Special Report
Dogma Bites Man
On the New & Biased Research Linking Faith & Social Ills
The message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal,” declared one columnist in the influential English newspaper The Guardian. “If you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.”
He was referring to a survey of data from eighteen nations recently published in the Journal of Religion and Society, in which a writer named Gregory S. Paul asserted (or at least strongly implied) that because the United States has a high level of religiosity and at the same time a high level of social dysfunction (murders, abortions, sexual promiscuity, suicide, and other social disorders), religious belief contributes to such problems, and can even cause them.
His assertion, made in a paper titled “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” should be challenged forthrightly, because the casual, non-research-minded reader might easily accept his conclusion that religion is a destructive force in American society. To this reader, the correlation of high religiosity with high levels of social problems can look like a convincing argument for the destructive effect of religion.
Certainly, secularist journalists and bloggers leapt upon the report as confirmation of their views. “When it comes to ‘values,’ if you look at facts rather than mere rhetoric, the substantially more secular blue states routinely leave the Bible Belt red states in the dust,” claimed one writer in the Los Angeles Times. Her conclusion: “We shouldn’t shy away from the possibility that too much religiosity may be socially dangerous.”
Religion in Depth
To draw accurate conclusions about the effects of religious belief on America, it is vital to look beneath the surface manifestations of religion—which can be defined as broad belief in a God or higher power, and loose attachment to religious traditions and institutions—and examine religious and spiritual belief and practice in depth.
But before doing so, it is necessary to challenge Paul’s analysis of the data collected from the international survey. My research associate, D. Michael Lindsay, an expert in the department of sociology at Princeton University, writes that Paul’s analysis does not pass scholarly muster. He makes two points:
• Paul claims that he did not employ the standard sociological tools of regression and multivariate analyses because “causal factors for rates of societal function are complex,” and because the countries were similar enough to study without using control variables. Can he identify a single other study published in a major social scientific journal comparing results across countries that did not employ multivariate analysis to control for differences among nations? No, because multivariate analysis is required for cross-national comparisons of this sort.
• For the author’s bold claims against religious commitment contributing to society to hold true, he would have to refute the hundreds of volumes that have proven otherwise. From parenting and fatherhood, to mental and physical health, the weight of empirical evidence is against Paul’s assertions: religious commitment has notably positive effects on the individual and collective levels of human society.
I will discuss the second point in more detail, but let us look at the first point more closely. What is the problem with Paul’s failure to use the basic sociological tools? As the Canadian statistician Scott Gilbreath has written:
There are many socio-economic data series that vary widely across the eighteen countries and that plausibly have a significant impact on social conditions, e.g., income distribution, proportion of GDP spent through government, social and cultural cohesion, fertility and mortality rates, age structure of the population, etc., etc. Failure to look at these and other exogenous data would introduce bias into the results.
In other words, Paul has made strong claims about the effect of religion upon society without examining all the other factors that might explain the phenomena he wrote about.
George H. Gallup, Jr. , has been in the polling field for fifty years, most recently as the chairman of the non-profit George H. Gallup International Institute. He and his wife Kinny have three children and attend St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Pennington, New Jersey.
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