May God Have Mercy on Us All: A Study on Secular Indicators and Peace in The Last Decade
Are secular values linked with variations on violence indicators? This paper aims to compare indicators regarding secularity and violence on nations from the last 10 years. Our final objective is to contribute to the dialogue regarding the relationship between religion and state with the use of credible empirical data. The working hypothesis we are trying to test is that nations with higher levels on secularity indicators would also present higher peace levels. The justification for this hypothesis comes from the recently more disputed conventional wisdom that, as stated by William Cavanaugh, religion is more prone to violence than ideologies and institutions that are identified as “secular”. The methodology used is a linear regression model. 47 nations were selected for the study due to the availability of data, which also determined the time-frame for analysis on this paper, raging at nine years, from 2008 to 2016, through data made available biannually.