Religion and Society

Via an article by Gwynne Dyer there's an interesting article by Gregory Paul. The article, which has the ponderous title of Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies - A First Look, looks briefly at correlations between religion and and various societal indicators. It is a fascinating work. Briefly, it shows that countries that have high religiosity, are also high in things that western society considers bad while those countries that are more secular, tend to less nastiness. So for example, the United States scores the highest in absolute belief in God, also scores highest in areas such as teen pregnancy and infant mortality, where as countries such as Sweden who have lower rates of absolute belief in God have lower rates of teen pregnancy and infant mortality. Most of the axis studied show a correlation between something undesirable in society and religiosity.

The question, of course, is why? After all the predominant religion in the United States, Christianity, tends to preach against the social ills that plague that country. What is it about religious belief that causes bad things to happen in a society? A possible answer lies in one of the comparison charts, a chart that compares acceptance of human evolution and the same societal ills. Now, generally, an acceptance of human evolution implies a higher level of education, since to accept evolution implies an understanding of the subject which requires education. This is a reasonable explanation as those countries that have lower belief in God and higher acceptance of human evolution also score higher on the international standardized tests that some right-wing think tanks love to crow about. So the more educated a society is, the less religious it is. It does give a possible link to the more educated a society, the less social ills it has.

This makes sense, since when people have a high level of education, they tend to not resort to crime for a living, nor do educated teens make as many bad decisions with respect to their lives. The fact that education and religion seem to some extent be mutually exclusive is also interesting. Now I'm not saying that all atheists are educated and that all religious people are not as examples to the contrary can be found in all societies. It does tend to explain the relative demise of religion in developed countries as education in these countries tends to be well funded by the state, the exception of which is the United States where education has been on a downward trend for decades. This downward trend in the US also mirrors the rise of religion in that country. The recent trend towards a theocratic government by the Bush administration is further pushing that country away from education, further strengthening the article's thesis.

What I think the article provides us is a warning against the intrusion of religion into government and the push to dismantle our public education system. As the correlations suggest, more religion and less education invariably leads to more crime and social ills. More education will help alleviate trends to more social ills in a developed country. What scares the theo-conservatives is that this increase in education will tend to result in a reduction of religiosity and thus a decrease for support in theo-conservative support. Perhaps this is why most theo-cons want to dismantle our public education system. In any event, our society cannot afford to lose our education. The US seems to be heading into a dark age, at least for the masses, I don't think we want to go down that path.