Heather’s post, Religion and Moral Behavior, allows me to make a point which I think is important. Some conservatives who argue for the powerful utility of religion in promoting the social order ignore the confounds with other parameters, and look at research which might suggest the efficacy of religion ceteris paribus. So, they make an inference that X increment of religiosity ? Y increment of social amity and Z decrement of social anomie. Extrapolating to the aggregate one then projects the increased social amity which might be generated by increased religiosity. The problem which this sort of model though is the point about the interaction of religion with other social variables; e.g., race, education and income. The groups where religion is concentrated in America today are those who are reservoirs of a great deal of social pathology already, while the groups where religion is weakest are those with lower levels of social pathology. Within the group where social pathology is low (e.g., Jews), the religious may be less prone to various problems, so you might obtain some increment of positive good, but you would receive far less than you might expect projecting out of from microeconomic research. As an illustration, consider Japan, along with Sweden probably the most secular advanced nation in the world. The Japanese might get some value out of greater religiosity, but their murder rate is so low that the return would be small. Contrast that with Nigeria, where some have joked that the nation’s only two exports are oil and preachers. Since religion already saturates the society, increasing religious belief would be hard to do.
Below the fold is a chart which displays confidence in the existence of god for blacks and whites of lower and higher educational attainments. I think looking at these data will make clear my point about the issue of marginal returns.
Well then, why not take religion out of it, as a determinist variable, substitute one of the many other possibilities, and see what happens. Why not pick “mean IQ of the population”, for example, and further posit that we are proposing that where mean IQ of the population is higher, social pathology is lower, and any religion found there is “quieter”, less extremist, less troublesome.
Now check that provisional speculation against the available data and see if it seems promising. Take Jewish communities. High IQ, low social pathology, high religion quotient, but causing no noticeable problems.
Japan. High IQ, low social pathology, not a high religion quotient, and so no issues there. Ditto for Sweden.
Now take SSA. Lower IQ (according to reports), high social pathology, high religion quotient ( as with the Jews), but it is not of the quiet kind, and quite troublesome indeed. Hummm.
Now the above speculation doesn’t prove anything, but it sure seems to require less pretzel logic than if religion is posited as the measured and important variable, and then we try to explain the data.
Of course it is much less politically correct, and I suppose that is the problem.
you can check american data with the GSS. try it.
That sounds like work. 🙂
I’ll stay with inductive reasoning at this point, and let the motivated math guys and gals tell me if I am wrong.
My reasoning tells me that mean IQ is likely a much better predictor of social pathology, than is degree of religiosity .
I predict that you will able to easily find 2 populations, both with a high degree of religiosity, but one with high social pathology, and one without. The one without the social pathology will be found to have a much higher mean IQ than the one with.
Further, in two populations with high religiosity, if one has high religious fanaticism and intolerance, and one has a quieter, more contemplative and live-and-let-live aspect, the latter will be found to have the higher mean IQ.
So, data guys and gals, and inductive and deductive reasoners, do you think that is true?
For what it’s worth, I was a city commissioner for 9 years in a bedroom community in the sunbelt. Everyone in town sends their kids to some combination of soccer, t-ball, flag football, cheerleading, basketball and religious instruction. We have a surplus of churches, if you can have such a thing. Some sections of our main roads are literally lined with houses of worship – – Catholic (Roman as well as Polish and other national), Orthodox (Russian, Armenian and Greek), Protestant (of every imaginable denomination), Jewish (reform, conservative and a chabad), and one mosque. Whenever a new church came up for zoning approval, we were confronted with the issue of removing main street frontage from the tax rolls. Personally, and as a rule, I always assumed that the positive impact of church going (and church youth groups) lessened the overall need for social services, including police, so that any net tax loss was negligible.
FarRightDemocrat.blogspot.com
How about the incredible levels of *suicide* in Japan? Only the Catholic, Mormons, and Shintoists have relatively low suicide rates there.
Suicide is an interesting phenomenon. I always thought (obviously, it seemed to me) that a suicide was just someone who was tired of life and wanted to die. But Schopenhauer had this nuance on it. He said that the suicide is often someone who desperately loves life, and wants to live, but can and will not any longer accept the unbearable conditions they feel they are permanently trapped in. Like deep personal or societal shame, perhaps.
Schopenhauer’s observation may sound like just a fancy way to say “someone who wants to die”, but upon reflection, it is not.
Then, and I’m just guessing off the top of my head, if Catholic, Mormons, and Shintoists have relatively low suicide rates in Japan, perhaps they have something in their beliefs that gives them an added tendency/inclination to turn personal suffering into something noble offered up to “god”?
Of course, you could look at the (rather well-known) work of Patrick Fagan, Diane Brown, Lawrence Gary, and Sun Joon Jang (and dozens of others)who did comprehensive analyses of religiosity, religious practice, and their interactions with race, wealth, and population density – all last decade, as I recall. Their work has been continued and updated by Kaufman, Weaver, Knoester, and others in the 10+ years since the famous “Why Religion Matters” paper of 1996.
There are dozens of multivariate studies of just the impact of faith-based counseling as opposed to secular counseling!
Doing a quick dip in the GSS is not the way to determine the effect of religion upon civics.
(rather well-known)
Yes, if you think the Heritage Foundation is the apotheosis of objective scholarship on religion 🙂 Social science which involves multivariate analysis can be a shell game; quick & dirty replication is pretty useful and illuminating.
So…..’Merica is an outlier.
America is an outlier on a lot of things.
Cherchez the hidden variable.
Ah. I see that you consider an ad hominem an answer. Interesting.
Of course, this ignores the fact that Kaufman, etc., are *not* members of, paid by, or otherwise associated with the Heritage Foundation… just referenced by them. Once more, you are running a single table in the GSS and then wondering ‘how come no one has…?”, thus showing that you have missed decades of research on the question you are posing. A ‘quick and dirty’ replication is, in reality, a great way to get dirty results quickly.
Deep Thought, you’re just making stuff up about me. You’re a nobody to me, assert all you want, but there isn’t a definitive answer on this stuff. I’ve looked into it, don’t wave multivariate magic wands at me, I’m not impressed. And yeah, I goofed on the Heritage association. Accusation of bias withdrawn. And I didn’t do a “how come no one has,” I was encouraging someone to follow up their questions. Don’t make up stuff about me or I’ll delete your comments.
I see that you consider an ad hominem an answer. Interesting.
Yes, actually, I do. If someone works for *The Discovery Institute* then I don’t have a problem discounting what they say about evolution simply by association rather through deep inspection of their work. Similarly, if someone in an English department claims that they have refuted the electroweak unification of the 1970s, I don’t feel the need to inspect their theory, in part because I don’t think someone from an English department has the professional credibility, and in part because I don’t have the skills myself to evaluate whether their refutation is credible on its own merits.
That’s how we sift or sort truth. We rely on institutions, individuals and their credibility and professional backgrounds. It’s imperfect, but better than anything else.
David,
Of course, you were admittedly wrong about all but two of the references I made, thus your filtering (and implied assumption about my opinion of the Heritage Institute) prevented you from realizing that I was, after all, replying to the question you posted – there are many studies into “…the interaction of religion with other social variables; e.g., race, education and income.”
And, an honest question – if you’ve ‘looked into this’ how can you make the statement “…there isn’t a definitive answer on this stuff”? After all, the higher-level analyses of religious and secular scholars are pretty well-documented that religious belief/activity is strongly correlated with more positive social activities *by believers*. Its about the most settled thing in this field of study! Now, the argument that the high incidence of crime in America where there is also a high presence of believers is fascinating, but doesn’t seem to be the question you are asking.
Also, in the main post you stated “The groups where religion is concentrated in America today are those who are reservoirs of a great deal of social pathology already, while the groups where religion is weakest are those with lower levels of social pathology.”
This seems to fly in the face of the works of, at least, Greeley who demonstrated a strong correlation with religious participation and a *lack of* social pathology. Am I misreading this?
Last – relax, man! I am not trying to burn down your house, I am trying to engage in intellectual debate.
religious belief/activity is strongly correlated with more positive social activities *by believers*.
Activity/participation. Not necessarily belief. Important distinction. And it depends on society.
DT, all the data don’t go in the same direction. Additionally, there is the problem of Simpson’s paradox. Many of the truisms in the field of sociology of religion which emerged in the 1970s and 80s have had to be mitigated or revoked in the 90s and 00s (e.g., the USA underwent a lot of secularization in the 90s and 00s, Europe has falsified some of the generalizations that Stark and Greeley made about general dynamics of religious growth, decline, competition, etc., based on American data sets).
Religious activity and belief are strongly linked and the only reliable way to determine levels of belief in studies is either a long poll on belief or the simpler ‘devoutness test’ of “people who call themselves religion x and attend church/temple/etc. at least weekly are not ‘culturally religious'”. This weeds out, for example, Americans who call themselves Jewish but no member of their family has attended a religious event for 40 years.
And, to be specific, there are non-active bonuses, too (longer life, healthier life, happier life), but I was under the impression this post was talking about the potentially “… powerful utility of religion in promoting the social order…”, so I am trying to speak to them.
Also, *what* ‘important distinction’? If religious people who are active in their religious life generate social benefits, is that not a positive social force that benefits believer and non-believer alike?
If religious people who are active in their religious life generate social benefits, is that not a positive social force that benefits believer and non-believer alike?
The “spill over effect” has a non-linear relationship to proportion.
Also, *what* ‘important distinction’?
The distinction is important because American data sets show that more educate and affluent are more participatory in religious organizations and activities, but, exhibit lower levels of religious intensity. IOW, church membership has a positive correl. with non-pathology, but avowed emphasis of religious orthodoxy in belief not necessarily (depending on how the latter is defined). The problem of SES confounds emerges here obviously, though some multivariates try and do control for it. My overall point is that secular societies where religious people are less pathological are not so simple to compare with very religious societies where religious people are less pathological. There are lots of interaction effects here (one could suggest that a balance of proportions for example maximizes utility and reduces anomie by allowing those who are not comfortable with religion to not disrupt the harmony of religious organizations through involuntary affiliation because of social norms). They’re not impossible to account for, but grand generalizations and theories (a la Stark, Greeley, etc.) should be viewed with a priori skepticism.
The short of it is that these social science data are not like physics. In South Korea the religiously non-affiliated are less educated and more fertile, and also more socially conservative, vs-a-vs Christians. But I wouldn’t project that worldwide.
I fail to see how this is an issue. Less crime is less crime; less drug abuse is less drug abuse; more charity is more charity. What do you mean?
Granted, but the work of Kaufman and the Austrian Demographers show that social benefit trends are still strong and demonstrable, if not ‘American’.
I fail to see how this is an issue. Less crime is less crime; less drug abuse is less drug abuse; more charity is more charity.
On the margins the beta might converge upon zero. The key is where on the margins.