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Heaven can wait: future tense and religiosity

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Abstract

This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the type of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are more effective for speakers of languages without inflectional future tense. Consistent with this prediction, we show that speakers of languages without inflectional future tense are more likely to be religious and to take up the short-term costs associated with religiosity. What is likely to drive this behaviour, according to our results, is the relatively greater appeal of the religious rewards to these individuals. Our analysis is based on within-country regressions comparing individuals with identical observable characteristics who speak a different language.

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Notes

  1. See Section 2 for a more detailed explanation of the two different future tense systems.

  2. For instance, the following famous passage from the Second Epistle to Timothy is in inflectional future tense in the French bible (1.), whereas the Finnish bible lacks inflectional future tense (2.).

    “And the Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom.” (2 Timothy 4:18)

    • 1. Le Seigneur med èlivrerade toute oeuvre mauvaise, et il mesauverapour me faire entrer dansson royaume cèlest.

    • And the Lord me deliverfuture of all works evil, and he me savefuture to me make enter into his kingdom heavenly.

    • 2. Ja Herraon vapahtavaminut kaikesta ilkivallasta japelastavaminut taivaalliseen valtakun-taansa.

    • And the Lord is freeingpresent me from all wickedness, and savespresent me in his heavenly kingdom.

  3. Our classification of languages is in line with that of Galor et al. (2016, 2020). However, unlike Galor et al. we stick to the original terminology of Dahl and Velupillai (2013) and speak of languages with “no inflectional future tense”, rather than languages with “periphrastic future tense”. The reason is that the term “periphrastic future tense” commonly refers to languages, such as English, which mark the future with an auxiliary (e.g. will), and not to languages that do not require any future tense marking at all, such as Finnish.

  4. Typically, time discounting is represented by a discounting function involving a discounting factor δ determined by an agent’s discount rate r. Smaller discount rates result in a discounting factor closer to 1.

  5. For example, Italy drops out of the sample since the only language spoken at home reported within the WVS sample is Italian (alongside “other” language which cannot be identified). On the other hand, Germany remains in the sample due to the presence of individuals speaking a language other than German (e.g. Turkish, Russian).

  6. Splitting this group into two—those with other and those with no denomination—has no implication for the results.

  7. The countries in this sub-sample include the following: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Hungary, Jordan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, and Uruguay.

  8. Some analyses on the link between language structures and outcomes have instead explicitly focused on a sample of immigrants (e.g. Gay et al. 2017; Galor et al. 2020), adopting “epidemiological approach” by comparing migrants descending from different countries within the same country of residence, in the hope that it might help to isolate the causal effect of speaking a language (although as a recent study by Beblo et al. (2020) suggests, studying immigrants may not overcome the concerns over causality since individuals who select into migration are more likely to reject the norms of their country of origin and may transmit their traits to their children). These studies, however, have used large single country datasets such as the US Census and American Community Survey, where detailed information on the background of individuals and their families is available. This exercise faces significant constraints within WVS where information on immigrant background is limited, and not available (and consistently defined) across all waves. We made an attempt at imitating a version of epidemiological approach on our dataset based on wave 3 (1994–1998) of WVS where information on the places of birth of the respondents, defined by broad continents, is available. The estimated marginal effect of No inflectional FT on Religious in a regression which includes dummies for continent of origin of immigrants in addition to baseline controls and host country dummies in a sample of immigrants (N= 2405) is statistically indistinguishable from 0. The results are available on request.

  9. Also, in unreported results, we include the size of one’s own language share in the population and its interaction with No inflectional FT as additional regressors in the baseline specification of our model. These are not statistically significantly related to the probability of being religious. Hence, the positive statistically significant association between No inflectional FT in one’s language and Religious does not appear to vary by the share of the population speaking the language.

  10. We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this example.

  11. SUR system is system of equations with no endogenous right-hand-side variables that allows for contemporaneous cross-equation error correlation. It is different from three-stage least squares which represents a system of equations with endogenous regressors and requires instrumental variables for identification.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor, Klaus F. Zimmermann, and two anonymous referees for their excellent comments on this paper. We also thank the participants of the economics internal seminar at the University of Western Australia for their feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, Faculty of Business and Law, Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA, 6845, Australia

    Astghik Mavisakalyan & Yashar Tarverdi

  2. ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The Australian National University, Building 9, H.C. Coombs Building, Acton, ACT, 2601, Australia

    Astghik Mavisakalyan

  3. Department of Treasury WA, David Malcolm Justice Centre, 28 Barrack Street, Perth, WA, 6000, Australia

    Yashar Tarverdi

  4. School of Economics, Finance and Property, Faculty of Business and Law, Curtin University, GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA, 6845, Australia

    Yashar Tarverdi

  5. Department of Philosophy, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    Clas Weber

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  1. Astghik Mavisakalyan
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Correspondence to Astghik Mavisakalyan.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 9 Regressions with alternative dependent variables: religious denomination - probit marginal effects
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Mavisakalyan, A., Tarverdi, Y. & Weber, C. Heaven can wait: future tense and religiosity. J Popul Econ 35, 833–860 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-021-00850-5

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