By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
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.” [...] 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. Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”
He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added. [...] “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added. [...] “The non-religious, proevolution 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.”
The Article Itself: by Gregory S. Paul, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies", Journal of Religion and Society, 7(2005)
... Conclusion: The United States’ deep social problems are all the more disturbing because the nation enjoys exceptional per capita wealth among the major western nations (Barro and McCleary; Kasman; PEW; UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). Spending on health care is much higher as a portion of the GDP and per capita, by a factor of a third to two or more, than in any other developing democracy (UN Development Programme, 2000, 2004). The U.S. is therefore the least efficient western nation in terms of converting wealth into cultural and physical health. Understanding the reasons for this failure is urgent, and doing so requires considering the degree to which cause versus effect is responsible for the observed correlations between social conditions and religiosity versus secularism. It is therefore hoped that this initial look at a subject of pressing importance will inspire more extensive research on the subject. Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U.S. is so inefficient that it is experiencing a much higher degree of societal distress than are less religious, less wealthy prosperous democracies. Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions? 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 (Aral and Holmes; Beeghley, Doyle, 2002). It is the responsibility of the research community to address controversial issues and provide the information that the citizens of democracies need to chart their future courses...
Quite apart from anything else, I would think that most of the societies he cites would balk at the description of themselves as "godless". They would, however, probably agree that there is no role for religious observance in the state itself, and they have all been better at pulling religion out of public life.
That said ... the items he chooses to examine don't necessarily have anything to do with religion; correlation is not causation. And whether or not our money is spent effectively, again, may have nothing to do with religion; that we don't spend money on providing basic universal health care would not intrinsically seem related to public observation of religion. "The strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west" have "markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast" because the south and midwest are also, in general, markedly poorer than the northeast. (And what happened to the western US in this discussion? Did it fall into the ocean and we didn't notice?)
His tables/figures at the end of the article are, to be sure, striking ... but there are some interestingly unexplained phenomena. For example, why is it that Australia seems to lead the pack -- by a really appallingly large margin -- in suicides of 15-24 year olds? The US is only in the middle of the pack in that one, regardless of religion. And why, pray tell, would religion make our society so much deadlier than others? Surely the fact that pretty much every society cited in the study has far stricter gun laws than does the US might have something to do with it. (Whether or not those laws might be a factor of religion, who knows? our lack of them is certainly due, in part, to a Constitution that can be interpreted as saying that gun ownership is an absolute right.)
Purely a side note: note that I'm not defending religion itself; I would be hardly likely to do so, after all. I'm just saying that this study needed to be put together with, perhaps, a tad more rigor and a bit less apparent agenda. (Said agenda, judging from the bibliography, to play whack-a-mole with the concept of "intelligent design". While ID can certainly be whacked with wild abandon on its merits, I'm not at all sure this article will be a good one to do it with. And, in any event, merits of the article aside, Europeans and some Asians will look at it and say, "Yep, that's what's wrong with the US, all right." And the bulk of Americans will look at it and say, "And? So? Like we care what your opinion is?" and do what they were going to do anyway.)
Posted by iain at October 03, 2005 03:43 PM
