Pole A: Irreligious score 0
A State and public decisions without religion. Common argument for it: in a country with many beliefs, only a State with no official religion treats everyone equally.
POLITICAL POSITION · DIMENSION 10 OF 12
Religion: irreligious or religious
Religion is the dimension that records the role a person gives to religion in public life and collective decisions.
What it is
Religion is the dimension that records the role a person gives to religion in public life and collective decisions. At the Irreligious pole, laws, public schools and the State are kept apart from religion, and faith is a private matter; at the Religious pole, religious values and institutions guide public life and have a place in State decisions.
What the dimension covers
- separation between the State and religious institutions
- religion in public schools
- religious values as a basis for laws
- religious symbols in public spaces
The two poles
0 · IrreligiousReligious · 100
Pole B: Religious score 100
Religion with a place in public life. Common argument for it: religion is a source of values and community, and excluding it from public life impoverishes collective decisions.
How the instrument measures it
The Evidence instrument (schema evidence-pol-1) records this dimension as a number from 0 to 100: 0 is the Irreligious pole, 100 is the Religious pole. The number comes from your answers to the questionnaire or from a result imported from another instrument by URL; either way it is a self-assessment, computed in your browser, and nothing reaches the server without an explicit action from you. With no answer for this dimension, it stays unknown (UNKNOWN), never 50.
| No. | Statement | Agreeing points to |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | Religious leaders should not try to influence votes in Congress. | Irreligious |
| 22 | Religious values should guide the country's laws. | Religious |
| 34 | Religious institutions should pay taxes like any other organization. | Irreligious |
| 46 | Public schools should include religious education during regular hours. | Religious |
Formula p = (resposta - 1) / 4 if agreeing points to Religious; p = 1 - (resposta - 1) / 4 if it points to Irreligious; placar = 100 * media(p)
There are 4 original statements, with opposite directions to reduce the effect of agreeing with everything. Answers run from 1 to 5 (1 Strongly disagree, 2 Disagree, 3 Neither agree nor disagree, 4 Agree, 5 Strongly agree); "Don't know" does not score. Each answer becomes a position between 0 and 1, the score is the mean position times 100, and confidence combines coverage (how many of the 4 statements scored) and consistency (how far answers point the same way): high from 0.75, medium from 0.50.
In the Evidence portable format, this dimension is the religion parameter of the profile URL. Scale, evidence states and limitations are in the instrument method; the terms are in the glossary.
Why it is a separate dimension
It differs from Social norms: one can hold traditional mores for non-religious reasons, or be religious and progressive on mores. Here the question is the place of religion in institutions.
Compare with Social norms and Technology.
Frequently asked questions
Does a religious person automatically land near the Religious pole?
No. The dimension is about the role of religion in the State and public life, not the respondent's faith. Some religious people defend strict separation between churches and the State.
Is Brazil a secular State?
The Constitution forbids the Union, the states and the municipalities from establishing religious cults or churches, subsidizing them or keeping relations of dependence or alliance with them, except for collaboration in the public interest (art. 19, I). The dimension records the respondent's preference; it does not interpret the Constitution.
What does a score of 50 on Religion mean?
That the answers ended halfway between Irreligious and Religious, through balance or through a mix of answers in both directions. It is not the same as moderation or the political center, and it says nothing about the other 11 dimensions.
Is my result sent or published?
No. The computation runs in your browser, nothing reaches the server without an explicit action from you, and the result page is not indexed by search engines. Political opinion is sensitive personal data under Brazil's LGPD (art. 5, II, and art. 11).
Literature and references
- Religion and Political TheoryStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: religious reasons in public decisions and the debate on secularism.
- World Values SurveySurvey in waves, in dozens of countries, on values, religion and public life.
- Pew Research Center: religionSurveys on religion and public life in many countries.
Reference readings on the topic. None of them validates the Evidence instrument, and no text, question or weight was copied from them.
Conceptual sources of the instrument
The place of religion in public life and law: strict separation (irreligious) or religion as a reference for the state (religious). It does not measure personal faith.
Other dimensions
- Related dimensionSocial normsProgressive · Traditionalist
- Related dimensionTechnologyTechnology · Biology
- PreviousForeign tradeProtectionism · Globalism
- NextSocial normsProgressive · Traditionalist