Status-Redirected Religiosity

A theoretical proposal, with evidence, competing explanations, and the conditions under which it should be rejected.

This is the technical companion to India Got Rich. God Got a Price List. — same argument, written for anyone who wants to check the work.

Abstract

Modernisation theory predicts that rising socioeconomic status (SES) erodes religiosity. This holds across much of the West but fails in India, where prosperity has coincided with intensifying religious expression. I propose that the anomaly is partly artefactual and partly real. The artefactual component is measurement: standard religiosity instruments, derived from congregational Abrahamic traditions, index belief salience and attendance, and are largely insensitive to the orthopraxic and expenditure-based forms through which Hindu religiosity is enacted. The real component is functional: where religion carries high social value, rising SES does not extinguish religiosity but redirects it from private observance toward conspicuous, status-bearing expression. I term this Status-Redirected Religiosity (SRR). The Western secularisation gradient and the Indian non-gradient are, on this account, the same underlying process — the exchange of religious participation for existential security — operating in two different status economies. Critically, SRR is a claim about social function, not about individual sincerity, and I argue that the sincerity question is empirically inaccessible and should be abandoned.

1. Prosperity secularised the West but not India

Norris and Inglehart (2011) established that religiosity declines as existential security rises: populations insulated from material and physical threat participate less. The mechanism is security, not knowledge. This distinction matters, because the popular alternative — that education erodes faith through cognitive sophistication — is poorly supported.

Why the "education erodes faith" account doesn't hold

Glaeser and Sacerdote (2008) found that in the United States education raises attendance while lowering belief intensity; Schwadel (2011) reported education raising involvement while reducing literalism; and the flagship experimental demonstration that analytic thinking promotes disbelief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012) failed a large preregistered direct replication (Sanchez, Sundermeier, Gray, & Calin-Jageman, 2017). Any theory resting on “enlightenment through learning” is resting on sand.

India presents the anomaly. Pew Research Center (2021), surveying 29,999 adults, found religiosity near-universal (84% rating religion very important) with a negligible education gradient (80% among college graduates versus 85% among the less educated). Meanwhile Nanda (2009) documented an intensification of middle-class and elite Hindu practice across the liberalisation period, and CSDS/Lokniti surveys have repeatedly recorded net self-reported increases in religiosity concentrated in urban and educated segments.

Prosperity arrived. Secularisation did not.

2. Standard instruments can’t see how Hindu religiosity is enacted

The first component of the explanation is instrumental. Verghese (2020) randomised closed- versus open-ended religiosity questioning among Hindus in Bihar. Under closed-ended formats over 90% reported temple attendance; under open-ended questioning only 16% volunteered temple-going as a religious practice at all. What respondents named instead was domestic puja, festival observance, ritual dress, and purity and auspiciousness norms.

This is the orthopraxy–orthodoxy distinction (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997, on the ethic of divinity). Hinduism is practice-centred and largely non-congregational. Instruments built around belief salience and weekly attendance therefore lack construct validity in this context, and cross-national religiosity comparisons involving India face an unresolved measurement-invariance problem.

The practical consequence is decisive for the present theory. If elite religiosity is enacted through expenditure and ritual elaboration rather than through prayer frequency, a flat self-report gradient is precisely what SRR predicts — it is confirmatory, not disconfirmatory.

3. Change the instrument and the income gradient appears

When the instrument changes, the gradient appears. Lakshmanasamy (2024), using NSSO 68th-round data (2011–12; N = 101,651 households, 9,914 reporting positive religious expenditure), found household income positively and significantly associated with religious expenditure across every religious and caste grouping, with education showing a small negative effect. Mitra and Mukherji (2024), using CMIE Consumer Pyramids data (approximately 204,000 households, 2014–2019), estimated an income elasticity of approximately 1.74 for a conspicuous-consumption basket that explicitly includes social and religious obligations — the signature of a luxury good, against 0.62 for food and 0.78 for education.

Institutional data corroborate. Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams recorded over ₹918 crore in direct donations in the year to October 2025, with digital channels overtaking physical counters. Priority-darshan schemes monetise access at major temples. Commercial estimates place India’s religious and spiritual market in the tens of billions of dollars with sustained growth.

Two caveats that cut against the expenditure evidence

Lakshmanasamy’s specification regresses expenditure levels on log income, yielding a marginal effect rather than a clean elasticity; it establishes direction, not luxury status. And Mitra and Mukherji find that the religious sub-component of their basket takes a larger budget share among poorer quartiles, consistent with Banerjee and Duflo’s documentation of heavy festival spending among the poor. Religious expenditure rises with income in absolute terms; it is not exclusively an elite phenomenon in proportional terms.

4. Where honour is scarce, religious spending converts wealth into standing

Why should prosperity redirect rather than extinguish religiosity in this setting? Five components, in short: status is a scarce good wealth cannot buy directly; visible religiosity pays best where religion is most valued; costly display is hard to fake; the pattern has a century-old precedent in Sanskritisation; and security, not wealth, is what secularises.

The mechanism in full: status, self-enhancement, signalling, Sanskritisation, security

Status versus class. Weber (1922/1946) distinguished class, determined by market position, from status group (Stand), constituted by social honour, lifestyle, and closure — and treated caste as the limiting case of status closure. Where honour is a scarce good not automatically conferred by wealth, actors require a conversion mechanism. Religious expenditure is such a mechanism: it converts liquid capital into publicly legible standing.

Self-enhancement conditioned on cultural value. Gebauer, Sedikides, and Neberich (2012) demonstrated that the self-esteem benefits of religiosity are moderated by the social value a culture places on religion, being strongest in highly religious contexts. India is among the most religious societies measured. The psychological return on visible religiosity is therefore high, and rises with the audience’s capacity to recognise the display.

Costly signalling. Sosis and Alcorta (2003) established that hard-to-fake religious displays signal commitment and secure in-group standing. Large donations, elaborate ritual, and pilgrimage are costly precisely in proportion to their signalling value.

Sanskritisation. Srinivas (1966) described upwardly mobile groups adopting more orthodox practice — vegetarianism, teetotalism, Sanskritic deities — to convert economic ascent into ritual standing. SRR is, in one reading, Sanskritisation with a liberalisation-era budget and an individual rather than caste-level unit of analysis.

The security account, applied symmetrically. Norris and Inglehart’s mechanism is not wealth but security. Indian elites acquired wealth within an environment of persistent volatility — institutional, economic, and positional. The prediction follows directly: where prosperity does not deliver security, it does not deliver secularisation, and the religiosity that remains will be oriented toward the insecurity that persists. In a status-competitive society, that insecurity is substantially positional. Hence redirection toward display.

5. Formal statement

Status-Redirected Religiosity (SRR). Where religion carries high cultural value and status is scarce relative to wealth, increases in SES produce no reduction in religiosity as conventionally measured, but a reallocation of religious behaviour from private observance toward conspicuous, expenditure-intensive, publicly legible forms. The magnitude of redirection is a function of (a) the social value placed on religiosity, (b) the availability of alternative status-conversion mechanisms, and (c) residual existential and positional insecurity.

The Western case is then not a contrast but a boundary condition: where religion’s social value has fallen and secular status-conversion mechanisms are abundant, rising SES produces exit rather than redirection.

6. Five predictions, one of them decisive

Within India, SES will predict religious expenditure and ritual elaboration positively while predicting prayer frequency and belief salience negligibly. (Partially supported; Lakshmanasamy, 2024.)
Religious expenditure will be disproportionately allocated to observable forms (donation with attribution, public ritual, pilgrimage) over unobservable ones, and the ratio will rise with SES. Untested — this is the sharpest available test.
Measures of positional insecurity and status concern will predict conspicuous religious expenditure, controlling for devotional self-report.
Experimental manipulation of audience visibility will increase intended religious donation more strongly among high-SES Indian participants than low-SES or Western comparison samples.
Where secular status-conversion mechanisms are dense (e.g., professional credentialling in metropolitan South India), redirection will be weaker — consistent with the observed Southern gradient (69% versus 92%).

7. SRR says nothing about sincerity — and controlling for status would break the test

It makes no claim about sincerity. The proposition that high-SES religiosity is “only” status-driven and “not spiritual” is empirically inaccessible. Aggregate behavioural and expenditure data cannot adjudicate interior states, and function does not imply insincerity: a practice may deliver status returns to a wholly sincere practitioner. SRR is a claim about what religiosity does socially, not about what believers feel.

The over-controlling trap, and why prediction 3 can't be tested yet

A tempting analysis that must be avoided. One might propose to regress religiosity on SES while controlling for insecurity and reputational motive, and interpret an attenuated coefficient as revealing “true” residual religiosity — with the Western pattern as the counterfactual. This is invalid. If status and insecurity are the mediating mechanism, conditioning on them removes the very pathway under investigation; the resulting estimate is not a counterfactual but a mis-specified direct effect, and inference from it would be a textbook case of over-controlling for a mediator. The appropriate design is mediation analysis with the mediators measured, not partialled out — and no Indian dataset currently measures status motive and religiosity jointly. Prediction 3 above cannot presently be tested. This is a gap to be stated, not filled by assertion.

8. Four rival explanations SRR does not yet beat

SRR must outcompete at least four alternatives, and does not yet clearly do so: religious nationalism, urbanisation, supply-side professionalisation, and simple co-occurrence.

The four competing explanations in full

Religious nationalism. Intensified Hindu practice coincides with Hindutva’s political ascendancy. Nanda (2009) herself frames the phenomenon as a state–temple–corporate formation. Period effects are confounded with SES effects.
Urbanisation and anomie. Migration to cities generates demand for community and identity anchors independent of income.
Supply-side professionalisation. Religious organisations have marketed systematically to a middle-class consumer base; observed demand may be partly manufactured.
Simple co-occurrence. Religiosity rose during a period in which SES rose. Absent individual-level panel data, “rises with SES” is not established over “rose alongside SES.”

The decisive missing evidence: no panel, cohort, or natural-experiment study tracks individual Indians’ religiosity as their SES changes. The India Human Development Survey is a genuine panel but contains no religiosity-intensity measure — only affiliation and a single religious-group-membership item. The temporal claim is therefore plausible and multiply consistent, but not causally established, and should be stated as such.

9. The critique targets the apparatus, not the believers

The analytical claim is descriptive; the critique it supports is not.

A tradition whose ritual centres historically flattened social distinction — where the queue for darshan was indifferent to lineage — has developed institutional mechanisms for reintroducing that distinction at a price. Priority access, tiered donation visibility, and the ritual arms race in life-cycle ceremony convert a levelling institution into a stratifying one. The object of criticism is the institutional apparatus that monetises religious standing, not the believers who navigate it, and certainly not the tradition itself. Where devotion becomes purchasable, the poor lose the one arena in which their standing was not a function of their means.

References

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Image credit

Hero: “Max Weber, 1918” by Ernst Gottmann (1874–1932). Public domain — the author died in 1932 and the work was published before 1931 — via Wikimedia Commons. Reproduced unmodified.

About the author

Psychology enthusiast and human-condition student, obsessed with the science behind why people do what they do — in love, culture, and everywhere in between.

Every theory on this blog is 100% mine — gaps in the research I’ve found through my ongoing formal study of Psychology, built on the back of prominent, published theories, not invented from thin air. AI helps me draft, refine and research these ideas further, but the theories themselves are entirely my own.

The goal: make you more self-aware, call out the misconceptions your culture and upbringing sold you as “just how things are,” and remind you that whatever you’re wrestling with, it’s the shared human condition — you’re not the only one in it. No BS, just the research.

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