Religious Culture and Innovation Performance in Europe

Innovation consists of a social process that leads to the possibility of accomplishing previously unthinkable things or doing them more effectively. Therefore, innovation is not just a matter of new technologies, e.g. computers or financial profits or software companies; innovation is also a matter of culture. As a matter of fact, the concept of culture extends beyond visible habits, customs, and material artifacts.

Culture also encompasses deep representations of reality and the fundamental assumptions through which social actors interpret their environment. Namely, the way a culture represents time, significantly influences its orientation toward change. Whether a collectivity perceives change as progress, disruption, or cyclical recurrence reflects deeply embedded temporal representations. In other words, a culture’s underlying conception of time directly shapes its attitude toward innovation. Cultures that understand time as linear and future-oriented are generally more inclined to interpret change as a form of advancement, whereas cultures that conceive time as cyclical may consider change as part of a recurring and regulated order rather than as a departure from the past.

European history can make a demonstration of how culture can affect innovation: Europe has a strong Christian background, yet Northern Europe is predominantly Protestant, Eastern Europe is Orthodox and Southern Europe is Catholic.

Since almost twenty years, the European Commission has released an annual European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). The Scoreboard provides a comprehensive assessment of innovation performance across European countries through a broad set of indicators covering diverse variables, such as the number of PhD holders, the relevance of research activities, the digitalisation level etc.

What is relevant in the annual reports is that Protestant countries, such as the Netherlands or Finland, have constantly occupied the leading positions.

By focusing mainly on Western Europe, I will try to explain this difference.

The first fact to take into consideration is that the Catholic Church, as an institution, was the main cultural institution in the Western Europe almost a millennium. Several invasions and regime changes occurred since the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century CE and only the Catholic Church remained stable and exercised cultural and moral (as well as political) authority over Western Europe. Catholic idea of time is based upon the Apocalypse book, which describes the end of the world and the time. Within this framework, in the Catholic area, any change (no matter if social or political) probably appeared as a step forward towards the end of the world and considered as a negative event. This also implies a strictly static society: for example, poor people are poor for a God’s decision and trying to improve one’s own social status is a heavy sin.

On the other side, when the Protestant Reformation took place in 1517 CE, the rational approach to life that characterises the Protestant confession provided a better environment for innovation, consisting of a set of values that make social actors eager to use rationality – namely, science and education – to produce wealth.

Those values are based upon two crucial facts: the first is that, while in the Catholic world the Church is the only legitimate commentator of the Holy Writings, members of Protestant churches are supposed to read and comment on their own the Bible: this implies that in Northern Europe, big effort happened to increase literacy and education among the whole population.

The second fact is that Protestantism rejects the Medieval mysticism: Protestantism considers miracle tales, Saints worship, ecstasy cases like Catherine of Siena, as a king of pagan legacy and need to be forgotten on behalf of a rational attitude: rationality is the only actual divine quality, and rationalism is the only way to honour God. Furthermore, according to most Protestant confessions, becoming rich is not any longer a sin: it is the demonstration of the God’s favour; so that, any business innovation that rationality suggests is a sign of devotion and makes a cognitive base for a positive idea of change.

Needless to say, European countries have undergone a process of deep secularisation and the religious identity is not anymore a key boundary for most citizens. Is spite of this, some of the cultural legacies historically associated with Protestantism still survive. The values historically linked to the Protestant tradition—such as individual responsibility, the importance of education, and a favourable attitude toward rational inquiry—appear to have persisted beyond the decline of religious practice itself. As a result, many Protestants countries are the most innovation-oriented in Europe

This is an example of the influence that cultural representations extend on how individuals and institutions perceive novelty, uncertainty, and social change. Although religion is only one among many factors shaping innovative capacity, its historical influence on cultural values and temporal orientations remains a relevant dimension for understanding variations in innovation across contemporary societies.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.