S01E04 - The Faith Factor. How Scholars’ Religiosity Biases Research Findings on Secularization

This article tackles a provocative question: do scholars’ own religious beliefs influence the conclusions they reach about secularization? The authors build a large dataset of researchers who study religious change and link survey data on their personal religiosity to the findings reported in their publications. The results show a clear pattern: more religious scholars are less likely to believe in the secularization thesis and less likely to report evidence for it in their research, while more secular scholars are more likely to support it. The study suggests that the long-running debate over secularization may reflect not just evidence about religion’s decline, but also the beliefs of the scholars studying it.(Citation: Rainero, V., Stolz, J., & Luijkx, R. (2026). The Faith Factor. How Scholars’ Religiosity Biases Research Findings on Secularization. Sociological Science, 13, 154–177. https://doi.org/10.15195/v13.a7)