Articles

Study Links Religion to Woes

Kay Campbell
Religion News Service
Oct. 15, 2005

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, around the world.

Data from the past 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, much higher than secular Scandinavia.

The study is published in the current edition of the online Journal of Religion & Society.

And sexual practices among teenagers, while fairly consistent around the world, are slightly more chaste in France than in the United States.

"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 United States that increased personal religious belief will translate into increased peace and tranquillity 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 ... 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 United States 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 United States.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

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