Continuing from the previous post about the role of church, the World Values Survey also asked the questions as below:
- Do churches give answers to people’s spiritual need?
- Do churches give answers to the social problems?
The “yes” answer given by the participants in OECD countries are shown in the graphs below:
Most of the people in Mexico, South Africa and US think that churches do give answers to people’s spiritual need. This is particularly true for most of the Catholic-dominant countries, like Portugal and Italy. On the other hand, most of the Japanese (only 34.1% of them) do not think churches/religion instituition in their country give answers. The same goes to Luxembourg, Belgium and Netherlands. On average, 61.3% of all the participants agreed that churches give answers to people’s spiritual need.
Next, what does people think of the role of churches in social problems? On average, only 30.3% of all the interviewees here think that churches have their role in social problems tackling. Among them, 62.2% of South African, 53.9% of Mexican and 45.6% of American think that churches give answers to social problems. On the hand, only 7.1% Japanese, 11.5% Danish and 15.5% Czech people agreed so.
Let’s look at the numbers from the selected Asia countries:
Again, in the Islam-predominant countries like Egypt, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, their religion instituitions is believed by their people to give answers to both people’s spiritual need and social problems.
micpohling