Page 200 - Cultures and Organizations

176 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

tough behavior toward fellow humans; feminine cultures worship a tender
God or gods who demand caring behavior toward fellow humans.
Christianity has always maintained a struggle between tough, mas-
culine elements and tender, feminine elements. In the Christian Bible as

a whole, the Old Testament reflects tougher values (an eye for an eye, a

tooth for a tooth), while the New Testament reflects more tender values
(turn the other cheek). God in the Old Testament is majestic. Jesus in the
New Testament helps the weak and suffers. Catholicism has produced some
very masculine, tough currents (Templars, Jesuits) but also some feminine,

tender ones (Franciscans); outside Catholicism we also find groups with
strongly masculine values (such as the Mormons) and groups with very
feminine values (such as the Quakers and the Salvation Army). On average,
countries with a Catholic tradition tend to maintain more masculine values
and those with Protestant traditions more feminine values. 74
Outside the Christian world there are also tough and tender religions.
Buddhism in masculine Japan is very different from Buddhism in feminine
Thailand. Some young men in Japan follow Zen Buddhist training aimed
at self-development by meditation under a tough master. In the 1970s more
than half of all young men in Thailand spent some time as a Buddhist
75
monk, serving and begging. In Islam, Sunni is a more masculine version
of the faith than Shia, which stresses the importance of suffering. In the
IBM studies, Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, scored more feminine
than the predominantly Sunnite Arabic-speaking countries.
In the 1990s Dutch sociologist Johan Verweij devoted his Ph.D.
research to explaining differences in secularization (loss of religion) in
Western Christianity. From the 1990–93 World Values Survey, he obtained
data for various aspects of religiosity across sixteen Christian countries. 76
Existing theories sought the reason for secularization in the moderniza-
tion of society, but these theories did not account for the situation in the

United States, a modern country relatively untouched by secularization. To
Verweij’s surprise, he found that the best available predictor of a country’s
degree of secularization was the degree of femininity of its culture—this
in spite of the fact that women tend to be more religious than men. In
masculine Christian countries, people rated their religiosity higher and
attached more importance in their lives to God, Christian rites, orthodoxy,
and Christian worldviews. Countries with feminine values had secular-