{"id":2716,"date":"2009-09-18T22:38:05","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T06:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2716"},"modified":"2009-09-19T13:34:48","modified_gmt":"2009-09-19T21:34:48","slug":"more-old-time-religion-more-teen-birth-rates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/more-old-time-religion-more-teen-birth-rates\/","title":{"rendered":"More old time religion, more teen births?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a new paper out, Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States<\/a>, which describes the positive relationship between teen births and religious conservatism on the state level. How positive? Here’s the scatterplot:
\n
\n\"religbirth\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The relationship holds if you control for income & abortion rate (in the latter case there could of course be a “trade-off” between abortion rate and teen births). But they don’t control for race, which is important as blacks are very religiously conservative, are prone to teen births, and tend to concentrate in states where whites are also religiously conservative. That being said, I suspect that this relationship would hold even controlling for race, though it might become weaker. But, if you look within states it is probably the case that in fact the very religious may have fewer teen births, all variables controlled (see the introduction of the paper for pointers to this literature, especially stuff from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth).<\/p>\n

These issues are complex. There is a reasonable amount of cross-national data which suggests that religious people tend to be, well, less messed up than non-religious people. And yet, there is also a reasonable amount of cross-national data that irreligious nations tend to be less messed up than religious nations. How to square this circle? It seems possible that extremely high levels of societal religiosity can only emerge in specific circumstances, just as extremely high levels of irreligiosity can only emerge in specific circumstances. The former case is more common than the latter case historically and internationally, but the latter case seems to be the trend in what we would term “developed nations,” that is, those nations which we’d actually want to live in. The slide toward secularization is even occurring in the United States, the great exception to the pattern of developed nations being secular. Between 1990 and 2009 the proportion of the American population which affirmed “No religion” doubled. And did society collapse in that period? No, rather, violent crime rates declined! I don’t believe that there’s really any first-order causal relationship, rather, secularization and other changes are being driven by complex processes which we are not privy to. But we can observe the patterns and commonalities. Developed societies are very secular, or getting more secular.<\/b> Yes, religious people may be more conscientious, but extremely religious societies are not more conscientious. These are the realities, and wishing that things were not so will change nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a new paper out, Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States, which describes the positive relationship between teen births and religious conservatism on the state level. How positive? Here’s the scatterplot:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2716"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2723,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions\/2723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}