Commenter Brigid alerted me to this study claiming that Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide. On the other hand, Jack Strocchi points to Niall Ferguson claiming that A faith vacuum haunts Europe.
A striking feature of these completing claims is that the alleged effects are the opposite of what might be expected. According to the Journal of Religion and Society study, religion is supposed to cause things condemned by Christianity, and most other major religions. On the other hand, Ferguson appears concerned (as usual) with the decline of martial ‘virtues’ that are antithetical to Christianity as preached by Jesus. At least that’s the only sense I can make of the leap in his final sentence where he asks
how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?
What’s even more striking is how little difference the presence or absence of religious belief seems to make. Americans and Europeans, not to mention Red-staters and Blue-staters, don’t seem to behave in radically different ways[1], and the differences that can be observed don’t have any obvious relationship to the inferences you might make if you supposed that one group believed in the Bible and the other did not. Neither the Ten Commandments nor the teachings of Jesus seem to command any more practical adherence in America than in Europe, while it’s hard to see how free-market economics and military unilateralism have any particular basis in Christianity.
The (apparent) unimportance of religious belief for social outcomes was one the great surprises of the 20th century, although, like most negative discoveries, its significance is not fully appreciated. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nearly everyone thought that religious belief made a big difference, for good or ill. Enlightenment figures like Diderot believed that man would never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. On the other side of the fence, Nietzsche’s philosophy was built on the observation that “God is dead” and the assumption that some transcendent replacement was required if we were not to collapse in nihilistic despair. Most in the 19th century agreed with Voltaire that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, since social order could never be maintained without the availability of Heaven and Hell to supplement earthly rewards and punishments.
So far at least, it seems that neither side is right. As Fergusson points out, the collapse of religious belief in Britain has not produced an Age of Reason – superstitions of all kinds flourish. And Parliamentary politics goes on much as it has for the past two centuries or so, despite the greatly diminished influence of kings and priests. On the other side of the coin, there is no sign of social collapse. Most obviously, crime rates are far lower than they were in the days of Victorian values, let alone in the medieval era when virtually everyone was a believer.
This is, I think a good thing. The more that religion is a purely private matter, with no particular social implications, the less likely we are to fight about it.
fn1. Ferguson briefly concedes this point in relation to sexual behaviour, but ploughs on regardless.
John Quiggin 
“And Parliamentary politics goes on much as it has for the past two centuries or so, despite the greatly diminished influence of kings and priests.”
Hmm while the operation parlimentry politics are prolly the same, I would have to say that standards of governence are a bit better in the UK than they were 200 years ago. There’s a bit of rhetorical overstretch going on here.
The study you referred to in the Journal of Religion and Society goes under the title of Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. To be honest I haven’t had time to have a decent look at it yet, but the author, Gregory S. Paul, was interviewed by Phillip Adams last Tuesday.
I wonder whether correlation doesn’t equal causality and whether the state of the nation in the US is not due to a whole range of interacting factors that developed historically.
btw Ahmed Bouzid, President of Palestine Media Watch in an article The End of “Greatnessâ€? stuck the knife in after Katrina by listing what he called social fault lines with France, “America’s favorite whipping horse.”
It is not a pretty picture.
Some people are prepared to argue that religion is a powerful drug that can induce a dangereous delusional state of mind.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7036
If you don’t know what an anagram is then you may struggle to find the point of the article. The Author is Richard Dawkins.
EXTRACT:-
Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland.
One of the few behaviours it does seem to affect is the rate of reproduction. Steve Sailer has pointed out the red states in America are reproducing at a far greater rate than blue states – and that even in Blue states the main breeders are the Black and Hispanic christians who vote democrat but nevertheless share the faith of the religious right.
The same pattern is apparent in Europe (where muslims are winning the reproductive race against their secular countrymen) and Japan (where almost nobody is very religious and the birth rate is a prime concern).
I can’t think of any population where the non-religious are outbreeding the religious. If someone can point me in the right direction I’ll concede the point. Perhaps we atheists need to get our act together before we become extinct?
Yobbo, Iand others, n pre-christian Roman times, people escaped the material press around them by escaping family responsibilities, the family was business, no other way to do it. Christianity was one such avenue of rejecting the corruption of the material world, “Come and Follow Me” … be fishers of men. Going into the desert, and celibacy became popular ways of gaining control over once life as an individual, as opposed to being the family’s slave.
One of the reasons Christianiity was disliked by the authorities was that it directly undermined the running of a successful empire by reducing the birthrate. When not promoting active and passive suicide (lions). The religious turn offical persecution into a sacrement. This is why suicide bombing can be popular, they feeling they are dying anyway, “might as well take a few with me”.
Of course context is everything. Through time it changes.
Eventually one of the Christianity sects was pick up as govtech by Constantine (the more hierarchical one). Exiles from Byzantium who thought the then emporer was ‘too pagan’ went to Rome, set up a scam (Constantine Donation) and through a con job, developedinto a state over states in Western Europe. It became the first trans-generation trans-national corporation, using institutional and state economics to wield enormous power.
Along the way, in order to survive it had to accept reproduction for the plebs while restricting the joys of celibacy to a select few.
The religious are often hypocritical about sex, no wonder they reproduce more, sex aids can just as often be psychological as a material fetish. Its all very freudian I am afraid. The religious reproduce more becuase they want to repress it (its an uncontrollable evil material urge) but there is always a return of the repressed (teenage pregnancies to the county sherrif). Their social face and their evolutionary loins are in conflict. This is resolved/expressed socially through witch-hunts/lynchings, easter friday self-mutilating whippings and the odd war.
The key is that the individual is not to think of themselves as an individual in this world, but only in terms of the next.
hey, anyone want to fly a plane into building?
OTOH, Yobbo, Italy is at least nominally still overwhelmingly Catholic and reproduction rates there have collapsed.
“I can’t think of any population where the non-religious are outbreeding the religious.”
Ever been to Moe?
no but I drank it when I had money to buy it!!
There is little doubt that the collapse of formal religious observance in developed societies has not had the catastrophic consequences predicted by old fogeys a century ago. Even the US has experienced a large decline in religious identification over the nineties, whilst crime has generally gone down. A survey taken in 2004 reported that
But the moral collapse of formerly atheist societies (eg CIS) should give Pr Q pause for thought before indulging in an atheistic victory lap. The Bolshevik’s destruction of religious institutions in Russia has been a major factor in turning that society into a mafia-run kleptocracy, plagued by alcoholism, prositution and shakedown operations.
Pr Q is forgetting that in the most advanced societies there has been a corresponding increase in the popularity of private religious schools. Parents want their children to be indoctrinated into some moral code.
So even modern, “with-it” people still want some old fashioned religious discipline to keep naughty children in line. Conquest’s First Law – “Everyone is conservative about what they know best” – is driving the revival of relgious education amongst new families (and the Decline of the Wets).
The study in the Times was utterly worthles because it failed to make apples-to-apples comparisons between religious and non religious societies. It did not factor out race-ethnic and class-economic differences between the relatively godfearing US and godless UK.
Steve Sailer has comprehensively refuted it by discounting the US’s underclass minority contribution to its social pathologies. When the UK’s Caucasian non-Christians are comparted to the US’s Caucasian Christians it seems the latter come out looking much better. Its true that god-fearing Southerners are more likely to murder you than godless British citizens. But in general Southern Christians are more law-abiding and family valuing than most other folks. Sailer examines the evidence and finds that
This is in clear contrast to the UK which went through a massive crime wave during the nineties. The UK’s laddish culture, and the associated plague of public drunkedness and loutishness, is partly due the the fact that British schoolboys are no longer being brought up as good Christians. This is one reason why everyone who comes into contact with a bunch of British revellers on a spree runs for their lives.
Nietiche’s social predictions about the effect of a collapse in religious faith amongst elites were spot on for about 100 years. The collapse of religious belief amongst elites in the late 19th C had the greatest social effect in the more traditional of the rapidly modernising societies, such as Germany and Russia. Tom Wolfe sets the Nietchian record straight:
Intellectuals became more of a plague than clerics in the 20th C.
I dont know where Pr Q gets hiscrime stats about Victorian England but he seems to be retailing an urban myth. His statement about the collapse of Victorian public morality is exactly the opposite of the truth.
The facts are that during most of the 19th C the UK experienced a massive revival in religious sentiment. This was associated with a massive reduction in crime. Himmelfarb lays out the correct facts and causal relations and defends Victorian values:
It is ridiculous for Pr Q to bring up high crime rates in religious medieval societies, since other factors were drasticly different. Fretting about crime waves in the middle of a bubonic plague is a bit like “handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500”.
Pr Q’s dismissal of the good effect of moderate religion on public life is a diagnostic of intellectual wrongg-headedness, Our cultural elites have persistently misunderstand the effect of religion on public life, although they are glad enugh to have had a religious mother and live in a moderately religous society. Sailer points out that this is a form of double think:
That’s a very, uh, interesting take on Nietzsche.
Jack, I was checking the issues on Victorian crime stats as you were writing your post and have deleted this claim, though I haven’t been able to confirm Himmelfarb either.
The rest of your argument seems a bit desperate, though. I’m sure with careful adjustments of the kind you want, you can make the case that the US is not, as the raw stats would suggest, massively more prone to violent crime than other countries. But it’s absurd to suggests that its massively less prone to violence, which is what you seem to be claiming.
From what I have read of comparative US crime statistics they have a lower rate of property crime, assault type crime, rape etc when compared with nations such as Australia. The one catagory where the USA has a very high rate of crime (although only in relative terms) is in homocide.
The fact that Australians can not legally carry concealed handguns probably goes some way towards explaining the higher incident of rape and assault here. I doubt that it is our devoutly agnostic tendancies.
“I can’t think of any population where the non-religious are outbreeding the religious.”
A classic confusion of causality. Religion has always been a drug of the poor (indeed, classic Marxists and classic conservatives argue that that is precisely its social function). The poor have always had more babies than the rich for sound economic reasons (the opportunity cost is lower, and also the death rate is higher so you have to have more as a hedge against destitution in old age).
meika,
the reason the Roman authorities were against Christianity in its early stages is also because it provided an easy scapegoat, but mostly because it undermined the peace they enjoyed as a polytheistic society, with no one cult or deity proclaimed “the one true god”..
usually, you’ll find, it’s monotheistic religion that poses a problem and starts wars – the belief that everyone else’s god is a demon, or false, and that ONE god should replace ALL gods.
🙂
It is often remarked that American political culture is imbued with a moral absolutism that has long been absent from other nominally Christian polities. Thus the various religious revival movements, abolitionism, prohibition, McCarthyism, “the war on drugs”, “the GWOT” all drew or draw their energies from a passion for perfectionism.
Why is this so?
It is certain that European cultures of the 17th century were more perfectionist than American societies ever were. In fact, the American Puritans fled to America because the English government thought that England would be more perfect without them.
Ever since, at least in a religious sense, European societies have grown less perfectionist, and in fact less religious.
How to resolve this apparent inconsistency?
The European Wars of Religion of the 16th and 17th centuries were so horrible and productive of so much patent evil, religion itself lost much of its credibility. When perfectionism had the whiff of burning female flesh, perfectionist movments faltered.
The American experience of religious perfectionism, on the other hand, never acquired that horrendous association with crazed fanaticism. Moral absolutist movements drew upon religious rhetoric and religious imagery but concentrated on social as opposed to doctrinal and teleological ends. American religiosity secularised itself and wove itself into the fabric of social and political life.
However, there is a downside. Americans, used to a measure of success in moral struggles, sometimes overestimate the desire of others to be as perfect as themselves. This was the sad fate of Prohibition, and it is likely to be the sad fate of the GWOT where Americans find themselves confronting forces even more morally absolutist than themselves.
How does this relate to the present topic?
It is worth noting that for Americans religiosity is more often than elsewhere in the Western world a force that galvanises social action. They tend to be more pleased to be reforming others than themselves. And this pleasure only increases with greater cultural, social and geographic distance.
If Sailor’s piece is supposed to be a “comprehensive refutation” then the arguement that religion is bad for society is looking pretty strong. Sailor jumps around with his stats in a way that looks suspiciously like cherry picking, and in particular often seems to confuse the trend with the actual figures.
For example if the American crime rate is falling, while European crime rates are rising Sailor takes this as proof of the benefits of religion. But Europe has been more secular than the US for a long time. If European crime rates are much lower than America’s then a slight rise doesn’t disprove the case.
What is more, Sailor picks on the UK, playing on an image of it being overhwelmingly white, but in fact the proportions of non-whites, at least in the major cities are pretty high there. Ditto somewhere like Amsterdam. By his own admission abortion rates are much lower in Holland and Germany than the US, so it can’t just be race.
Gregory Paul also compared the situation within the US, between the relatively secular North and the more religious South. Hard to make the case that lower crime in New York State or Pennsylvania are because of an absence of ethnic minorities.
I’m also fascinated by Sailor’s claim that Australia is the most dangerous developed country. I walk around the inner city of Melbourne at night and very rarely feel unsafe. I wouldn’t do that in many white neighbourhoods in the US, or much of Europe for that matter.
I’m no fan of Robert Barro, but he has run regressions comparing the effect of religion on economic growth and discovered that:
We find that economic growth responds positively to the extent of religious beliefs, notably those in hell and heaven, but negatively to church attendance.
The link is here (PDF file).
Personally this makes me laugh – the ideal religious state for economic growth is guilt . I.e. I believe in Heaven and Hell but don’t go to church so, in a futile attempt at redemption, I work harder and innovate better.
More seriously – long-run regressions of the type that Barro runs are notoriously prone to getting it wrong so I wouldn’t read too much into his data. As far as I am aware, the most plausable (and best backed up by evidence) explanations for long run economic growth are institutions (Acemoglu, Rodrik, North) and Geography (Sachs).
Sailer’s argument appears to be that the critical factor in anti-social behaviours is melanin.
Soak me in bleach before I kill again!
Here is some data on the deaths due to assault in industralized countries. As you’ll see, Australia is worse than average, but not much. http://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/24/violent-societies/#more-3035
BTW, what possible reason have we to control for the US underclass in its statistics? Two points. First, if we exclude the underclass we’ll change the picture for all societies (compare apples with apples principle). Second, it is conceivable that the US has an especially marginalised underclass – indeed, likely – and that religion plays a role in bringing about this fact (sample explanation: religious beliefs make people less concerned with justice in this world, and therefore less motivated to pay the taxes that would help lift some of the underclass. Certainly there is a contingent link between religious belief in the US and opposition to estate taxes.).
>From what I have read of comparative US crime statistics they have a lower rate of property crime, assault type crime, rape etc when compared with nations such as Australia.
You’d need to check through Tim Lambert’s blog archives to confirm this but my understanding is that the definition of assault used in American crime statistics isn’t directly compatible with the Australian (or British) definition.
It does appear that the incidence of some forms of property crime (bruglary and car theft) are higher in Australia.
Katz,
I think you will find the english puritans left England because of persecution.
too calvinist for the COE.
given it would be impossible to catergise a christian ( nominal out, pious in) I can’t take it seriously
HP, The persecution of the Calvinists who sought refuge in America was performed by the English Government on behalf of and in defence of the Church of England.
These Calvinists didn’t take off for America in a hissy fit because they lost a theological debate. They were prisoners of conscience and criminals in the eyes of English law.
jquiggin Says: October 10th, 2005 at 10:29 am
I applaud Pr Q’s diligence and honesty. I have not been able to confirm Himmelfarb, although her account is consistent with more reliable literary anecdotes from that period (“middle class piety and working class deference”). This blog contains a revealing account of the rise in civil morality, under Queen Victoria’s reign, during the second half of the 19th C:
No wonder we call the straight-laced upright citizen a latter day “Victorian”. Duh!
Lets lay our cards on the table. Pr Q’s reliance on the discredited survey reported in the Times article is a not-to-subtle attempt to smear the US’s Bible Belt “rednecks”. On the contrary I argue that moderate theism, combined with a strict “lawfare state”, is a significant factor in reducing social pathology. The EU has neither of these and is, ceteris-paribus, more crime-ridden than the US.
The notion that the Christian parts of the US are more crime-ridden than the non-Christian parts of the EU does not pass the smell test. To put it bluntly, the UK’s Caucasian non-Christians tend to be loud mouthed drunken yobs or lager lout lads always spoiling for a fight or a bit of argy bargy. Whereas the Christian bits of the US tend to be polite and well-mannered, unless you start messing with them. Only then might you wind up riddled with bullets.
Anyone who has first hand experience of the difference between the US’s and UK’s bar room culture can testify to this. Does anyone recall their experiences with the UK’s soccer hooligans, barmy army, british backpackers on a drunken spree etc? The UK is turning into Hogarth revisited .
I reject Pr Q’s cheeky attempt to limit the atheist-to-theist social pathology comparison to “violent crime”. It “is absurd to suggest” that I claimed that the US is “massively less prone to violence”. In fact I explicitly noted that the US’s godfearing Southerners “are more likely to murder you than godless British citizens”. This is because of the ubiquity of guns in the US, which Howard was right to ban.
James Q Wilson reports that the US’s Caucasians are about three times more likely to gun you down than the EU’s Caucasians.
But violent crime is only a small subset of the total crime incidence measured by “crime victimization” surveys. And on this measure it is clear that the US’s as a whole (and its Caucasian Christians in particular) are less criminal than most of the EU’s Caucasian non-Christian nations.
Pr Q’s US-bollocking argument has so far has been remarkably fact-free or fact-wrong. The figures from the International Crime Victimization Survey (1999) for Selected Contact Crime (% of pop. victimized in robbery, sexual assault and assault with force more than once in a year) bears this out. The ~atheists in the EU (2.4%) were about 25% more prone to become victims of crime than ~theists in the US (1.9%).
The Times article that Pr Q relies on is rubbish because it does not make a proper apples to apples comparison. It is poor social science to put the US’s (predominantly non-) Caucasian-perpetrated crime rate into a comparison with the UK’s (predominantly) Caucasian-perpetrated crime rate. The UK does not have anything like the crime-ridden ethnic enclaves observed in the US.
To the extent that the US demonstrates a high overall crime incidence rate it is a legacy of immoral and illegal forms of immigration (ie slavery and wetbacks). It has certainly got nothing to do with the US’s higher religious observance, which evidently reduces crime from what it otherwise might have been. The Nation of Islam and Evelyn Waugh have at least one thing in common.
When you make an (ethnic & economic) apples-to-apples comparison between Caucasians in the US and UK it is evident that the US’s Caucasian Christians show less social pathology on average than the EU’s Caucasian non-Christians. This controls for the most significant socio-biological differences between the US and EU – ethnicity.
I would bet that, homicide apart, the US’s Caucasian Christians are a whole lot more law-abiding than the EU’s Caucasian non-Christians. They are less likely to commit crime because they know that either God, the State or a well-armed fellow citizen will punish them. Thus does because god-fearing lead to law-abiding behaviour. (Duh!).
Of course homicide rates are pretty important indices of social pathology (“Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” – Tom Lehrer). So the US’s “rednecked good ole boys” could lift their game in that deparment.
Nietzche’s theory that atheistic political movements would tend to be more violent and immoral than theistic ones is consistent with the facts of the 20th C Holocaust. The atheistic nazis and communists that started WWII and perpetrated several colossal acts of genocide were more violent and vicious than the theistic “God, King and Country” types that ran WWI.
Katz,
I thought that was what I was implying.
your statement
‘It is certain that European cultures of the 17th century were more perfectionist than American societies ever were. In fact, the American Puritans fled to America because the English government thought that England would be more perfect without them.’ doesn’t seem to fit with that however.
Jack,
I beleive you are innacurate in referrign ot the Nazis as atheists.
While there were various grousp within the Nazi Party that were atheist, neo-pagan or adhered to various types of mysticism, the great majority of Nazi party members were Christians.
Can’t follow your thinking HP.
This is what I understand to be the history of the so-called Pilgrim Fathers.
English Calvinists set up a congregation in Scooby.
The the Archbishop of York wants them removed.
The English Government, through the Ecclesiastical Courts, prosecute some leading Calvinists. The Archbishop’s and the English Government’s motives were to remove the Calvinist contamination from the Church of England, to make the English Church and English society more perfect. (Catholics were being persecuted in a much more violent way at the same time for similar reasons. This is the characteristic form of religious perfectionism in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries that refused to countenance any religious hererodoxy on the ground that it insulted God and endangered the souls of the people.)
The English Calvinists first withdraw to Holland, but discover there that the Dutch are a pack of immoral sinners whose wicked ways might corrupt the English Puritans.
Their final move was to America. And the rest is, as they say, History. It is true that there were some episodes of religious persecution in North America. But very quickly White North Americans concluded that they had to accept through gritted teeth a form of toleration. Thus doctrinal perfectionism quite quickly faded as an American dream.
Jack,
The Nazis were not atheists. One of the parties offical slogans was “Gott mit uns”. Mein Kampf contains many invocations of God. He claimed to be doing God’s work in cleansing the world of Jews. He was passionately opposed to the church, but nevertheless identified as a Christian.
You continue the line begun by JQ of distorting Nietzsche. Please stop it! Nietzsche is fantastically complex. But he certainly did not think that rejecting god would lead to immorality. If anything, he thought it would lead to a truly moral life.
Jack, you seem to be missing the 800 pound gorilla stuck in your monitor:
“This is because of the ubiquity of guns in the US, which Howard was right to ban”
“The ~atheists in the EU (2.4%) were about 25% more prone to become victims of crime than ~theists in the US (1.9%).”
Don’t you see the connection between those two statements?
Theists in the US are far less likely to be victims of crime because they’re armed and prepared to use it. Ditto for the bar-room brawl scenario. It’s not wise to perpetrate random acts of violence against people who may well be armed to the teeth.
Neil Says: October 10th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
I concede that the Nazis were nominally theistic, although hardly subscribing to anything remotely resembling orthodox Christian belief. I rather think that they were atheistic in everything but in the payment of political lip-service.
I find it incredible that any movement brandishing the swastika – intended as a vicious pun on Christian iconography – and practising state worship could be characterised as “Christian”. I define Christianity operationally, by church attendance, school enrollments and parochial attachments. By this standard the Nazis were relentlessly hostile to institutional Christianity.
And devout Christians were the most effective internal critics of the Nazi regime, often paying with their lives for their beliefs. It is true that militantly atheistic communist were also stout opponents of nazism. But I would be careful about citing them as political role models.
Nietzche’s prognostications about a godless European future leading to totalitarian genocide were intended as positive predictions rather than normative prescriptions. On that score he turned out to be pretty close to the mark for almost a century.
Nietzche scored a number of remarkable cultural predictions. I remember reading a passage of Nietsche where he made the startlingly accurate prediction that Europe would settle down, after a century of fraticidal warfare, into a commercial market society. But I cannot remember the passage.
He also predicted that many post-modern intellectuals would abandon the pursuit of truth in order to seek secular goods, power, fame. They did not disappoint him.
I acknowledge that Nietzche was an atheist (classical pagan) at heart. He was also a fervent anti-nationalist. But he mixed up prognosis with proposals so much it is often hard to tell.
Jack, at very least you’ve changed the subject. You were saying that atheism contributed to immorality. When challenged, you say that the Nazis were not orthdox Xians (which is certainly true). But you will notice that the majority of believers in the world are not orthodox Xians.
Nietzsche interpretation is extremely difficult. It is at least a defensible interpretation of his views that rejecting Xianity (to which he was especially opposed) would lead to greater morality, and that the worst possible result would be continuing nominal Xianity (which he thought was the status quo of the Europe he lived in).
The US was traditionally a violent country, but it has become less so over the last dozen years for a variety of reasons, with an enormous imprisonment rate probably being the most important. But other factors such as an aging population, less drunkeness, and a level of religious faith that is at least holding its own if not growing, probably play a role too.
Leaving aside gun homicides (which America’s 200,000,000 or so guns make inevitably high), American whites are probably less violent today than whites in other English-speaking countries. American working class whites in the South are now quite a bit less violent than their distant cousins in Scotland.
Whether this is a long term trend or merely an anomalous blip, only time will tell, but many people need to readjust their stereotypes about the level of violence in America versus other countries.
that’s right, distorting neitzsche, naughty naughty
theism is slave morality, its seeks to become the master, its does not seek to be free, merely more powerful
as a slave morality theists tend to to want power over others, i.e. tell them what to wear hoping maybe that wont assault anyone.
if they suddenly became atheists because it was realised God is dead, but they remained slaves in their heart, then freedom would not be tolerated, at least for for others, whoever they might be, for it would be a threat to power
the conservative urge to personally privatise (i.e. become powerful over others and hurt them by inscribing symbols of that power in their corrupt subhuman flesh) all common and public goods would be one example of the slave morality, efficiency and productive economies are a small gloss to this goal
but then the whole discussion has conflated “society is god” with “god is moral”, such that nowadays god has become simply Mr Murdoch by other means (selling the slaves what they want to buy)(all puns intended)
the iron age experiment that god is society is about to end, god is dead, society is dead, we are all doomed, now then, where’s my plane, and where is that tower of babylon?
hhmmm, maybe its the comment list
I’ve created a Crime Misery Index for the U.S. in the 20th Century on the model of the Economic Misery Index that sums the unemployment and inflation rates. For the Crime Misery Index, I plot the homicide rate and the incarceration rate (setting the 1950s to 100).
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/04/introducing-crime-misery-index.html
You’ll note that in the U.S., the homicide rate doubled during the left-of-center heyday from 1965-1975, while the imprisonment rate actually dipped, dysfunctionally. Beginning a little before 1980, the incarceration rate began to climb, eventually quadrupling by 2000. The homicide rate fell sharply in the 1990s, although it has largely stopped declining. Although the crime rate is way down, the Crime Misery Index is still near an all time high in the U.S. due to the high imprisonment rate.
The rise in crime started later than in the U.S. in most European and Anglosphere countries. They are now still where the U.S. was in the 1970s, with high violent crime rates but short prison terms and demoralized police forces. I suspect that will change over time as their voters decide the current crime level is intolerable.
By the way, there’s no question that medical advances drive down the homicide rate, but that’s been going on during the whole 20th century, with improvements like blood transfusions, antibiotics, and motorized ambulances all playing a major role in the first half of the 20th Century.
Neil Says: October 10th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
Well, I would expect that a leftist would turn Scott Fitzgerald on his head and say “The [poor] are different. They have [less] money.” Unfortunately this anecdotal evidence is not the whole scientific truth.
I can’t find the Bureau of Justice report but I am fairly sure that in the US, when one controls for SES (income and education), one still finds that the crime rates for Caucasians are much lower than for non-Caucasians. This may have nothing to do with the amount of “melanin” in the skin. It could be caused by, purely cultural, ethnic-correlated behaviours. (Ever listened to rap music?)
The “good religion” effect may not be apparent within the US’s Caucasian society. It is likely that the US’s (Blue State) Caucasian non-Christians are somewhat less criminal than their hell-raisin’ (Red State) Caucasian Christians cousins. The fancy talking folks up North are richer and better educated than the poor boys down South. So here is where Scott Fitzgerald’s social generalisations may come into play.
The “good religion” effect is apparent comparing the US and EU Caucasian societies. The crime rates for the US’s Caucasian Christians are lower than for the EU’s Caucasian non-Christians. And I fancy that this could be because of the US’s more devout Christianity.
In this case the social stereotypes about “gracious southerners” being nicer than “lager louts” could well be right. More generally, it appears that the EU is committed to a slow form of cultural suicide, which includes trashing the heritage of Christianity.
Not by much. The US’s ethnic underclass is about an order of magnitude greater in size than anything found in the EU. There are alot of bad apples in the US underclass, I am afraid.
Hmmm…thats an interesting question. Theists have not really been in the forefront of oppressing black people throughout US history. The Quakers, who were nothing if not religious, were the most ardent abolitionists. Black preachers, such as Martin Luther King, have been in the forefront in championing civil rights to protect the dignity and improve the equity of coloured people in the US.
Over the past generation atheists have not done a whole lot to improve the condition of the US’s underclass. The atheistic (?) Blue State liberals have been behind several social policy moves that have hurt, rather than harmed, the cause of black people. As a result from the sixties through eighties the US’s underclass (defined by social pathology) underwent a spectacular increase in size.
These included the liberalization of immigration restrictions from Latin America, the liberalization of welfare entitlements to ethnic communities, the liberalization of penal and correctional policies and the liberalization of drug laws. Note the CD?
The disintegration of the black family was behind much of this terrible trend. So maybe religious people are not being crazed racists to promote “family values”?
The relative size of the underclass only started decline in the nineties when more paternalistic “lawfare” welfare and “workfare” policies were imposed, by the conspicuously religious Bill Clinton!
Mainstream Christians are usually pretty prominent in “social justice” politics in both the US and elsewhere. It is true that the US’s Evangelical Christians are pretty strongly in favour of limited government.
Whether limited government is good or bad for the underclass is an open question. Legalizing crack is limited government alright and a bad policy for the underclass. Making welfare conditional is a move in the direction of limited government and is a good policy for the underclass.
Big Government may sometimes be good for Scandanavians. It may sometimes be bad for Africans. Horses for courses, different strokes…
I doubt whether there is much of a relationship between marginal tax rates on the rich and the size of the underclass. But when the Bush admin policies – on fiscal probity, national security, border protection – are in play then all bets are off. This outfit is somekind of monstrous mutation from conservatism and is headed for self-extinction.
“By the way, there’s no question that medical advances drive down the homicide rate”
Where those medical advances include, of course, termination of unwanted pregnancy by abortion, as been proved conclusively in the United States.
Dave: I fail to see the correlation between abortion & the murder rate?
As Jack says,
“But when the Bush admin policies – on fiscal probity, national security, border protection – are in play then all bets are off. This outfit is somekind of monstrous mutation from conservatism and is headed for self-extinction.”
Armageddon out of hear!
Any suggestions for a secular enclave, accepted, while the religious right of all persuasions fight out, very old tribal wars.
Neil, I’m not imputing to Nietzsche the belief that rejecting God would necessarily lead to immorality – if you read the post you’ll see I link this view to (a literal interpretation of) Voltaire. I think it’s fair to say, though, that he believed that some transcendent alternative (the Ubermensch or whatever) is needed if this is not to happen.
Jack, give it up. The murder rate is a brute fact that makes any attempt to paint the US as a particularly nonviolent society absurd. You can make a bunch of excuses and argue that, really the US is not that different from other places all things considered, but if you do that you end up agreeing with me that religion makes no difference.
Steve at the pub: simple – fewer unwanted kids to teenage single mums. Unwanted kids have a high crime rate.
This was one of Steven Landsburg’s stories in “Freakonomics”. I’m a bit dubious myself – there are lots of factors that are candidates for the big drop in crime rates and I’m not sure Landsburg properly controls for all of them (BTW, incapacitation by prison is the right’s favoured explanation – one I’m even more dubious about, both because of the dodgy econometrics and because this approach has never worked in the past).
>…the left-of-center heyday from 1965-1975
The Nixon administration was ‘the left-of-centre heyday”?
DD, it’s Levitt not Landsburg – a big difference in quality if not in style.
jquiggin Says: October 10th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
Jack, give it up. The murder rate is a brute fact that makes any attempt to paint the US as a particularly nonviolent society absurd.
Pr Q, please “give it up” and stop imputing to me views that I have explicitly disavowed (x2). I never said that the US was less prone to violent crimes than the EU. In fact I specifically and explicitly made the opposite point, namely that the US presents higher homicide rates, accross all ethnic groups, than comparable states in the EU. FTR, here is what I said:
I can’t make it any clearer than that.
Homicide is a fairly rare crime and the homicide rate is not necessarily representative of a given society’s civic culture. In the case of the US, the highest homicide rates are present in groups that do not conform to the standard ethnic type, do not typically profess religious beliefs (!) and are not found in other society’s with which the US is being compared.
I am making the (true) claim that the US’s overall crime victimization rate is lower than the EU average. Pr Q has not addressed, or conveniently side-stepped, this empirical fact.
The crime victimization rate is a broader measure of social pathology, and more representative of the state of civil culture, than the homicide rate. Thus it is germane to considering the issue of religion and its broad social consequences.
The US really is “different from other places all things considered”, specifically race and religion. And both these factors make a difference. Although these are by no means the only factors that make a difference. (Some, such as the US’s compartively youthful age distribution, actually bias the comparison against the US.)
The presence of strongly held religious belief does make a (good) difference to US society. Operationally, “religious belief” means at least regular church attendance or enrollment in a religious school or participation in a local community religious group.
The US’s more religious citizens, of any colour, are less likely to commit crime than non-religious citizens, factoring out for SES. And the US’s Caucasian ~Christians are on average less likely to commit crime than the average of the EU’s Caucasian ~non-Christians, whatever the SES.
The Dept of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey acknowledges this in a rather tactful manner:
Roughly speaking, the US’s total crime rate is inflated by the presence of extraordinarily crime-ridden minority communities, not found in EU societies. And its Caucasian crime rate is depressed by the presence of extraordinarly faith-based majority communities, not found in EU socieities.
I do not wish to speculate on the ulitmate causes of these correlations. I merely make the observation that they exist.
What Pr Q calls “making a bunch of excuses” is what most social scientists (incl Pr Q) call making an apples-to-apples comparison. I am sure that I do not have to teach Pr Q how to suck eggs on this methodological matter. But FTR, here goes. This is done to factor out biasing characteristics in order to make a standardised comparison that isolates the causal variable under consideration ie ceteris paribus.
Ian Gould Says: October 10th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
You bet. The rather left wing Ted Kennedy Democrats controlled Congress in those days. And Nixon was a left-liberal cum lame duck on most domestic policy issues (wage price controls, EPA).
Nixon’s “tough on crime” & “law and order” stance was just that: a stance.
Crime rates have been falling in Australa, Canada and England as well as in the US.
Legalizing abortion may or may not have reduced crime rates in other countries, but the evidence from America is extremely dubious, despite the vast popularity of Steven D. Levitt’s abortion-cut-crime theory. What Levitt leaves out of Freakonomics bestseller is that in the U.S., the teen violent crime rate soared among those born immediately after legalization.
Levitt’s theory rests upon European studies claiming that women who get abortions would be worse mothers than women who don’t get abortions. The reason he used Europeans studies was because American studies point in the opposite direction: all else being equal, women who get abortions tend to be more upwardly mobile than ones who don’t. See http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/10/new-facts-undermining-freakonomics.html
For a more general discussion of the relationship between abortion and crime, see http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm
By the way, the abortion rate dropped from 19 to 11 among white American women from 1991 to 1999. For some reason Levitt hasn’t predicted an upsurge in white teen crime beginning in the next year or two.
Indeed, the American experience points to a more general picture that abortion and crime rates are vaguely positively correlated.
An alternative explanation for falling crime rates in the US in the 1990s:
Falling Poverty
Ask any serious criminologist (as opposed to someone who just wants to prove a pre-held political position) and they will tell you that crime correlates strongly to poverty (there’s a large relative component to this, as opposed to absolute poverty – if I recall correctly) and demographics.
When I listened to the author of Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. on LNL he was at pains to state that his study did not show that religion caused increased levels of violence, asociality etc. His only claim was that increased levels of religious belief did not prevent these, as the proponents of religion claim.
Terence claims:
“An alternative explanation for falling crime rates in the US in the 1990s:
“Falling Poverty
“Ask any serious criminologist (as opposed to someone who just wants to prove a pre-held political position) and they will tell you that crime correlates strongly to poverty”
That has not been the American experience. Poverty rates fell sharply in the 1960s, especially when the big increases in welfare were factored in, yet the crime rate shot upwards.