Truth
Criminality, Schizophrenia and Obsession: Christianity and Mental Illness
Abstract
The Social Psychology of Christianity
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 April 2002
Wednesday, 25 October 2006
Christianity and Schizophrenia
Both US and UK studies show that Woody Allen is correct to depict his archetypical Jewish anti-heroes as neurotic—about twice the rate in the general population—but they suffer less than the average with psychoses—serious mental breakdown—except for manic depression, a condition often associated with creativity. Other work shows that Catholics and Baptists are more likely to be admitted to hospital with serious mental disorders than the average. The incidence was lower than average among Methodists and Lutherans.
There is a religious component in many mental illnesses, as studies have repeatedly shown. Religiosity is related to schizotypal personality traits. Wulff (1997) thought schizophrenics might be attracted to religion, and Jackson (1997) thought religion protected against schizophrenia. L E Brightwell, in his study of religious delusions, found that they occurred mainly among people from lower class backgrounds, the illness being paranoid schizophrenia. White et al (1995) found that a higher score on attitude toward Christianity was positively associated with schizotypal personality traits.
Diduca and Joseph (1997), using various measures of religious preoccupation, conviction, emotional involvement and attitude to Christianity, found a significant link between schizotypal traits and religious preoccupation among men. It was extrinsic religiosity that linked positively, while intrinsic religiosity linked negatively. An intrinsic religious piety relates with better psychological well-being, while an extrinsic piety relates with poorer psychological well-being. The intrinsic types are consistently found to be less anxious than people in general, whereas the extrinsic types are more anxious. Among women, extrinsic religiosity relates with paranoid and suspiciousness aspects of the schizoidal personality. Religion might be useful in protecting vulnerable personalities from delusional fears.
Robert Sapolsky, an author and professor of neurology at Stanford University, has explained it with some interesting examples. Schizophrenia is a disease of disordered thought, disconnected socialization, hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, a 50% rate of attempted suicide, a totally disastrous disease, yet it has a genetic component. Every culture on the planet has one or two percent of schizophrenics? What could be the adaptive advantage of schizophrenia?
In evolution, adaptive traits become more common. Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait. Schizophrenics are less likely to reproduce than ordinary people. It is maladaptive, and the gene ought to be selected out, but that is fully developed schizophrenia. When only partial, it offers some advantages. Other examples might be better known:
- Sickle-cell anemia—a fatal hematological disorder, but partially developed it protects against malaria.
- Tay Sachs disease—destroys the nervous system within a couple of months of life, but partially developed protects against tuberculosis.
- Cystic fibrosis—kills people while young, but partially developed it protects against cholera.
The advantages of the partially developed version keeps the gene from beings selected out all together. The genetics of schizophrenia is similar. The partial version is called “schizotypal personality”—it means weirdos! Schizotypals have an interest in new-age beliefs, science fiction, fantasy, religion, in a literal way, a fundamentalist way—they indulge in “metamagical” thinking. They take things literally. Seeing and hearing is believing. They are the believers, the religiously inclined, the gullible.
In human history, schizotypals are metamagical thinkers, the shamans, the medicine men, the witch doctors, whom anthropologist, Paul Radin described as “half mad”, and “healed madmen”. Shamans tend to be solitary, talk with the dead, speak in tongues, ride on the moon, and turn into a hyena by night. It is not schizophrenia that is selected, but schizotypal shamanism is, a milder, more controlled version of schizophrenia. Shamans are honoured, if feared members of society, that society wants, and will tolerate the occasional schizophrenic to have.
Schizotypalism is at the heart of religion. Who hears a voice in a burning bush? Who sees visions of dead men, and hears them addressing them? Who thinks they speak for God? Schizotypalism is what gives rise to new religions, disparaged as “cults”, though all religions began in that way. Charles Manson, David Koresh and Jim Jones are examples, and, though Koresh and Jones are beyond psychiatric testing, Charles Manson is a paranoid schizophrenic. In the west, shamans were replaced long ago by the clergy, although now religious psychiatrists are gaining in popularity and are much more like the original shamans.
Neurosis, Delusion and Hysteria
Stalin was born in 1879 and was baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church. Yekaterina, Iosif’s mother was deeply religious, and his father was an unsuccesful cobbler whom his mother threw out. A drunk, he died while Stalin was still young. Yekaterina took in washing to keep them both, and she sent Soso (Joe) to the theological school at Gori where they lived. Though Soso was among the poorest at the school, he showed qualities of leadership. Soviet biographies claimed he already read Marx and Darwin at this primary school and became an atheist and Marxist before the age of 15, but Isaac Deutscher, author of what is still the best biography of Stalin, thinks it improbable. The Communists wanted their leader to be a Marxist from childhood, but the books were unlikely to have been available to him. There were only a handful of Marxists in Tiflis, the capital city, so young Soso would not have been among them. It is propaganda:
Stalin’s apologists are only too ready to project his Marxist Leninist orthodoxy almost into his childhood.Isaac Deutscher, Stalin
Omit the “Marxist Leninist”, and it would be correct. His orthodoxy—Greek Orthodoxy—did go back into his childhood. Young Soso was an exemplary pupil, and the headmaster and the local priest recommended him for a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a great honour for a poor boy. He spent almost five years at the seminary, until 1899, when he was expelled for not attending his exams shortly before he should have graduated.
Dmitri Volkogonov (Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy) says the young Stalin was insatiably interested in the Old and New Testaments, absorbing them faster than the other boys. He had “a catechistic cast of mind” able to systematize all he read. Significantly, as it seems typical of convinced Christians, “he lacked a self-critical faculty”:
Since he rarely experienced doubt about the truth of the ideas and theories he believed in, he did not see the need to criticize them.D Volkogonov
In the seminary, life was strictly regimented by the monks. Students were rarely allowed outside the walls, were made to say endless prayers, and constantly had lessons on the bible and theology. One subject they were asked to submit essays on was ’What language did Balaam’s ass speak?’. Deutscher describes the seminary as half monastery and half barrack.
Nor were students allowed to borrow books from secular libraries, only literature approved by the monks being allowed. The monks also constantly spied on what the students were doing, searching their belongings and reporting them on the slightest suspicion. Three teachers were once accused of lecturing in a liberal spirit, were reported to the police and dismissed. The school punishment log shows the boys were punished for such crimes as reading J S Mill, E Renan (The Life of Jesus!), and C Darwin. Some were punished for not snitching on their colleagues. Conditions were so harsh that eight years before Stalin entered the seminary, the headmaster had been assassinated by the son of a priest, because he had been accused of being anti-Russian. Georgia was a Russian colony.
Stalin had no reputation in the first few years as a trouble-maker, though he did have later. One of his punishments was for reading Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo. Deutscher agrees that the novel “could hardly have helped its young reader for a career as a priest”. Nor did it. Soso appeared in the conduct book increasingly in the last couple of years. Was it dissatisfaction with the discipline of religious life that he became a Marxist? Stalin himself explained why. Among a list of reasons was:
the harsh intolerance and Jesuitical discipline that crushed me so mercilessly at the seminary.
S Sebag Montefiore wrote that the seminary’s “catechistic teaching and ‘Jesuitical methods’ of “surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life”, and violation of feelings repelled but impressed Soso so acutely that he spent the rest of his life refining the methods”.
The influence of his religious education, and he had had no other, expressed itself not in the content of his views but his cast of mind.D Volkogonov
Volkogonov thought “his religious education fostered a dogmatic turn of mind that became permanent”, and:
He never succeeded in freeing himself from the shackles of dogmatism.D Volkogonov
He began by believing every Christian postulate and effortlessly moved to believing every Marxist one.
He was inclined to canonize Marxist propositions.D Volkogonov
Before he missed his exams and was expelled, Joe was filling the conduct book more and more, but he was never reported for reading socialist or Marxist books, although he admitted he had, and had joined a socialist group clandestinely a few months before he left.
Had he not made the shift from his religious leanings to secular, heretical views at the turn of the century, some little Georgian village would one day have received him as a young orthodox priest, the spiritual pastor of a human flock.D Volkogonov
Religious leaders not uncommonly claim to be a messiah, and their followers accept their claim. One might say that the leader might not be deluded but just exploitative, but the followers plainly are deluded. The leaders often are themselves deluded too. R Matthews, in his study, English Messiahs, concluded that three of the six he studied were suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and the other three were mad in different ways. William James noted that it is hard to find a religious leader without signs of madness:
Saint Paul had his visions, his ecstasies, his gift of tongues…
Authors have often pointed to the hysterical symptoms of many saints, especially female ones. Father Thurston noted that female stigmatics were largely hysterical personalities. It has to be asked, “What is the difference between mentally ill patients whose illness has a religious aspect, and religious leaders who show symptoms of mental illness?” The main difference seems simply to be in their ability to generate a following. One factor is simply time! Many of the ancient and medieval saints today would have been institutionalized, and people seem to be more inclined to follow madmen in troubled times. Personal charisma must also have been a factor, those without it ending up in a mental hospital while those with it start a movement, and are hailed as saints or messiahs.
A Roe, in his study of mental illness by occupation, found that clergymen were more likely than the average to be neurotic and even psychotic. The trends could already be seen in seminary students and their religious training made them worse! J Stalin was in a seminary training to be a priest before he became a full time Bolshevik. J E Dittes, in his psychological study of religious professionals noted that the clergy had a child’s attitude, being strongly dependent in their relationships, and often had strong, strict mothers and weak fathers.
Speaking in tongues looks insane to most of us but it apparently is not. Pentacostalists, who indulge in this peculiarity, tend not to be any more neurotic than anyone else. Yet the tongues they speak in are not languages but some oddity of behaviour. The sounds produced are often alternating chains of consonants and vowels, strange, sometimes foreign and biblical words, and put together in a rhythmic and rhyming manner. The tongues have no grammatical structure and mean nothing. The purpose of the performance is mutual bonding and to generate emotional responses, convey commitment to the religion and show enthusiasm. Rhythmic bodily movements accompany the performance, which, when it is not pure fraud, seems to be a trance-like automatism.
Other brain defects contribute too. Certain type of epilepsy damage the brain, causing an obsession with religion. Another part of the brain, when damaged, impairs the proper perception of cause and effect, producing a superstitious personality. Freud in 1907 noted the similarities between religious ritual and obsessional behaviour—religious practice served to repress instinctual impulses. Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) can trap people in cycles of behaviour such as repeatediy cleaning a room because of a conviction that everyhing in it is dirty. At its worst, rituals take over and paralyze people’s lives, people are obsessed with their habits. In its milder forms, it manifests in rituals such as always sitting in the same seat on a train, repeatedly re-adjusting cutlery or always washing oneself in the same order. The most common rituals in OCD concern washing, food preparation, entering and leaving places of emotional significance, and counting things. In every major religion, these are the four most common rituals.
Religion is about rules—how you do everything throughout the day, how many times you say a certain prayer in a lifetime, how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys have to be counted on a rosary. Religious ritualism is shot through with obsessiveness. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, himself a Jew, says Judaism is typical. Outside organized religion, he says, these defects can destroy people’s lives, but, not only can they function with them in the religious context, they make a living of it.
While the peasants are sweating to produce the bread that they need to consume, they’re sweating to produce the bread that the clergy is consuming as well. We are paying, thoughout history, for people who are the best, most avid, psychiatrically-driven performers of ritual.Prof Robert Sapolsky
He cites a sixteenth century Augustinian monk named Luder who left a detailed diary. In it he described how he washed and washed and washed, and confessed and confessed and confessed. His Father Superior, exasperated, told him, “The problem isn’t that God is angry with you, it is that you’re angry with God”. We know him as Martin Luther.
Obsessional Personality
Both neurotic and religious practices are defensive, self-protective measures meant to repress some urge. Freud argued that the connexion of obsessive actions and religious behaviour is shown by ritual in both, the guilt brought by neglecting the rituals, and the exclusiveness of the behaviour. So, obsessional neurosis is a pathological counterpart of religion, and religion is a universal neurotic obsession serving to alleviate pathological symptoms and prevent them in some who might otherwise develop them.
Obsessional neurosis is a symbolic expression of natural desires forbidden by the super-ego, or an expression of the super-ego’s prohibitions. The desire or its prohibition is relieved by the obsession or the compulsion, or both as in pleasureless compulsive masturbation. Compulsive obsessions are conducted conscientiously, and when they cannot be, guilt is induced, so the compulsion is relieving the guilt. Religious rituals and practices also have to be conducted faultlessly. Compulsions often include taboos, just as religious devotion does too. The obsessions often get absurdly elaborate, just as religious ritual often does, and a great deal of theology.
Higher religiosity correlates with lower scores of Eysenck’s psychoticism (not psychosis, at least so far!) and higher scores on obsessionality, yet obsessional traits might be a subset of psychoticism. Obsessionality and impulsiveness seem to be opposites and obsessional people might be more responsive to suggestion, and therefore religious conditioning. Psychoticism is a measure of hard-heartedness—the willingness and determination to stick to actions or principles irrespective of incidental consequences, at the hard-hearted end of the scale, or to ameliorate views in response to unwanted circumstancial consequences, at the tender-minded end. Religiosity is in this domain among traits thought to be a result of conditioning, but, Eysenck believes, at the tender-minded end of the scale.
Fontana (1980) distinguished the obsessional personality from the obsessional neurotic, giving Christians their wanted release from Freud’s observations on the obsessive nature of religion. The first is orderly, rigid, and emphasizes hygiene and self-control, and these are merely “obsessional traits”. The second has compulsive thoughts and impulses, is indecisive, and is guilty and ritualistic, and these more seriously are “obsessional symptoms”. Religious people, notably women, judged on religious attitude tests, are indeed often obsessional, though the correlations are tiny, albeit significant, and simply in traits rather than symptoms—they have nothing more than obsessional personalities, and that is not bad at all, you understand, and might be a good thing!
Christians conclude from this sophistry that “empirical studies” do not support Freud, even though Freud had no idea that obsessional behaviour could be so cleverly divided, because this ingenious artefact had not been devised when he wrote. Moreover, he spoke of practice. The tests used were of religious attitudes whereas religious practices might be a better correlate with obsessional human practices. Lastly, of course, the practice of religion might be saving neurotic personalities from actually becoming neurotic—religion might be beneficial for potentially neurotic people.
Scientists have so far been unable to find an explanation for the extreme forms of the disorder, which affects about a million people in Britain, but upbringing, head injuries, genes and emotional trauma have been implicated. Now, a team at the University of Parma led by Claudio Sica has found that Catholics are more likely to show signs of obsession than non-Catholics, and devout Catholics the most. Research among 1,500 workers found that three quarters spent about five minutes a day on ritual behaviours such as always using a particular coffee cup or performing tasks in a particular sequence as a way of coping with stress. Lyne Drummond, a consultant psychiatrist at St George’s Hospital in London, said that many patients with the disorder said they had a strict upbringing. Madonna, the singer, has blamed her adolescent rebellion and adult obsessions on a strict upbringing by her sternly Catholic father.
Christianity and Criminality
Many Christians and other believers hold that religious faith is socially beneficial, lowering rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The Christian hypothesis is that popular religiosity is socially beneficial so that high rates of belief in a creator, worship, prayer and religious practice correlate with lower rates of lethal violence, suicide, non-monogamous sexual activity and abortion, and better physical health.
R Stark and W S Bainbridge have sought to prove that religiosity makes people moral, and stops various types of delinquency in individual people and the community. Thus Hirschi and Stark (1969) thought Christianity might be beneficial in preventing crime because of fear of supernatural punishment—the fear of hellfire—but found that it was not. Thereafter, about two studies a year on religion and crime were done up to 1998. Most found little or no correlation but a few found religion did deter crime. Then C J Baier and B R E Wright (2001) surveyed 60 reports of religiosity and criminality amounting to 79 studies because 19 could be treated as two studies. The good news for Christianity is that all but two showed a negative correlation between crime and religion, so crime was less among religious people. The bad news is few of them showed much of an effect, the average being only -0.12 using Pearson’s measure. They concluded that religiosity was only slightly beneficial in reducing criminal behaviour. Among explanations are that:
- family bonding instilled and strengthened by religion might help deter criminality
- peer group pressure, religious people choosing to be in religious groups—shame and embarrassment being higher for religious people in such groups exposed as criminals
- the source of criminality was boredom, a need for neurological arousal or excitement (Eysenck), and the sort of people able to put up with church services were not the sort of people to seek excitement in crime.
Flaws in these studies included that the effects were bigger when they selected from religious people, when the subjects were higher in blacks, when the sample size was smaller, and when the crime was nonviolent. Including petty and juvenile crimes might dilute a more shocking relationship—that religion is related with more shocking crimes. So, contrary to the rosy view of religion, serious social problems might be positively related to it.
Psychological studies based on written tests are often flawed, but psychologists seem to ignore it. Like any multiple choice question, it fails to allow for people who cannot put their answer in one of the permitted categories. Psychologists know it, but think that it is all right as long as the outcome meets the statistical criteria they use. No proper scientist could accept a test that gave the right answer by accident. To invite an answer to a statement such as, “I go to church because it helps me to make friends”, meant to distinguish an extrinsic believer from an intrinsic one assumes that, first, the respondent goes to church, and then that, when they do, making friends is the only reason relatable to the intrinsic-extrinsic distinction. Maltby and co-workers have shown that as many as 44% of respondents could not properly answer the questionnaires they were given. The effect might be that these people give next best answers that class them then as religious though they actually were not, and that could obviously cause spurious correlations that religious people might find unthinkable, or they might not answer at all, either particular questions or drop out of the sample all together.
The sample size problem has been getting worse because of the pressure to publish. Academics now typically do quick studies by collecting data on small captive samples like schoolchildren, university students and church congregations, and the larger and more diverse the sample size, the smaller the negative correlation of crime with religion. Indeed, many studies find a negative correlation between morality and belief in God!
In studies of criminality, Catholics are consistently found to be the worst offenders while Jews and especially the non-religious are the least delinquent. Franzblau’s 1934 study found honesty inversely related to religiousness. Ross (1950) found non-believers more likely to help the poor than people who profess religion. So, if you want an honest employee, your best bet is to choose the non-religious candidate. Catholic youths, taught religious morality in a reformatory, ended up more religious but no less criminal. Youths who believed in hell fire and the devil were no less likely to commit crimes, and church attendance had no effect in making people less criminal.
Several studies show there is no difference based on religion between people’s inclination to cheat others. One would have thought that church members would have been much less inclined to cheat than the average. So, Christianity has no influence when one would be expected and often is claimed by Christians. What is true, in that studies confirm it, is that Christians want to appear to be more honest than the average person, even though they are not.
Throughout history, crimes ranging from homicide, hate crime, and terrorism to genocide and ethnic cleansing have often been triggered by religious zelotry. Religions that have lost all tolerance through claiming the absolute truth and that our God and their Devil are engaged in a cosmic struggle are, author of When Religion Becomes Evil (2003), Charles Kimball said, likely to end up in destructive behaviour or violence at some level. The antagonists can see no middle ground, we are the “good guys” and they are the “bad-guys”. It has been seen recently in the religious warfare in Northern Ireland, and now it is building in the opposition of the fundamentalists in the Christian USA and those in Moslem Asia. Any suggestion of negotiation or of flexibility is automatically discarded with no thought of the consequences. Both sides are right, they believe. Christianity is claimed to be monotheistic but that is uncritical waffle. As long as Christians believe there is a Devil opposing God and good people, then Christianity is dualistic. Only the Unitarians think otherwise, and they are not noted for extremism.
When Gregory Paul compared religious and secular countries in an analysis of eighteen prosperous nations reported in the Journal of Religion and Society—published by a US Catholic University—positive relationships, often most marked, were revealed between religiosity and social delinquency like murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy. The United States, is by far the worst in these measures of social deviancy. The figures show that the theses of the Christian sociologists is grossly false, and, from an inspection of them, it is hard to work out how they came to their positive conclusions on the benefits of religiosity. Could it be the usual reason? Honest scholarship and Christian belief are incompatible! If there are any benefits for society of religiousness, they are not at all evident in the United States, the most religious of western nations.
Among the measures of social dysfunction across advanced democracies that are peculiarly high in the US despite its religosity is:
- higher juvenile mortality—higher rates of religious affiliation, attendance, and prayer do not result in lower juvenile-adult mortality rates on a cross-national basis.
- lower life span—though Christianity is said to be of some benefit in matters of health, it does not bear on life span
- adolescent gonorrhea infection—rates in the US are six to three hundred times higher than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular democracies
- adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates—rates are uniquely high in the US
- adolescent abortion rates—rates are uniquely high in the US and elsewhere they increase with belief and worship of a creator, and decrease with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution. Pope John Paul II’s claim that abortion is worse in secular societies is just wrong!
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. Higher rates of acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. The United States is the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies on these important measures, even though it is the most religious, and the least ready to accept evolution. Again the trends are confirmed too within the US, as well as across nations. The strongly theistic, anti-evolution south and mid-west have much worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the northeast where secularization, and acceptance of evolution are high. Paul summed up:
We also have the highest juvenile mortality rates. We have pretty much the shortest life spans. We have the highest abortion rates among democracies where abortion is legal. We have the highest sexually transmitted disease infection rates. We have the highest teen pregnancy rates, pretty much across the board we have real, serious social issues that other nations don’t seem to be suffering from.Gregory Paul, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
An apologist protested that he had not explained the association:
Why is it that a more religious country would be more prone to the kinds of social disorganisation that he mentions, such as a high murder rate and a high teenage pregnancy rate. I’m sorry, the causes for those things are much more likely to be found in other explanations than religious ones.
The apologist is doing what apologists do—apologising, but in the usual dishonest way. Paul had outlined some reasons why religion causes social dysfunction. It is through intolerance caused by dualism, religion dividing the world into “them” and “us”, where “they” are always the bad guys and “we” are naturally good. And religious people are not necessarily compassionate. Using Stanley Milgram’s punishment technique, people of moderate religious belief—the majority of Christians—were more likely to administer punishment on a supposed subject than even the ordinary person when told to by the authority figure. Very devout people and non-religious people were the ones more inclined to object.
The simplification of shades of grey in the real world into black and white cuts down negotiating options, and that puts up the likelihood of extreme reactions. Moreover, the malfunctioning of society itself must add to the sort of anguish that religion claims to be able to help. The “Theological Model” is that people turn to religion as a reaction to crises, whether personal or universal, presumably in the belief that they either have a divine cause, or God can be appealed to to alleviate or solve them. In serious crises, people turn to prayer rather than the professions.
As in most of Christian belief, the logic of this is hard to understand, though disabled people undoubtedly benefit from the psychological support the religious fantasy affords them, and when they are in a church community they can also benefit from the acceptance and assistance they sometimes get there. The membership of the Church of Christian Science is high in disabled people. The effect of a malfunctioning society can make scared citizens seek the same comforts and companionship in church. So the US might be in a vicious circle of religion aggravating the fault lines in society, and the resulting dysfunctioning of society pushing people into religion for a supposed comfort factor. Unless the vicious circle is stopped, the faults in US society might crack open.
The Christian response was the usual ad hominem attacks, in particular that Paul is not qualified to criticize religion because he accepts evolution! It invited the following defense on one blog:
The idea that unquestioned belief systems lead to dysfunctional patterns of behavior in societies seems to me to be rather easily demonstrated. Look at all the wars since time immemorial fought under the banners of my God is better than yours… It’s the arrogance of unquestioned belief systems which include the unquestioned circular assumption that “I am right” because after all, “god said it”, that create strong breeding grounds for weak minded, irrational behavioral dysfunction. And smart but unscrupulous leaders know exactly how to take advantage of those conditions. Those, I think, are the conclusions to be drawn from this study.Drew Renner
One apologist, in criticism of Paul’s graphical comparisons, had the audacity to cite the philosopher of science, Karl Popper. Popper’s important point is that a claim must be either refutable and thus scientific, or irrefutable and thus non-scientific. Religion makes claims that are neither provable nor refutable and are therefore not scientific. Yet here Christian apologists criticize as being unscientific a rather pointed trend that is plainly demonstrated. These correlations are suggestive but, no one is claiming they prove anything in themselves. It is merely that they merit examination to see whether there is some causal link that might point to a solution.
These believers really take the biscuit, especially as Paul simply said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. An actual claim of a causative relationship between these faults in US society and religion was made by Ruth Gledhill, the religion correspondent of The Times:
Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
Paul concluded:
The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.
Religiosity measures for 17 nations
See also the paper about national cladistics which discusses this dendrogram in which the US and Northern Ireland stand together as beacons of social dysfunctionality, though the measures are of religiousness:
Nations linked on the basis of religosity measures
Cairns (1991) reported that almost everyone in Northern Ireland claimed church membership, and 62% attend church at least weekly.
Christianity and Murder
While believing that religion is beneficial to society, many conservative evangelicals in the US think Darwinism is evil and the cause of atheism and immorality. Indeed, atheists are feared and often socially excluded and blackballed in the once Great and Free Society. The degree of acceptance of evolution correlates negatively with belief in a creator and bible literalism. The people of the scarcely religious Japan agree most with evolution, while the people of the highly religious USA accept evolution least of the developed democracies.
Some Americans imagine the God-loving US as a New Jerusalem, a shining city on the hill, an example to a skeptical world, and think foreigners who think otherwise are jealous and ungrateful. Yet Paul found the US is the only wealthy democracy where religion was widely popular and had, for example, unusually high murder rates. The US has had more mass murders in schools than all the other developed democracies together! Murder is an extreme act of interpersonal violence and creates a sense of fear in the community when it is widespread.
Moreover, the figures on it are reliable, because of the extreme nature of the crime, so it is a good measure of social dysfunction. The USA is the only first world nation with levels of religiosity as high as they are in the second and third worlds, but not only does the US have the highest homicide rates of the advanced countries in the world, the percent of evangelical Protestants in the southern cities of the US correlates positively with murder rates, even when other variables were controlled, according to Ellison, Burr, and McCall.
Gary F Jensen of Vanderbilt University, also in JRS, has taken the case further, analysing more countries specifically in relation to homicide and suicide, and carrying out regression analyses to determine the degree of correlation and the level of it.
| Homicide and Suicide Rates (Natural Logarithms) by Measures of Religiosity (World Value Survey Nations) — Jensen JRS |
|||
| Items | Measure | Homicide | Suicide |
| God Important | Passion | +0.524** | -0.663** |
| Religion Important | Passion | +0.447** | -0.507** |
| Believe in the Devil | Malevolent | +0.566** | -0.391** |
| Believe in Hell | Malevolent | +0.510** | -0.459** |
| Believe in God | Benevolent | +0.301* | -0.582** |
| Believe in Heaven | Benevolent | +0.284* | -0.545** |
| Attend Services | Ritual | +0.273* | -0.449** |
| Belong to a Religion | Ritual | +0.024 | -0.372** |
| Number of nations— 41-46 | Significance Levels P — ** .01 — * .05 | ||
Every measure but one is significant, most at the stricter .01 level, so the trends are not accidental. However, significance does not show causation though it suggests there is a common factor or factors underlying both trends, at the very least, so they are somehow linked. On every measure religiosity and suicide are inversely correlated. It upholds the view that religion might help prevent depression. The possible factors suggested by some of the questions are indicated in the table and were tested in combination against homicide by regression. This ritual measure of religiosity had no correlation, but the other three were significant, especially the malevolence measure which was positively correlated together with the intensity measure whereas the benevolenvce measure was negatively correlated with homicide. Like the different Gods of the Baylor survey, it suggests that religiosity does indeed have amazingly different significance for believers, and for the consequences of their belief.
The United States is strongly dualist (96 percent believe in God, 76 percent believe in the Devil) along with South Africa, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic. Testing for this, Jensen found that homicide rates were indeed much higher in countries with moderate to high proportions of their people believing in both God and the Devil. Even when economic factors, often cited by believers as the cause of spurious religiosity correlations with homicide rates, were included for comparison, the highest correlation coefficients were with the benevolence religiosity dimension (0.861, negative, P=0.01) and the dualism religiosity one (0.498, positive, P=0.05).
Jensen also made comparisons with other factors influencing high homicide rates such as civil war, multiculturalism, and unsure government and the two religious factors still shone through as being significant. Nor is it a case of picking on the US, an accusation that was made against Paul, for the correlations persist even when the US is not included. So the US is at the extreme high end of a religiosity against homicide relationship that applies across over forty countries. Jensen summarises:
The results are remarkably consistent with Durkheim’s passion hypothesis about religion and homicide and are contrary to over-generalizations about religion as a barrier to crime… The findings are consistent with Ellison, Burr, and McCall’s analysis of the strength of “Evangelical Protestantism” and city homicide rates [perhaps because] the evangelical movement encourages high levels of passion and moral and/or religious dualisms.
It is largely a question of honour, and the lack of negotiating options when people are brought up with the simplistic good/bad bipolar view of the world. But there does seem to be benefits, in respect of this one extreme crime of murder, at least, from a benevolent monist religious conception. The economic axis is partly encompassed in the dualistic hypothesis because economic disparities feeds the dualistic view of “us versus them”.
When the benevolence of religious belief is embodied in notions of a good God in heaven then those for whom this is the overwhelming religious feeling seem to be discouraged from murder. But other dimensions of religious belief are positive correlates of homicide showing, as Jensen says, that religion can “become evil”. So, both believers and critics of belief get something out of this analysis, but believers, who always have rosy tinted views of religious belief, ought to have their eyes opened more. According to Hans von Hentig, Studies in the Sociobiology of Crime (1967), prison inmates say sex offenders are often fervently religious, and murderers and embezzlers attend services in higher proportion than their numbers. Those who simply profess belief cannot be assumed to be benevolent types of people, and many of them are quite the opposite, especially when they believe strongly and see the world as dualistic. The fact is that those who believe in the Devil all too often end up being Devilish. Naturally, believers cannot see it!
