP religion survey. Previous special issues covered the ISSP surveys
“citizenship” (Scholz et al. 2017; Eder 2017), “work orientations” (Jutz et al. 2018; Volk and Hadler 2018) “role of gov-
ernment” (Edlund and Lindh 2019; Hadler et al. 2019) and “social networks” (Sapin et al. 2020; Hadler et al. 2020).
ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 361

assimilation theories predict the decline of ethnicity, while the secularization theories
predict the decline of religion, but both underestimate ‘the resilience of ethnicity
and religion’.
The main goal of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of interconnec-
tions between religiosity, believing (i.e., religious faith) and belonging to a religious
denomination on one hand, and ethnic self-identity on the other. In the present paper
we aim to discover the levels of religiosity (as an integration of religious believe in God
and belonging to a religion) of the majority and minority ethnic groups in different
societies. Thus, we try to brighten the still existing gap between religiosity and ethnicity
in a cross-cultural comparative context, exploring the unique opportunity provided by
the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP).
The structure of our paper starts with a short purposeful overview of theoretical con-
structs of religion and ethnicity, followed by the presentation of the implemented meth-
ods of empirical measurements and analytical approaches. The results, including
different factors’ effects and random forest drivers, could be seen in the final section. In
Discussions section we summarize the previous outputs.

Religion and ethnicity as theoretical constructs

Referring to social theorists, Stark (2001) sees religion as beliefs, values, and practices

associated to spiritual concerns. He recalls that Emile Durkheim defined religion as a
unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things; that Max Weber
believed religion could be a force for social change; that Karl Marx viewed religion as
a tool used by capitalist societies to perpetuate inequality. He also describes religion as a
social institution and a cultural universal, because it could be found in all societies in a
variety of forms serving people’s needs.
In this study, we follow Grace Davie’s model of analyzing religiosity as constructed
by believing and belonging. Religiosity is different from believing in God (Davie 1990,
2013, 2015), it is different from belonging to a particular religious denomination,
though. The interactions between them are not constant over time and depend on con-
crete circumstances. This view contrasts with some contemporary theories of modernity
that seek to isolate ‘traditional’ features of premodern societies (Woodhead et al. 2016),
focusing on individuals being more concerned with a self-constitution process (Bauman
2018). The individual identity, however, is external to neither any group’s identity nor
belonging to any social community. Usually, the group’s commitments could be either
religious, or ethnic, or both. People usually expect recognition and respect from those
who are valuable to them and in this context religiosity and ethnicity play an important
social role, they both incorporate social functions.
Compared to religiosity, ethnic issues are much more complicated to be measured
and analyzed, both theoretically and empirically, especially in a cross-national context.
Ethnicity is a rather delicate, sensitive, and politically laden topic, though. In general,
ethnicity could be considered as a multidimensional construct that includes several ele-
ments like ancestry, nationality, cultural identity, religion, country of birth, and many
others. (Aspinall, 2011; Connelly et al. 2016). However, the entire content of the ethni-
city, as well as the importance of the different single dimensions may vary between
362 L. DIMOVA AND M. DIMOV

people over time, and geographically also. Furthermore, belonging to a particular ethnic
community does not mean that a person possesses all its cultural characteristics. Most
often, ethnic identity is a ‘hybrid’ identity, i.e., one accepts some but not all cultural
entities and what exactly recognizes is a question of a personal choice (Smith and Leavy
2008). The same could be said about the religious identity as a complex of beliefs, val-
ues, practices, canons, rituals, belonging.
As for the religion-ethnicity construct, there is still a significant gap in the interpret-
ation of the inter-connections between the two dimensions, both theoretically and
empirically (Kim 2011). Conflict analyses usually treat religion as a subset of ethnicity
(Stewart 2009). For Stewart ‘in the many cases where both identities are present and
overlapping, the identity along which mobilization occurs is determined by demograph-
ics and according to the identity which is perceived as being used politically’.
Ethnicity, argues Fox (2000), ‘is based primarily on the self-perception of the ethnic
group in question. Cultural markers like language, religion, customs, and phenotype (or
’race’) are used by ethnoses to demarcate their boundaries, thus ethnic groups need to
possess at least one … diacritical marker. Most agree that religion is an aspect of ethni-
city and make similar arguments.’ Going further, Fox points out that ‘if religion con-
tributes to ethnic identity, it is an important factor, otherwise it is not.’
For Grace Davie (1990, 2013, 2015) religious identity provides a sense of belonging
and cultural identity, but religious belonging does not always mean religious believing
in God. In our analysis, we follow the understanding of religiosity as a combination of
belonging and believing.
McCleary and Barro (2019) consider religion as “more than a community of believers
who share a tradition of narratives, customs, norms, and rituals”. For them religion has
both social and economic context which lead to the conclusion that “it is also more
than a network of social interactions and collective support”, and that “religiosity tends
to decline overall with economic development”, depending however on specific dimen-
sions of development. In this study we consider economic context of religion cross-
nationally, analyzing the GDP effect on the level of religiosity. Moreover, we focus on
social context of religion, dividing the surveyed countries into Western Europeans,
Post-socialist Europeans and Oversees, aiming to discover a possible long-lasting effect
of religion restriction in former socialist societies.
Stark (2001) is one of the many scientists who wrote about different forms of reli-
gious repression by communist regimes. He discovered that the effectiveness of “these
Communist efforts to stamp out religion were not very successful”, despite the atheist
policy to discredit the religion “did greatly diminish religious participation and, espe-
cially, religious education”. What is the situation decades after the collapse of the social-
ist bloc in Europe is rather interesting to know.
The discussion here could be summed up in three hypotheses:
First, there is a significant division between religiosity, belonging to a particular religious
denomination, and believing in God, and all religious aspects have different impacts on
ethnic identity. In a comparative context, belonging has relatively the greatest burden
among the three components, and the strongest effect on ethnic self-identity.
Second, ethnic minorities have higher levels of religiosity, believing and belonging,
compared to ethnic majorities (Karl Thompson 2018).
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 363

Third, religion is among the markers of ethnicity, but not the determining one (Fox 2000),
i.e., whether one self-considers him/herself as a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, etc., or
self-identifies as Turkish, Roma, Austrian, etc., ultimately is a result of a personal choice,
founded on the specific socio-cultural environment and individual values structure.

Methods
To test our hypotheses, we used data from the ISSP Religion’18 module (See ISSP
Research group 2020a and ISSP Reserch group 2020b). In our study, we worked with 28
ISSP member countries2 from all over the world. The analysis is based on 39,115 face-
to-face individual interviews carried out by a unified design of research instrument and
sampling model, which guarantee a correct cross-national comparability of the data.
The selection of these 28 countries has been based on two main criteria: (1)
Successful completion of the ISSP’18 module on religion through national surveys, rep-
resentative for the whole adult population over 18 years of age in each single country;
(2) The society of the country could be broken down into ethnic majority and minority
groups, implementing a unified purposefully designed algorithm on the respond-
ents’ answers3.
This study is related only to individual/personal religiosity, religious beliefs, and
belonging to a certain religious denomination, reported by the respondents themselves.
Religious institutions like churches, mosques, religious rites, temples, etc., are exempt
from our current interest.
Three main categories have been defined according to personal dispositions:

religious (people, who consider themselves to be religious),

belongers (people, who share that they belong to a specific religious denomin-
ation); and

believers (people, who believe in God without any doubt of His existence).

To study the level of religiosity in general, respondents were asked to share how reli-
gious they feel themselves to be based on 7-point scale where 1 ¼ extremely religious
and 7 ¼ extremely non-religious. We recoded the outputs of the collected data from that
question and distinguished 3 main cohorts of religious people as follows:

Religious: those that pointed the following options: Extremely religious þ Very
religious þ Somewhat religious;

Non-religious: those that pointed options: Somewhat non-religious þ Very non-
religious þ Extremely non-religious;

Neutral: those that pointed the option: Neither religious nor non-religious.

To discover the level of religious believing in God we used the following aggregates:

Hard Religious Believers: those that pointed the following options: I believe in
God now þ I always have

Flexible Religious Believers: those that pointed the following options: I do not
believe in God now, but I used to þ I believe in God now, but I did not used to
364 L. DIMOVA AND M. DIMOV

Table 1. Share of Religiosity, Belonging and Believing by ethnic groups (%).

Minority ethnic groups Majority ethnic groups
Country Religious Non-religious Neutral Religious Non-religious Neutral
Austria 44.1 44.1 11.8 42.3 41.8 15.9
Bulgaria 59.9 28.3 11.8 54.7 24.7 20.6
Chile 38.8 28.7 32.6 44.1 31.0 24.9
Taiwan 74.4 11.3 14.2 70.7 12.8 16.5
Croatia 51.4 32.4 16.2 63.8 21.1 15.0
Czech Republic 53.5 25.6 20.9 26.5 45.0 28.5
Denmark 24.8 56.0 19.3 11.3 51.7 37.0
Finland 35.5 45.2 19.4 34.0 43.0 23.0
France 57.0 25.0 18.0 23.5 51.4 25.1
Georgia 81.4 3.3 15.2 88.0 3.1 8.9
Germany 42.1 38.6 19.3 32.7 55.1 12.2
Hungary 45.5 54.5 0.0 38.6 44.0 17.4
Iceland 37.7 41.0 21.3 40.9 35.8 23.3
Israel 39.2 51.5 9.2 37.6 51.6 10.8
Italy 76.9 15.4 7.7 53.5 31.6 14.9
Japan 20.0 60.0 20.0 28.6 55.8 15.6
Lithuania 56.2 28.1 15.7 52.5 18.8 28.7
New Zealand 61.4 25.7 12.9 27.4 45.8 26.8
Norway 46.2 40.4 13.5 31.0 39.8 29.2
Philippines 92.5 3.2 4.3 87.1 6.0 6.9
Russia 63.0 24.2 12.8 50.7 39.0 10.3
Slovak Republic 59.8 22.0 18.1 43.7 35.8 20.4
Slovenia 65.6 16.7 17.7 57.2 30.3 12.5
South Africa 76.6 9.9 13.5 71.0 14.5 14.5
Spain 25.1 52.7 22.2 37.7 39.6 22.7
Sweden 41.5 29.2 29.2 13.0 54.7 32.4
Thailand 51.0 26.0 23.0 29.4 36.7 33.9
Turkey 75.0 6.8 18.2 74.7 13.0 12.3
Base n ¼ 39,115.

Hard Non-believers/Atheists: those that pointed the option: I do not believe in

God now and I never have

To discover the belonging to a particular religion denomination we worked with four

aggregated religions – Christianity, Islam, Jewish, and Asia/Easter religions - reported
by the respondents themselves as their belonging. We considered those denominations
in a general context4 and do not make any comparisons between the specific religious
ideologies - they could be a task of our further work.
To overcome the difficulties in the measurement of ethnicity (Burton, Nandi, Platt
2008, 2010; Connelly et al. 2016), the ISSP’s research instruments use a diplomatic and
well-working approach, asking national teams to compound as comprehensively as pos-
sible a list of existing country-specific ethnic groups. The most important requirement
to its content is to be relevant to the national ethnic policy, research culture, and to be
unambiguously understood by all respondents. Based on these lists we regrouped the
ethnic structure of every single country into ethnic majority and ethnic minority clus-
ters. To do that, we created an algorithm based on which we implemented a purposeful
statistical approach of recalculation.
Here we constructed a binominal variable which clustered all dominant groups in
one category (ethnic majority) and all the rest in another (ethnic minority). We used
the aggregated distribution of different self-reported groups in order to determine the
dominant one. Since the distribution only provided an explanatory element, we needed
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 365

a statistical proof to verify the existence of ethnic groups which are significantly greater
than the others, i.e., outliers. We applied an outlier detection method which would pin-
point the groups that have deviation far bigger in density as compared to the others,
hence only those with dominant frequencies. This approach is specifically useful in
multinational countries with large number of almost equal ethnicity distribution. We
applied the Three times interquartile range (IQR) method as it is commonly used in the
field as suggested by Rousseeuw and Croux (1993). Only those ethnic groups which fre-
quencies are three times bigger than the inner quartile range are assigned as dominant,
i.e., a majority ethnic group. The rest falls into the other category which we named
minority ethnic group.
In that way, we tried to ensure scientific solutions to some important challenges
related to the cross-national measurement of ethnicity in general, as well as to cope
with difficulties in cross-national comparison between different ethnic groups measured
by the ISSP’s national teams in different ways, with different tools, standard protocols,
and approaches5.
The dependent variable in our analysis is religiosity (as a complex of believing and
belonging) – i.e., personal disposition as religious. As control variables, we used some stand-
ard socio-demographics like age, education, mother’s religion, father’s religion, ethnicity,
urban vs. rural, sex, plus religion the respondent was raised in, and country’s political past6.
As a macro-level control, we used the correlation between GDP and religiosity.

Results
A general view of religiosity in all 28 selected countries shows an attention-worthy dis-
tribution between religious, non-religious, and neutral people in almost all surveyed
societies. (Table 1) Those that self-identifies as religious dominates the non-religious
cohort in most of the states. Atheists and religious neutrals are relatively less, but not
enough to be ignored. Ethnic comparisons, in turn, reveal a higher share of religiosity
in ethnic minorities than in ethnic majorities. Accordingly, the shares of non-religious
and neutral in minority groups in the most cases are less than those in the dominant
ones. Thus, the first our hypotheses has been confirmed.
Going into more detail, ISSP data discovered a comparable picture of religiosity in
every single surveyed country both for majority and minority ethnic groups. Among the
most religious societies stand out those of the Philippines, Georgia, Taiwan, Italy, South
Africa, Turkey. The great majority of their population (about 70%) consider themselves
to be ‘religious people.’ At the opposite pole are Japan, the Scandinavian countries,
Hungary, Israel and surprisingly – Spain, where atheists are more than religious in both
majority and minority ethnic groups.
Majority v/s minority ethnic comparisons discovered that ethnic minorities have a
higher level of religiosity, belonging, and believing than ethnic majorities. In a large
extend that could be explained with the cultural defense theory (Bruce 2002). People
feel secure being a part of a community that shares the same cultural norms, traditions,
religion, rituals, etc. Belonging to such a community makes people feel stronger against
a non-friendly environment. Being a member of a group of people with the same or of
366 L. DIMOVA AND M. DIMOV

Table 2. Religiosity, belonging and believing by ethnic groups in all 28 countries (%).
Ethnic Minority Ethnic Majority
Total (A) (B)
Religious 47.0% 61.4% 45.1% A
Non-religious 33.6% 23.3% 34.9% A
Neutral 19.4% 15.3% 20.0% A
Belongers to a religion 75.2% 78.4% B 74.8%
Hard believers in God 57.4% 68.9% B 55.8%
Flexible believers in God 20.4% 18.1% 20.7% A
Chi2 ¼ 556.85, p ¼ 0.000.
Base n ¼ 39 115.

similar values, believes, behavior standards, religious practice, etc., enables them to
easily keep their ethnic and religious identity.
Furthermore, we discovered that there are significant differences in the public percep-
tion of religiosity, believing in God, and belonging to a particular religion. (Table 2).
There were no countries where the three dimensions overlap entirely, i.e., not all people
who consider themselves as religious believe in God. Also, not everyone who believes in
God belongs to a religion; not all, who describe themselves as religious belong to a reli-
gion, either. Overall, 80% of all respondents perceive themselves simultaneously as reli-
gious, believers, and belongers. However, every fifth reports only for one or for a
combination of just two accessories.
The analysis indicated a significant positive correlation between ethnic self-identity,
religiosity, belonging, and believing; where the belonging effect is the strongest one -
i.e., again our hypothesis has been proven. Belonging to a specific religion often plays
an important marker’s role of ethnic identity even without religious faith. In other
words, when ethnic identity largely depends on belonging to a particular religion, peo-
ple declare belonging even when they paradoxically consider be atheists.
The ISSP data registered some other seemingly “paradoxical” correlations between
believing in God and believing in religious components like paradise, hell, religious
miracles, superpower, life after death. It is not inherent only of religious people, not
even of all hard believers.
The so-called “Hard believers in God” have the highest relative share among those
who think that there is retribution after death (69,8%). Their religious faith also
includes paradise (77,1%), hell (77,7%), religious miracles (74,7%), as well as other reli-
gious components studied by ISSP. However, even within this relatively strong level of
religious beliefs, one in four people is skeptical of the existence of eternal spirit-
ual salvation.
Social data also allows for a look at another comparison of religious attitudes –
between post-socialist and non-socialist societies. Looking for the differences (if any) we
aimed to find “the echo” of policies against the religion in former socialist societies and
the public reactions in there in the later times of religion freedom. Nowadays, in the
studied post-socialist Bulgaria, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Czech
Republic, Georgia, and Hungary (which completed the ISSP religion module), being a
religious person seems to be a subconsciously demonstrated resistance against the previ-
ous religious restrictions. (Table 3). Of course, in each country, whether post-socialist,
Weatern European, or any other, the religious structure is specific and, as a rule,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 367

Table 3. Religiosity, Belonging and Believing by Country Groups.

Western Post- Socialist Overseas
European Countries European countries countries
All Countries
(A) (B) (C)
Believers
Chi2 ¼ 184.17 Non-believers 22,1 21,8 23,6 A, C 21,2
p ¼ 0.000 Hard believers 56,7 56,2 B 52,9 61,6 A, B
Flexible believers 21,2 22,1 C 23,5 A, C 17,2
Religious
Chi2 ¼ 600.73 Religious 46,5 41,3 53,6 A, C 51,1 A
p ¼ 0.000 Non-religious 34,1 38,4 B, C 28,8 29,9
Neutral 19,4 20,4 B, C 17,5 19,0 B
Belongers
Chi2 ¼ 13066 No religion 25,4 26,1 23,9 25,1
p ¼ 0.000 Christianity 56,2 57,5 72,1 A, C 37,7
Jewish 2,4 4,3 B, C 0,1 0,2 B
Islam 5,9 9,0 B, C 3,6 C 1,6
Asia religion 9,1 1,6 0,1 34,4 A, B
Other religion 1,1 1,6 B, C 0,2 1,0 B
Results are based on two-sided tests with significance level a ¼ 0.05. For each significant pair, the key to the category
with the smaller column proportion appears under the category with the larger column proportion. Tests are adjusted
for all pairwise comparisons within a row of each innermost sub-table using the Bonferroni correction. Chi-Squared
test for variable association, H0: “No difference of religiosity levels across all political country formation”.

involves not only one single religion7. People belonging to different denominations have
different beliefs and, here in our study, we do not look for any comparisons between
them. What we are specifically interested in is how much the political past has affected
today’s level of the religious culture of people with different ethnocultural backgrounds.
We found out that, in general, religious prohibitions in former socialist countries have
not had a strong and lasting impact on the holy attitudes of their citizens, and today
they are not significantly different from others in the world.
In the most societies religious people are less than hard believers. One of the explana-
tions could be found in public perceptions with regards to the differentiation between
religiosity and believing in God. For many people being religious means not only to
believe in God but more often to follow religious practices, rituals, specific behavior. To
pray regularly, to visit religious places of worship, to observe religious holidays, to
attend religious services and events, etc., is perceived as synonymous with religiosity,
which does not necessarily include hard believing in God. People may take part in ritual
activities, especially those pursued in public for many non-religious reasons. How Stark
(2001) points out, the church attendance effect is substantially weaker than the God
effect, i.e., the God effect is the fundament of religiosity.
For Europeans, the key factor of religiosity is believing in God, for overseas it is the
country of residence, how the applied machine learning approach registered. The effects
of individual drivers on level of belonging to a religion or level of religiosity was derived
by application of the Random Forest Technique8 (Breiman 2001). We trained our mod-
els (depending on the split) on a training subsample and tested the result on another
subsample of the same data for the entire model. Since this was a regression (rather
than classification) we used the lowest RMSE, i.e., as a measure of predictive power of
each model turn.
The model indicated that personal socio-demographics like age, sex, education, ethnic
identity are not among the main influencers on religiosity. Together with the key
368 L. DIMOVA AND M. DIMOV

Table 4. Influencing factors of religiosity and ethnic dimensions.

Elements of religiosity and ethnic dimensions
Religious Belonging Believing Ethnicity
Drivers
Ethnicity 3% 2% 3% Not included
Religious Not included 20% 42% 9%
Belonging 20% Not included 24% 26%
Believing 51% 16% Not included 9%
PS/West/Asia 6% 44% 9% 22%
Age 7% 3% 9% 13%
Education 11% 16% 9% 16%
Sex 3% 0% 4% 5%
Relative variable importance of individual drivers in percentages explained variance as compared to all drivers.
Note. Drivers’ effects estimated as variable importance in multidimensional space. Individual importance estimated as an
improvement to RSME in every tree split across variables as a regression task.

religious markers (believing and belonging) country of residence plays an important

role and has a significant positive correlation with religiosity. It appears that the socio-
cultural environment and national features, as well as the historical traditions and heri-
tage in each country, establish ‘a national religion face’, followed usually by the ethnic
majority cluster of the society. In some countries (Algeria, Shri Lanka, The Philippines)
both ethnic majority and ethnic minority profess the same religious denomination
which determines the religious appearance of the state.
Data also showed that the ethnic model displays a vital part in explaining the differ-
ences among belongers. Belonging to a particular religion is more than considered as
religious or believing in God. There is a strong correlation between belonging to a reli-
gion and some important perceptions such as religiosity and cultural belonging with a
clear difference in type among the observed countries. On average, belonging to a spe-
cific religion is determined predominantly by parents’ religions (especially for majority
ethnical groups) and by subjective assessment of individual place in society. In some
states like Turkey, however, belonging to religion for minorities is pretty much deter-
mined by geographical areas, corresponding to tight family traditions and values origin-
ally raised in their community. On the other hand, belonging to a specific religion does
not necessarily correspond to personal characteristics such as sex, age, education.
The implemented random forest analysis discovered the main factors’ influences on
ethnicity and religiosity in general. (Table 4). God’s effect is dominant in the religious
self-identity – i.e., faith in God is the key factor, followed by professed religious ideol-
ogy. It is indicative that the family environment plays a relatively less significant role in
religious self-determination. The same applies to socio-demographics - sex, age, educa-
tion. With the exeption of belongong, political background could be ignored in the
chosen configuration of independent variables also. The situation with ethnicity is simi-
lar – i.e., to consider yourself as a religious person or an atheist, in general, depends
less on your ethnic self-identity than on other factors, related to religiosity itself, to a
specific denomination, and as a result – to a personal choice. With this, all our hypoth-
eses have been proven.
Ethnicity, not even being a key influencing factor, in this recurs acts as an indicator
of social and national religious affiliation – i.e., it gives a sense of empathy and belong-
ing to a particular community, of “a secure back” and protection. When people around
you share the same values and moral norms, when your behavior and religious faith is
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 369

Figure 1. Drivers of Religiosity and Ethnicity.

Note. Multivariate modeling of main effects Drivers’ effects estimated as variable importance in multi-
dimensional space. Individual importance estimated as an improvement to RSME in every tree split
across variables as a regression task.10

shared by a community, you feel a part of a bigger social construct and do not feel iso-
lated. This also applies to those who do not consider themselves religious and are not
believers but claim to belong to a particular religion - because it is distinctive for their
ethnic group and their place of residence. As we have already displayed (Table 2),
belongers make up a significant higher relative share than the religious and hard
believers. This applies to both ethnic groups, but for the ethnic majorities it is more
considerable. Within that ethnic segment, the belongers to a particular religion are with
serious predominance over religious counterparts. Religion in this aspect acts as an indi-
cator of national and ethnic affiliation rather than of religious faith. To the greatest
extent, this applies to former colonies or occupied states in which belonging to a par-
ticular religion is a matter of national and cultural identity.
Drivers of ethnicity, on another hand, clearly showed that ancestry is the heaviest fac-
tor for both minorities and dominant ethnoses9. (Figure 1) When religion is included in
the battery of independent variables, the religious components play an important role in
ethnic identity - Fox (2000) comes to similar conclusions. The most substantial is the
effect of religion with which respondents were raised in. Here, the link between ethnic
identity and religious affiliation is particularly strong. The family religious environment
is rather important for ethnic orientation, and the interrelated religion–ethnicity is obvi-
ous. The political past, again, is not a significant factor, but the top-bottom status is.
Position in society plays a rather big role in ethnic self-determination, especially when
ethnic stigma syndrome intervenes. People from some ethnic groups (Roma is a typical
example), mainly minorities, who are subject to negative attitudes by other ethnic
groups, often hide their true ethnicity, especially if they have achieved a higher living
standard or professional success. Put another way, successful individuals, located close
to the top of society, tend to view their own origins as an ethnic stigma when their
“bottom ancestry” is an object of discrimination or xenophobia by the most people.
To control religiosity at cross-cultural macro-level perspectives, we used GDP as a
basic indicator for a country’s maturity (Figure 2). The data clearly outlined a signifi-
cant negative correlation between the level of religiosity and living standards in the
370 L. DIMOVA AND M. DIMOV

Figure 2. Religiosity vs. GDP per capita.11

Source. ISSP’18, World Bank national accounts data, and OECD National Accounts data files.

surveyed countries. The citizens of the richest states are comparatively least religious.
This is related to the countries of the “Rich European North”, including Sweden,
Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland. Close to them are Austria and Germany.
At the opposite pole are the Philippines and Georgia with the lowest GDP, where
over 80% of the respondents are defined as religious. Thailand, Czech Republic, Japan,
and France stand out as countries with relatively low religiosity, but with different polit-
ical past, different levels of GDP, different religious cultures. In this analytical recurs,
the level of religiosity depends both on the socio-economic factors mentioned above
and on the national cultural features, norms, traditions.

Discussion
ISSP data offer unique opportunities for in-depth multivariable analyses, based on a
reliable set of nationally representative data, collected all over the world. Moreover, data
from the ISSP allow cross-national comparisons of religious culture and ethnicity. Our
focus was on individual religiosity, belonging to a denomination, and believing in God,
as well as on ethnic self-identities in different types of ethnic groups of 28 countries.
Implementing a purposefully designed algorithm, we transformed the list of ethnoses,
reported by the respondents, into two main clusters - ethnic majority and ethnic minor-
ity. We have done that for each surveyed country, where it was applicable – i.e., where
the ISSP’18 module on religion had been successfully completed and where the respond-
ents’ answers on country-specific ethnic structures allowed us to distinguish the society
into ethnic majority and ethnic minority groups.
As a basic theoretical construct, we followed Davie’s concept (2015) about religiosity
as a sustainable combination of believing and belonging and found out that the internal
religious components do not entirely match. We discovered that the situation ‘believing
without belonging’ (Davie 2015), or ‘belonging without feeling religious and/or believer’, is
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 371

widespread in the surveyed countries, and thus does not prove claims that this is
a paradox.
Among our main outputs was that ethnic minorities have a higher level of religiosity
than ethnic majorities – with this, we proved our hypotheses and expanded the geo-
graphical perimeter of some of Thompson’s findings (2018). Furthermore, the data indi-
cated that ethnic minorities have also higher levels of belonging and believing compared
to the majority ethnic group. In both ethnic groups, however, there is a mismatch
between believing in God and believing in religious markers such as life after death,
paradise, hell, religious miracles. We also found a complete match between the three
religious’ dimensions (religiosity, hard believing in God, and belonging to a religious
denomination) in about 80% of respondents – while every fifth report indicated a devi-
ation. In general, hybrid identities - both religious and ethnic - could be defined as the
typical characteristics of the surveyed people.
ISSP data discovered that religion is among the key markers of ethnicity (when it is
in the independent battery of variables), but it is not fully covered by the ethnic identity
and therefore they could not be substitutable. The interconnection depends on the spe-
cific socio-economic environment, religious denomination, and ethnic group. In a com-
parative context, belonging to a religious denomination has a stronger impact on ethnic
identity than believing in God or even being religious in general.
Statical modeling discovered that country of residence as a measure of community
the respondents live in, is one of the important factors for religiosity, believing, and
belonging. In a comparative context, ethnicity itself is a less important factor for reli-
gious orientation than the socio-cultural environment like country of residence, parents’
denominations, and religion raised in. The implemented macro-level control by GDP
clearly outlined a significant negative correlation between the level of religiosity and liv-
ing standards surveyed: the less religiosity could be found in the Richest European
North, Austria, and Germany; the highest level of religiosity – in the Philippines and
Georgia. However, the level of religiosity depends not only on the GDP and economic
development, but also on the factors mentioned above and on the national and cultural
characteristics, norms, traditions.

Notes
1. Detailed description and additional information about ISSP could be found on http://www.
issp.org
2. The list of the countries could be seen in Table 1 in the results section.
3. Despites UK and USA successfully completed the ISSP ’Religion module, their teams
measure ethnicity in ways, that do not allow to implement our unified algorithm to divide
their societies into majority and minority ethnic groups. That is why these countries are not
included in our analyses.
4. For Christianity we considered all varieties reported by the respondents - Catholicism,
Orthodoxy, Protestantism, other Christian religions. By Asia/Easter religions we meant
Buddhism, Hindu and all others indicated by the surveyed individuals.
5. We presume that in every ISSP member country there must exist an ethnic majority cohort
and at least one minority community, which is different in some way from the majority.
Furthermore, it was a challenge to discover similarities and differences between the two
major strata in the context of religion and ethnicity interconnection. Working with the two
selected ethnic groups, we were able to compare the main social markers of both religiosity
and ethnic identity.
372 L. DIMOVA AND M. DIMOV

6. We used ‘country’s political past’ as a criterion for grouping the surveyed courtiers into
Western European Countries, Post-Socialist European Countries and Overseas countries.
Thus, we tried to measure the influence of socialist and non-socialist political regimens on
religiosity and mainly to discover what is the echo of Marxist ideology that ‘religion is an
opium of the people’ in today’s post-socialist societies. Of course, we did NOT place under a
common denominator all post-socialist countries (in our case they are only 8), neither in
terms of their religious heterogeneity nor in terms of specific dominant and non-
dominant religions.
7. Within the group of the 8 surveyed post-socialist countries, Catholic Christianity dominated
in 5 of them and Orthodox Christianity in Bulgaria, Russia, and Georgia – all of them, as it
is in all other surveyed societies, are religious heterogeneous and the dominant religion
does not mean that it is the only existing religion.
8. The method has multiple advantages that clearly leverage the insights and the predictive
power of the data. Among these are: the non-linear approach to explain variance in
dependent variable, the interactivity in building multiple independent models, the lesser risk
of overfitting and generally the highest level of accuracy. One of the most effective
advantages is the possibility to extract the variable importance. For this particular task no
prediction on target variable was used. The purpose of running the model was to measure
the actual importance of the individual drivers in the context of their mutual dependence
and interaction with the other selected variables. We focus on Interactive tuning of
hyperparameters, that was made using 10-fold cross validation greedy algorithm to
determine: the number of variables randomly sampled as candidates at each split (mtry)
and the minimum number of data points for further splits in a tree. (min_n) (Breiman
2001). Other hyperparameters were set as constant i.e., number of trees ¼ 1000.
9. Here we used more socio-demographic variable as compared to the previous analysis
including top-bottom 10-point scale subjective for respondent’s self-assessment of where he/
she stands in society where 0 corresponds to society bottom, and 10 - the highest levels
of society.
10. Here we deliberately refrained from using standard Linear Regression (OLS method) due to
its multiple limitations and dubious results with categorical data.
11. GDP per capita is gross domestic product divided by midyear population (Source:
World Bank)

Notes on contributors
Lilia Dimova is a social scientist, Director of the Think Tank organization Agency for Social
Analyses (ASA), established in Bulgaria. Assoc. Prof Dimova is the ISSP Principal Investigator
(1994 since) and the ESS National Coordinator (2005–2019). Her main scientific interests are in
the field of social stratification and inequalities (gender, ethnic, generational, religious), poverty,
exclusion/inclusion, ethnic and national identities.
Martin Dimov is a data scientist, modeller and statistician, Director of the Data Science Team in
Gem Seek Company. Dr. Dimov’s professional achievements are in the field of development of
predictive models, innovative approaches and techniques for better utilization of internal data,
implementing top-notch ML/AI algorithms in mega and social data analyses.

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