c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) 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 less, for nations and regions around the world.
Data from the last 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 rates are much higher than secular Scandinavia.
The study is published in the current edition of the online Journal of Religion and Society.
And sexual practices among teenagers, while fairly consistent around the world, are slightly more chaste in France than in the U.S.
“I’m not a radical saying this; this is sociology of religion,” said the study’s author, independent scholar Gregory S. Paul, a paleontologist who lives in Baltimore.
These trends, Paul said, run counter to the conventional wisdom in the U.S. that increased personal religious belief will translate into increased peace and tranquility for a town or country, 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,” Paul said, referring to measures of societal health.
“We have the highest under-5 mortality rate in the Western world,” Paul said. “Our rate is twice that in Sweden and Japan and, I think, higher than Cuba’s even. It’s kind of scary.”
Cuba was not one of the nations Paul used for his data. The studies he used were done in the wealthier democratized, developed countries. Compared with this group, in many cases the U.S. looked like the Third World of the West.
The U.S. homicide rate remains much higher than those of other prosperous democracies, with only theistic Portugal rising to a similar rate _ and both are significantly higher than the rates of secularist France and Japan. Sexually transmitted diseases are now comparatively rare in Scandinavia, where sex education is early and explicit, and sex is considered a normal part of life. STDs remain prevalent in the U.S.
The trends inside the U.S. repeat the global models, according to Paul, with the more religious South and Midwest “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.”
The online journal in which the article is published, Journal of Religion and Society, has been respected in academic circles for more than seven years. 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.
Paul’s article 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.
The article was called “Cross-national Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.” It can be read in the Journal of Religion and Society, at http://www.creighton.edu/jrs.
MO/JL END RNS
(Kay Campbell is the Faith & Values editor at The Huntsville Times in Huntsville, Ala.)
