A preliminary overview of a recent study published by the Journal of Religion and Society claims to have found a strong correlation between levels of “popular religiosity” and various “quantifiable societal health” indicators in 18 prosperous democracies, including the United States.
The most interesting and controversial findings are:
- 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.
- Rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developing democracies.
- John Paul II and evolution-deniers claimed that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates. The data indicates they’re completely backwards: abortion rates are highest in the most theistic democracies.
- The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in fostering low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion.
An editorial by Rosa Brooks summarizes the potential effects of this study succinctly:
Although correlation is not causation, Paul’s study offers much food for thought. At a minimum, his findings suggest that contrary to popular belief, lack of religiosity does societies no particular harm. This should offer ammunition to those who maintain that religious belief is a purely private matter and that government should remain neutral, not only among religions but also between religion and lack of religion. It should also give a boost to critics of “faith-based” social services and abstinence-only disease and pregnancy prevention programs….
This in itself does not make religion worthless or dangerous. All humans hold nonrational beliefs, and some of these may have both individual and societal value. But historically, societies run into trouble when powerful religions become imperial and absolutist…
Arguably, Paul’s study invites us to conclude that the most serious threat humanity faces today is religious extremism: nonrational, absolutist belief systems that refuse to tolerate difference and dissent.
I disagree with Ms. Brooks: I think the most serious threat faced by humanity today is environmental. With population growth at an all-time high, we are already experiencing the side-effects of massive population: massive death tolls from natural disasters. I’d rank religious extremism somewhere after that.
But not too far after.
Please refer back to the blog: Factual Error Found on Internet!
Don’t believe everything you read! That is the most rediculous blog I’ve read in ages. People can do absolutely anything with statistics. If they’re going by population, sure we’re in the top 18 contries, because we’re one of the largest countries, whereas France and Japan are tiny in comoparison. (Scandinavia being not much bigger!)
This is just like the email I got the other day that says that Americans are the leading nation in heart attacks, despite other countries cultural consumption of high fat, low fat, wine/beer habits, only because we speak English.
According to this article, I will die young, despite my good eating habits and exercise habits, because I am a Christian. This says that my children will have AIDS get pregnant in her teens, and have an abortion, my boys will be gay and become criminals, all because they believe in God.
And according to our dear Rosa Brooks, my beliefs are nonrational and may cause serious trouble in the future when my religion is too powerful.
I’m sure China was not included in this article, since their abortion rate is due to government ruling and not their religion. They probably didn’t mention middle eastern countries that send their military on suicide missions in honor of their country since that is a military mission. We won’t mention the country in Africa that takes drastic measure to make sure that their women never want to have sex. They don’t have to worry about abortion. That is government ruled as well.
Maybe this study came to the wrong conclusion. Here’s my thoughts: The 18 prosperous democracies were found with the highest numbers of religious extremists, because those countries are free countries, allowing those people to worship how they’d like without being burned at the stake. These are the people who are allowed to make choices for themselves without their government telling them what to think and how to act. These people have freedome of speech!
These “controversial findings” have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with living in a democracy. Despite the statistics of bad things in our country, there’s a whole lot of good, and I’d much rather be here than anywhere else in the world. —
Christy
Corrections…
A few corrections:
They only evaluated first and second-world democracies.
No, the 18 were only compared to one another, not to third-world democracies, dictatorships, or socialist republics. It was an attempt to eliminate the very variables you mentioned.
To sum up: in looking at first or second-world, prosperous democracies, higher incidence of religious observance and belief is correlated with the elevated social ills mentioned. Whether or not one causes the other is not necessarily the question. Determining what the cause of the correlation is, though, should be of pressing importance.
Why is the juvenile STD rate so much higher in the US than in any other surveyed democracy? Why do we have more abortions per capita than they do? Why is our murder rate so much higher?
Maybe it’s not religion, but the questions have answers.
We just need to find them.
And then fix them.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
I don’t think so…
I’m the last guy to advocate wholesale adherence to irrational world-views, but I’m going to have to come down on this with a heavy layer of skepticism here. The analogy that immediately came to mind was playing a dart game in which you throw 100 darts, remove all but the best 3, and call those your throws. How did they come up with such narrowly defined measures of societal dysfunction? (I know they make a case for them–I read the article–but it’s easy to make cases after the fact, isn’t it?) Relying on homocide but not auto theft or burglary, even though those are things that most people have to deal with much, much more frequently (particularly in some of our more enlightened neighbor-countries across the pond), seems to totally miss a major dysfunction in society. Where are drug addictions? Where are physician-assisted suicide rates? Where are divorce rates? And STD’s? Who cares about STD’s? How about child vaccination rates or percentage of people with a cold (easily spread in a dysfunctional society) on a given day? (I could go on and on.)
A better question would have been, “how happy are you?” That’s totally subjective, but a much better indicator (I think) of how well a society is working than the 15-19 yr old abortion rate. Even better would have been an objective metric on the degree to which natural rights are secured, but that tends to be more of a government problem than a societal one.
Having thus dismissed the criteria, I can now turn to the inputs. Why religiosity? Is that the biggest difference you can find between Japan and the US? Scandanavia and New Zealand? Picking the first pair (on account of my 3-years of living in Japan), I can only say that if I had to list 10 top differences between the two cultures I’m not sure religiosity would be there. Correlations may exist with religiosity, but only with the darts you didn’t pull out of the wall and hide.
All in all, I felt the same way after reading this as I did after seeing “First Daughter”. Dumber than befores.
Is it better to have a small population in which fewer people die in a given disaster, or a larger population in which more people get to live until the day they die in a disaster? I would hazard a guess that an individual’s death rate remains the same regardless of total population: 100%. I vote for religious extremism.
An aside…
An interesting aside to this: Utah has one of the lowest incidences of auto theft in the nation. Yet if you’re a woman, you have a greater risk of being raped in Utah than anywhere else in the nation.
Yet with the majority of the population being members of a religion which, to put it mildly, frowns upon rape, you’d think the state would be one of the safest in the nation for a woman alone. Why isn’t it? Is it social factors which are causing the rapes? Genetic? Penal? Governmental? Religious?
I don’t know why it is, but it’s a correlation to think about. Pretty much the same reason I posted the original blog: there’s a correlation (in the case of auto thefts vs. rapes in Utah, a negative one).
I strongly suspect the correlation I blogged about is due to secondary factors (better sex education than in the USA, which prevents STDs and abortion, for instance), but it is thought-provoking. Maybe there are some answers buried in the statistics which are worth figuring out.
As far as cherry-picking statistics goes, perhaps it would be useful to spread the societal indicators further afield. The preliminary results support such an approach in an attempt to falsify the results. Had they not found a correlation, a broadening of social dysfunction markers probably would not be worthwhile… there would be no results of interest to report.
Scientific method in action 🙂 See if the results can be falsified!
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Dysfunction defined…
I’m not accusing them of falsifying results, although I don’t doubt those kinds of things happen when people are trying to print sensational articles. My complaint focuses on the huge leap from 7 “random” statistics to “social dysfunction.” If the title of the paper were Religiosity and Seven Rates That Correlate, then you’d be fine. It’s calling it social dysfunction that is way too big of a stretch. Why, for example, didn’t they include GDP? That’s all about how a society functions economically, and the US is greater than of all of the other countries in the article combined (or close to it). Gotta love those Calvanists…
Another thing to remember, particularly when it comes to “dart throwing,” is that statistically significant findings are not necessarily truly significant. Generally regressors with a 95% confidence level are treated as significant by researchers, but if you’re looking at 100 random regressors, that means 5 will look like they matter. In other words, they could have looked for things like percentage of Pokemon watchers, fraction of people who put their right leg in their pants first, etc., and still found something tied to the murder rate or religiosity, depending on their fancy.
Good question…
That’s a good question, that I totally glossed over in my previous response.
The rate of death for individuals, as you say, is 100%. Unavoidable. Yet I find myself reflecting on the post of a friend of mine, Nolan, on a mailing list recently, regarding deterministic points of view on social welfare, and free-will based points of view. After reading his post, I’m increasingly convinced this is probably one of the key dividers between the “believer” and the “non-believer”. It is this notion of free will.
The determinist sees events, statistically, as having one possible outcome. Although you cannot determine the exact actions of an individual actor within a complex system, you can determine, with a fair degree of certainty, the actions of percentages of those actors. Thus the determinist sees social ills as a numbers game: put actors X in situation Y, and the percentages of those who will act in a certain fashion can be determined.
The determinist, then, is concerned with actions which will work to improve the statistics. He will want to get the actors into a better situation, where they have a statistically higher probability of success. In many cases, if a certain percentage of those actors manage to improve their situations along the lines of probability, the determinist himself stands to benefit from the overall improvement. If not himself, then often his progeny.
The notion of “free will”, while useful to describe the actions of individual actors, is useless to describe the probabilities of outcomes that reliably follow larger groups of actors in similar situations. The adherent to “free will” often sees the success or failure of an individual largely as a product of their own choices, rather than falling somewhere along the bell-curve of probability within a predictable range of outcomes.
How does this tie in to global disasters vs. the danger of religious extremism?
In terms of total numbers, isolated terrorist events due to religious extremism are a drop in the bucket compared to the loss of life and resources from natural disasters. To put it into perspective, current estimates on losses due to Hurricane Katrina put it at in excess of $200 billion to recover from. The US population, as of the 2005 census, is 297 million people.
That’s $673.00 per person. For every man, woman, and child in the entire nation. For my family of six, then, this disaster may eventually cost me upwards of $4038.00.
This is not chump change for most Americans. Pretty much any way we would choose to spend that money would be better to improve our respective lots than the way it’s going to be spent: increased taxes and insurance premiums to cover the cost of the disaster.
This is why I say that I consider natural disasters and the accompanying death toll (and, unmentioned in my original comment, accompanying damage) to be the greatest threat we should consider mitigating. I’m not a person who likes to give false dichotomies, like “why are we spending money in Iraq when we could be hiring teachers?”. That kind of logic is just dumb. But in the amount of effort we should be expending to mitigate the risk, I consider natural disasters a higher priority than religious extremism. In addition to the deaths, the costs for those who survive the disaster are onerous.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
I didn’t write this because I wanted to
You’re preaching to the choir. I certainly would not opt to send very much money to New Orleans if it were up to me–it’s the threat of jack-booted (had to throw that in) IRS agents sending me to jail that effectively robs me of $3,365. The only thing that makes me feel better is that the top 1% of income earners actually pay 50% of the taxes, so at least I’m sticking it to them! After all, they’re only rich because of deterministic reasons, not because they’re hard-working folk like us down here at the bottom.
Religious extremism is generally over-feared, I agree; however, 9/11 had a higher death toll and probably a higher true economic cost that Katrina. Why? Because terrorism creates ongoing fetters to economies that natural disasters do not. In other words, aside from the billions spent on clean-up, you now have ongoing transactional costs that you didn’t have before: difficult customs transactions, higher risk premiums, generally higher security levels, fighting wars overseas, etc. On the other hand, natural disasters are unavoidable. A rational person does not consider a tornado victim to have suffered a moral wrong. Honestly, in well-anticipated situations (hey, is that a hurricane in the Gulf?), the victim of a natural tragedy can be held partially culpable–not so with the children in Beslan.
As you can probably guess, I vote for a slow decline into increasing government oppression as the #1 threat to humanity.
Weak logic..
And it sounds bitter. Sorry dud.. you make a lot of good points a lot of the time, but this is plain ridiculous.
“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”
Essentially they’re saying “there was more bad stuff in the middle ages, when we were more religious, and America is the most religious country and has the most bad stuff, so Religion has a correllation (but not causation, wink, wink) to the bad stuff”.
Its like saying because of the rape rate in Utah and the fact that Mormons store food in their basements while others don’t, that we should examine the correlation between stored food and rape.
AND.. they are using America alone – the sample is too narrow. Ireland Italy, and Holland, seem to be next three – and they aren’t exactly hotbeds of problems..
America has the most startling variance between rich and poor, we have the most money overall, the longest workweek (parents not home), we’re the youngest country (and I mean from settlers to nation, not from inception of current government), we have the most diverse culture, the least amount of time from immigration to now (Many are first or secod Generation, as you know from being in LA – which has one of the highest homicide rates in poorer areas) – The list goes on and on.
Your study is biased, not logical, it ignores a million other factors, and has an axe to grind. And it can’t get away with the “correllation, not causation, (wink, wink)”. Sorry, it is trying to make a point, and it is doing so badly.
I agree that religious extremism is a problem, but that’s not what America is. It is a nation of people, many of which believe in God, who do not do so in an extremist way.
Sorry, not angry about it, but surprised at how weak it is.
The study…
Did you read the study, or just Rosa Brooks’ editorial?
The study refutes the popular notion that secular democracy leads to moral declines, defined as societal dysfunction using the same statistics used by the UN Development Programme. Brooks just sensationalized it, being the left-wing media pundit that she is. You seem to be refuting points the preliminary result of the study itself doesn’t make.
Although America’s exceptional statistics are mentioned a few times, the comparison is among 18 secular democracies, correlating variables where several key social indicators are shown to consistently vary by average level of religiosity. It’s not “these guys vs. America”. Not even remotely. That’s Brooks’ interpretation. America is singled out several times for uniquely high indicators of societal dysfunction, but they are not using “America Alone”.
How else can one refute the claim that teaching evolution in schools leads to increased abortion rates, other than to correlate the evolutionary belief rates with abortion rates? How else can one refute the claim that disbelief in a Creator leads to higher homicide rates, than to compare rates of disbelief in a Creator with homicide rates? How else can one refute claims made by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay that belief in evolution causes higher crime rates and shooting sprees like Columbine, other than to compare crime rates and school shooting rates to levels of belief in evolution?
Religious pundits and politicians consistently blame secularism and the teaching of evolution for society’s ills.
Guess what, it ain’t secularism or evolution that’s the problem. Now there are numbers to back it up.
It’s time for them to find a different scapegoat.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
The study..
I just gave the study another skim, and it sites only portugal and decades old europe.. it prefaces that Portugal is a second world country. It still relies strongly on US statistics, claiming that the US is the only one with religious rates and dysfunction rates.. yet it never even touches on the other ways in which we’re different.
As for how to better correlate, the best way is to see what the people having the abortions and the murders and the dysfunction – see what they believe.
Until then.. sorry, its a way slanted study and it carries very little water.
I disagree
Without coming down on one side or the other of the debate at hand, I disagree with you, Justin. I think you just don’t care for the correlations being made.
——– *This signature is an experiment in Google Bombing mot propre
One quick interjection to
One quick interjection to this, concerning how another country mentioned is Ireland, which Justin quoted as not being “a hotbed of problems.”
Dude, didn’t you do a show about this last year?! I can understand if your desire to put the experience from your memory (solely for the writing, your performance was wonderful) has caused you to forget the DECADES OLD RELIGIOUS/TERRORIST WAR between Catholic Ireland and Protestant North Ireland, but I still felt obligated to remind you that Ireland is in no way a peaceful little green island.
And while Catholic vs. Protestant might not be the true cause of the violence there, it’s certainly a catalyst.
I think the whole thing about religious extremism being linked to bad stuff is an interesting theory. Certainly one worth *talking* about. For that matter, I think extremism period can be linked to bad stuff. No one looks for balance anymore.
—————————– “I can kill you with my brain… or a bloody axe.” Arthur Rowan
Heh – Show..
Ahh, Maria..
Dude, much of that was northern Ireland, and at the time much of that wa sgoing on, we were barely PostWar, so I mean today, and current rates.. i would wager, much of the countries mentioned were more religious at the time that was really prevelent.
And besides.. France is full of monsters anyway, right? kill the beast
Extremism is bad in almost all ways
As for the study saying it’s not secular government causing the decline of modern society, I’m all for it.
As for the study saying it’s religious fanaticism that causes the decline of modern society, I don’t drink that Kool Aid too much either.
The problem lies in the absence of parental support to guide youngsters in the resolution of moral dilemnas.
If I were a religious zealot, truly immersed in the teachings of a religion, (and assuming this religion doesn’t promote rape), then I’m not going to go raping women or having teenage sex.
Stating how the moral majority causes us not to teach proper sexual education in school might lead to teenage pregnancy is an interesting theory. However, since when did the school system become responsible for my kid’s moral and sexual education?
I think the better theory is that too many parents allow their child’s sexual education to come SOLELY from the school system, instead of the parents themselves. If you allow the schools to raise your children, you deserve whatever happens to them. If you raise your children yourselves, then they have a much better chance of being what you hope they will be.
Numbers don’t lie, until people with agendas get ahold of them.
My $.02 Weed
Religious extremism
What a stupid thing to write, let alone read. I would bet that the only places they did thier study was in places where Christianity was allowed. To much of anything is dangerous, get too much oxygen and see what happens to you.