Study links religion, societal woes in developed nations
The article is long, laced with academic terms and written for sociologists, but the message is clear: More religion seems to mean more troubles, not fewer, for nations and regions around the world.
Data from the past 10 years seem to indicate that the United States – by far the most religious nation in the developed world as measured by church attendance, prayer and belief in a creator-god – has some of the highest rates of murder, infant mortality, teen gonorrhea infection and teen abortion in the developed world.
The study is published in the current edition of the online Journal of Religion and Society.
“I’m not a radical saying this; this is sociology of religion,” said the study’s author, Gregory S. Paul, a paleontologist who lives in Baltimore.
These trends, Paul said, run counter to the conventional wisdom in the United States that increased personal religious belief will translate into increased peace and tranquility and that decreased belief in God and practice of religion will result in cultural chaos.
“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,” Paul concluded in the article. “The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S … is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
The article, “Cross-national Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” can be read in the Journal of Religion and Society at www.creighton.edu/jrs.
It includes three pages of charts and six pages of bibliography to establish the data used for the paper’s conclusion that the more secular a nation, the healthier its society is likely to be.
Located at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., a Jesuit school, the journal publishes only articles that have been reviewed and approved by a panel of scholars.