George Monbiot writes in todays Guardian about some facinating research into correlations between the prevelence of religious belief in societies and various undesirable social outcomes. The research he cites looked at looked at eighteen democracies with similar levels of economic development, but having different levels of religious belief. It concluded:
“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 … None of the strongly secularised, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction.” Within the US, “the strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and midwest” have “markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the north-east where … secularisation, and acceptance of evolution approach European norms”.
The research was conducted by Gregory S Paul and published as Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies in the Journal of Religion & Society. The journal appears to be a fairly small, web-based publication that has been around for about six years. The article doesn’t give any biographical information about Gregory S Paul except to say he is from Baltimore, Maryland. While this is quite unusual for an academic journal, it is at least possible the the author is concerned about unwanted ‘attention’ from some sections of US society. The Times has an article with some quotes from Mr. Paul, whom they describe as a Social Scientist, that indicate that they actually interviewed him.
Of course, the research points to correlations: which is very different from saying that religion causes murder and sexually-transmitted diseases. Personally, though, I’m not too surprised by the results: religion has never seemed to me to be a very positive force in society. what is facinating is that, until fairly recently, this kind of research would be almost impossible to carry-out. Firstly, trans-national statistical data-sets that can be meaningfully compared are a fairly recent development; and secondly, the idea that empirical methods could even in principle be applied to such subjects would have been very difficult for a significant proportion of the population to accept. I see at this as a positive sign, and look forward to more comprehensive studies in the future.