Religiousness and Infidelity: Attendance, but not Faith and Prayer, Predict Marital Fidelity:
High religiousness has been consistently linked with a decreased likelihood of past infidelity but has been solely defined by religious service attendance, a limited assessment of a complex facet of life. The current study developed nine religiousness subscales using items from the 1998 General Social Survey to more fully explore the association between religiousness and infidelity. Interestingly, logistic regressions using currently married participants (N = 1,439) demonstrated that attendance, but not faith, nearness to God, prayer, and other religious attributes, was related to infidelity. Exploratory analyses also found that individuals with high religious importance but low attendance were more likely to have had an affair and weak evidence that marital happiness moderated the association between religiousness and infidelity.
I wouldn't put that much weight on one study...but this speaks to the functional significance of religious phenomena. Secularists often make the critique that great evil has been acted upon in the name of religion, but the flip side of this is that the same psychological and social parameters which result in group conformity which generates hostility toward perceived outgroups also can serve as critical buffers for those within the circle of the ingroup. The fact that institutional religion is declining as a source of social cohesion and identification, but supernatural beliefs far less so, suggests that anomie and anti-social behavior may increase....
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If you are measuring by church-attendance, America has a far higher prevalence of institutionalized religion than any of the nation-states in post-Christian Europe, yet we experience far higher rates of violent crime (the archtypical example of anti-social trend, though I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind). We have no official establishment, but it's obvious that American culture is still strongly identified with Christianity.
Perhaps there is an institutional substitute we're missing that is currently functioning in Europe.
well...all variables aren't controlled, right? there are other issues out there (the japanese aren't very religious at all, but there's a lot of social capital embedded in institutions and conformity is important).
America has a far higher prevalence of institutionalized religion than any of the nation-states in post-Christian Europe, yet we experience far higher rates of violent crime
How does crime among American whites compare to white Europeans? As Razib alludes to, there are cultural and possibly average genetic differences among groups to account for.
Thursday - uh, where did Razib allude to "genetic differences" here?
Should "infidelity" really be identified with "anti-social behavior"?
If institutional religion is declining (hard to tell here in the southern US), that could just as readily be interpreted as a weakening of mutually-rejecting subgroups and thus possibly an increase in social cohesion.
It's my impression that there's a weak positive correlation between religiosity and crime, one swamped by other (mostly economic) variables, but that's the sort of thing that calls for large longitudinal studies - and I haven't seen any good ones.
Thursday - uh, where did Razib allude to "genetic differences" here?
Razib didn't in this post (or this blog in general), but Thursday was just offering a different variable. It is also a valid variable, because one of the other qualities that differentiates the United States from Europe is the level of ethnic diversity. One way of determining whether determining whether that is playing a significant role in the divergence in crime-rates would be to compare whether European-Americans are any more likely to commit crimes than European-Europeans. If the crime-rates are similar despite widely divergent religious values, then it would mean that religion isn't a central factor.
One way of determining whether determining
I really should make a habit out of proof-reading my posts.