P.Z. Myers, at Pharyngula, points us to a very well-done study by Gregory S. Paul, in Creighton University’s Journal of Religion & Society, that examines the correlation between popular religiosity in a culture, belief in evolution, and a wide range of social dysfunctions, including homicide, teenage abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and juvenile-adult mortality.
The data are mainly from a cross-national collaborative study conducted in 1998 that interviewed more than 20,000 people in 17 of the world’s developed and developing democracies. Paul also includes data from Portugal, as an example of a second world European democracy. A society’s level of religiosity was measured by its citizens’ belief in a higher power, their acceptance of a literal interpretation of the Bible, frequency of prayer, and church attendance. Acceptance of evolution was also measured and shows a strong negative correlation, as might be expected, with levels of religiosity.
Not surprisingly, the US scores high on the popular religiosity scale. “Japan, Scandinavia, and France are the most secular nations…[;] the United States is the only prosperous first world nation to retain rates of religiosity otherwise limited to the second and third worlds”.
Also not surprisingly, at least to some of us, the US also scores high on every measure of dysfunction, spectacularly high on some of them, such as murder, teenage abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, and violence by schoolchildren. (Abortion rates, by the way, were only taken into account from those countries in which abortion is at least as legal and accessible as it is in the US.)
That high positive correlation is not an anomaly; it carries across the board.
In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies…. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner [Benjamin] Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hillâ€? to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. … No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction….
If the data showed that the U.S. enjoyed higher rates of societal health than the more secular, pro-evolution democracies, then the opinion that popular belief in a creator is strongly beneficial to national cultures would be supported. Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life� that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted. Contradicting these conclusions requires demonstrating a positive link between theism and societal conditions in the first world with a similarly large body of data - a doubtful possibility in view of the observable trends.
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There is [also] evidence that within the U.S. strong disparities in religious belief versus acceptance of evolution are correlated with similarly varying rates of societal dysfunction, the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west having markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where societal conditions, secularization, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms
The conclusion is inescapable: religious democracies are more dysfunctional; secular democracies are healthier.
Paul’s paper deals only with correlations, not causes. It’s possible that a highly dysfunctional society drives people to religion. But Paul points out that his analysis of the data demonstrates the need for more research, not only to test his findings, but to start looking into the causal factors underlying the correlation between societal dysfunction and high levels of religious belief.
Keith Rozario | 28-Sep-05 at 4:48 am | Permalink
Corellation could be mere coincidence. Mathematical anomalies, France has a high rate of crime confined mostly to it’s Muslim Population not because their Muslim but because the Muslim Population is a poorer segment of society. France as compared to the US has better economic distribution of wealth . The worlds richest Nation has people like Bill Gates and the Waltons, but for every Billionaire there’s about 100,000 citizens who live in Poverty. The Crime rate, whether homicidal or sexual or dysfunctional is more a function of Poverty than it is of religion. Most crimes are crimes of Poverty and not religious based.
richard | 28-Sep-05 at 5:33 am | Permalink
“Corellation could be mere coincidence”
Of course, and Paul makes no claim to have uncovered a hitherto-unknown law of social dysfunction. But there’s a lot of coincidence happening in his data, and it demands some further looking into. Your comment about crime within the Muslim population of France attributes that crime rate to that population’s relative poverty. But that’s just another correlation. I would suspect, on the evidence from the cross-cultural data presented in the Paul study, that the crime statistic you refer to might have more to do with the religiosity of the population under study than their poverty. France has pockets of non-Muslim poor - people from Southern Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe. How do the crime rates of those populations, adjusting for poverty rates, compare with those of the Muslim population?
I’m all for eliminating poverty, and I do believe that the wide (and increasing) gap between the very very rich few and the massive numbers of poor has more to do with social dysfunction than religiosity does. But I also believe that religiosity (especially as it’s preached and practiced in America’s evangelical megachurches) has a lot to do with the inequitable distribution of wealth. When people are taught that great wealth is God’s reward to those who have pleased Him, then any progressive legislation to reduce the inequity in the distribution of wealth smacks of Satanism.
Richard
jeb | 28-Sep-05 at 11:02 am | Permalink
Like that title!
Good article and reference. The absolute authority that religion invokes provides cover and empowers all sorts of mischief that would otherwise be seen and rejected for the less than civilized behavior it sometimes is. Suffering is God’s will. Why be concerned about it?
I’m skeptical a bit of the study because it reinforces what I already believe. I’d like to see this topic studied more, because I think it would dispute the almost axiomatic claim of religions that religiosity makes people better. Maybe attention would then shift to what actually works to make better societies.