Yesterday’s Times brings an article describing of a new study looking at how the degree to which a society is religious affects the moral and ethical foundations of a society.
The results are no surprise to me.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.
“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 United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
I always thought the notion of the whole red-state/blue-state “values” voters thing was pretty funny, considering things like the divorce rate in red states versus blue states, etc. It appears that the correlation between societal decay and Republican voting might actually be confounded with a correlation between societal decay and religiosity.
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Shocking that a country which objects to sexual education on moral grounds suffers from a high rate of sexual disease and abortion, isn’t it? It’s almost as if a conscious plan of leaving people–especially young people–ignorant has had some kind of negative effect. Amazing.
Of course, the article just gives a flavour, and if you’re really interested you should read the actual paper. (I love the Internet.) The paper is worth reading for the graphs alone.
For example:
See that statistical outlier, way up there in the crazy-religious/mass-kill corner? The one I’ve helpfully highlighted with red? That’s the United States. All those other letters that are more secular and less stabby? Everyone else.
(Mathematical rigour compells me to point out that what this graph actually seems to show is a slight correlation between religiousness and death rate among all the other countries. The U.S. data point doesn’t actual have mathematical significance since it’s so far away from the useful data. In other words–“We see a that religious belief in a society tends to correlate with murder rate for most countries, and then there’s the Americans who just love to kill each other.”)
And if you skip the actual paper you might miss this amusing bit in the conclusion:
There is 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
Of course the people who most need to understand the results of this study are the same people most likely to view this study (and indeed the notions of science and statistics generally) as either a “godless pursuit” or “some kind of anti-American hogwash”.
Sigh.
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