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Not only thematically a little bit different here, but with my presentation as well.

Because I'm going to present some numbers, I thought it might make sense to have them on presentation, on the wall.

But first of all, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to present a little bit of my personal research.

I'm here as a step-in for Gerd Pickel, but I can't really step in for him because he is such a great researcher.

And I'm doing a little bit different research than him, but I think I will contribute to the discussion and to the presentations we already heard.

From an outsider perspective, the sociological perspective on the question of the contribution of religions to the common good in the public society.

So from the sociological understanding, the question posed here looks a little bit different.

It is the question of how the common good can be defined in the first place.

And it is, sociology understands the common good as a contribution or contributing to common goods with an S at the end.

That means that it is the preservation of the creation or enforcing human rights.

And these kinds of goods, they have a particular kind of problem or dilemma.

Because in the sociological experience, they look like these.

You have the choice to contribute or to non-contribute to the production of these kinds of goods.

And if everybody contributes, we will end here.

The product, the good will be produced, goods will be produced, and everybody can benefit from them.

But if some people opt out and they are not going to contribute, that leaves the other people with a problem that they contribute and the goods might not be produced.

So they are left with the costs.

And because everybody tries to avoid to be left with the costs without having the benefits of the goods, normally the public goods, the common goods, and here they are not produced because nobody is going to contribute.

That's called the free rider problem, and we face that when it comes to environmental problems, for example, or for the enforcement of human rights.

And the sociological riddle here is how to transform these individual incentives not to contribute into the incentive to contribute to the common.

So transforming individual benefits into societal benefits.

And you might see that ties in explicitly to the questions that are raised here, coming from a little bit different perspective.

So from the sociological perspective, the transformation involves two kinds of incentives that are basically norms, norms and sanctions.

We are bound by norms in order to contribute to common goods.

I will show some data about how religion is able or religions are able to enforce, to support these kinds of norms necessary for the contribution to the common goods.

And secondly, the second solution to the transformation problem is trust.

If we trust that everybody else is going to contribute, we have a high incentive to contribute ourselves, but how to come up with some kind of trust that says to us,

okay, everybody else will tie in, so my contribution is not waste.

And I will show some data how religion supports these kinds of trust in others to contribute to the common.

That is discussed under the headline of social capital, and maybe some people of you know about this kind of concept.

My research that I'm going to present is about Europe. It's an observation from Europe.

And this has two implications.

The first implication is that Europe is always seen as a special case, as a special case of a secularized society.

And secondly, it is quite easy to observe or to get some data, big data on hand in order to analyze the social majorities in Europe.

And I will exactly do that.

So minority religious groups or groups at all are not considered here.

I'm looking at the majority society groups.

So this is probably a graph that is quite familiar to you.

It shows the confessional distribution in all European member states from the European Value Survey 2008,

which is a comprehensive survey about value orientations of the European population.

And you see that you can't see nothing because all the European societies are so different.

And if somebody tells you that there is a trend of secularization, this is not completely true.

So the picture is quite diverse if you look at the societies in Europe.

We have societies that have about 70% of people that say that they are religious.

This is the green bars.

We have societies that have an orthodox majority, Protestant majorities, Catholic majorities.

So the picture is really quite colorful.

What does that mean for the production of norms and values through religion?

If the picture is so colorful, it might be hard to detect trends, I thought, but to spoil a little bit, it is possible to find some.