Crime and religion
Yesterday there was a lot of back-and-forth in the comments of this post about the relation between violent crime and religious belief. One of the comments was by Richard Saunders, and it went like this:
If I don’t believe in God and some kind of judgement and reward or punishment after death, why should I not give into my basest impulses, take a room on the 34th floor of a Las Vegas hotel, and open fire onto a concert below, and then kill myself?
It’s a somewhat rhetorical question, because of course Richard Saunders isn’t saying that most atheists are mass murderers. It’s really asking whether religion is a major force that stops people who would otherwise be committing violent crimes from following through and actually doing it.
The answer is that we don’t know, but there have been attempts to find out. And, as with most social science research, it’s hard to get a clear idea of what’s going on.
Later in the comments, Roy Nathanson responded to Richard Saunders this way:
In fact, there is a negative correlation [between violence and religious belief] at all levels. The most secular countries are also the least violent. And the prison population in the U.S. has a far lower percentage of atheists than the general population.
The same commenter later added (on the specific topic of the religious beliefs of mass shooters), after some further back-and-forth:
…[I]t turns out that mass shooters do have a strong tendency toward a lack of religiosity. In this case, I think that the lack of religiosity is simply one more symptom of the root cause, which is a near total isolation from society. The people who commit mass shootings are typically isolated loners. It isn’t that they don’t go to church, it is that they don’t engage in any social interactions that would reinforce their natural empathy for other people. They see everyone as “them” and no one as “us”.
It was the statements that Roy Nathanson offered on violent crime in general as it correlates with religion that interested me enough to write the present post: in particular, that “the most secular countries are also the least violent” and that “the prison population in the U.S. has a far lower percentage of atheists than the general population.”
As both participants in that discussion know (and as I’m assuming just about everyone here knows), correlation is not causation. Just to take one example, religiousness is more common in less educated people, and violent crime is more common among them as well. So is it something about religion that reduces violent crime, or something about education—or is it some other factor they have in common?
In addition, crime in the US is far more prevalent in certain ethnic groups, and those groups also happen to have much lower rates of atheism. But that doesn’t mean atheism vs. religiosity is an important independent variable for those groups.
So we have this sort of discussion about religion and murder, for example:
And within America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be the highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates tend to be the among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon.
But what else is different about those two groups of states? The low-murder states are richer and they are whiter (those are not the only differences, of course).
Louisiana is about 1/3 black, and it is the 48th richest state (in other words, one of the very poorest). Alabama is the 46th richest state and it is a little over a quarter black. Both states are highly religious, with up to 90% of the population reporting being affiliated with a religion.
In contrast, Vermont is the 21st richest state and it is 1.27% black, and 63% of its people are religiously affiliated (still rather high, actually). Oregon is number 26 in wealth and has 1.9% black people, and 69% religiously-affiliated people. Very similar to Vermont.
So what causes those high crime rates in those two states? It certainly can’t be ascribed to being religious, just from those figures. All was can see are the correlations.
For that matter, we don’t know why black people have higher crime rates, either, although the issue certainly has been studied rather heavily. Some say it’s because the police are bigoted and target black people. Some say it’s poverty. Or family breakdown. Or any number of other things.
I’m not about to be able to answer the question. But I would wager very strongly that the cause is not the higher rate of religious affiliation among black people.
An interesting study would compare, for example, the violent crime rates of religious black people with the violent crime rates of non-religious black people, matched for socio-economic levels and education. Then you’d be getting somewhere, although I doubt you’d get a definitive answer. But the data at least would be more relevant.
Apparently there hasn’t been a ton of previous research on that sort of thing, but here’s an excerpt from a 2014 review of the picture. It seems to support the thesis that religiousness is negatively correlated with violent crime rather than positively correlated with it:
Chamlin and Cochran’s (1995) state-level analysis finds that, among other indicators of the strength of non-economic institutions, state religious participation dampened the criminogenic effect of poverty. Similarly, Jang and Johnson (2001) find that individual religiosity moderates the effect of neighborhood disorder on drug use by augmenting the social control of youth living in disadvantaged and disorganized communities, just as Pearce et al. (2003) observe that personal religiosity reduces the criminogenic effect of exposure to neighborhood violence.
That same article contained new research as well, by doing a county-by-county and race by race comparison of crime rates and religious affiliation rates, with some interesting results [emphasis mine]:
The dependent variables in this study are county-level White, Black, and Latino violent index arrest rates (sum of arrests for homicide, aggravated assault, forcible rape, robbery) averaged across the 1999-2001 period…
We focus on three unique dimensions of the religious contexts in our sample of counties. First, total religious adherence is measured as the proportion of the county’s population that adheres to a religious institution recorded by the RCMS, as indicated by affiliation or regular attendance in a congregation. Second, civically-engaged religious adherence is measured as the proportion of the county’s population that adheres to a religious institution recognized as being more civically-engaged than the national average according to the General Social Survey (see Tolbert et al. 1998; Lee and Bartkowski 2004). Third, religious homogeneity is measured as the relative diversity of the religious adherents within a county…
Additionally, we include four race/ethnic specific disadvantage indicators – poverty, unemployment, education, and female headship – that have emerged as important macro-structural characteristics in criminological theory and prior empirical research…
First, total religious adherence is negatively related to violent crime for Whites and Blacks, net of other key measures. That is, the greater the proportion of a county’s population that is religious, the lower the violent crime rate for Whites and Blacks (we note also that the effect for Latinos is in the expected direction, though not significant at p< .05). However, there are no significant differences across Whites, Blacks, and Latinos in the relationship between total religious adherence and violence. F-tests for differences were all non-significant (p>.10, two tailed), suggesting that religious adherence has roughly equivalent associations with violence across race/ethnic groups.
Second, civically-engaged religious adherence has a statistically significant, negative association with White violent crime (p< .001), but not Black or Latino violent crime…
Third, religious homogeneity is associated with statistically significant reductions in violence for Blacks (p< .05) and Latinos (p<.01), but not Whites. Put another way, Black and Latino violence is lower in counties where adherents belong to similar types of religious institutions…
Fourth, other key macro-structural characteristics, particularly concentrated disadvantage, have the expected criminogenic (positive) association with violence for all three racial and ethnic groups. That is, a greater confluence of poverty, unemployment, female headship, and low education in a county is associated with increased violent crime rates for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. Likewise, racial/ethnic heterogeneity (or the diversity of a county’s population) also has important criminogenic effects for Whites in all three models, but appears to reduce Black violence net of religious contextual characteristics and other key controls.
Much more at the link.
So there you have it. What little data we have seems to indicate the religious affiliation reduces violent crime somewhat. Once again, though, we don’t know whether there is some other variable that differentiates religious people from non-religious people that is really what is influencing the statistic. After all, religiousness is not randomly distributed in the population.
One of the public-policy issues about which no leftists (and very few conservatives as well) are willing to speak truthfully is the extremely high rate of criminal offending among blacks in relation to other groups (not only in this country, either). The empirical evidence supporting this fact (concerning almost every type of criminal activity, but especially violent crime) is massive and cannot reasonably be questioned by anyone who is widely read in matters of criminology, but informed discussion of this topic is rare indeed, even on the right.
Religion or moral philosophy (i.e. behavioral protocol). #PrinciplesMatter
As for atheists, Christians, et al, to each their own faith. With a caveat: be wary of conflating logical domains.
Then there are the ideologies: liberalism (divergent), conservativism (moderation), progressivism (monotonic).
Crime and reasons. #HateLovesAbortion
j e:
That’s because the topic is a minefield, and a poorly understand one as well regarding causes. How does one sort though all the possibilities to isolate out what makes a difference? And how to do this without appearing racist (or even being racist, especially with the newly-expanded definition of the term)?
There is much research on the topic, however. Lots of data and links can be found here.
The debate on the merits of religion is very much affected by diverse underlying concepts of God – Maimonides vs Spinoza, for example.
Principles of right and wrong either resonate within you or they are imposed from outside and you adapt. Whether you are part of an organized religion is at most a secondary factor.
je/Neo–You often see it mentioned that a small percentage of criminals, say, 10%-15%, commit the great majority of crimes.
I have also seen mentioned the suspicion that these “repeat offenders” are actually responsible for many more crimes than the ones they confess to/are found guilty of, because they have gotten away with many of the other crimes they commit.
These other crimes—I’ve seen mentioned estimates of 10, 20, even 30 other crimes per individual–many likely low level ones–things like shoplifting, and other petty theft, vandalism, etc., but also murders —which remain “unsolved,” and are never attributed to them.
If the racial component to crime, and the other two other suppositions I have mentioned above are true, it would seem the me to be the height of good policing to concentrate limited law enforcement resources on those ethnic groups and communities where the likelihood of criminal behavior is higher and, in particular, on that specific 10%-15% percent of criminal “repeat offenders” who are likely responsible for the great majority of crime.
That is where law enforcement’s focus should be.
Of course, such concentration by police on certain ethnic groups, neighborhoods, and individuals is exactly what the Left is protesting against, on the basis that such policies are prejudiced and “unfair.”
I presume that means, to be “fair,” spreading limited, scarce law enforcement resources evenly throughout our ethnic groups and neighborhoods, a la TSA treatment of airline customers.
From the study, ” It is now well known that communities (as well as neighborhoods, counties, and other larger units of analysis) plagued by high levels of disadvantage are typified by higher rates of crime and violence.”
Obviously what these people need is some white privilege.
Ray:
Much like “Climate Change,” there is no problem that white privileged and patriarchy cannot solve.
Neo,
Thanks for expanding on this topic. It’s worthy of much more study.
In the limited case of mass shooters, which is not really related to general criminality, I have a theory that the principal proximate cause of these is a high degree of privacy within the society.
If you look at the prevalence of mass shootings (eliminating cases of pilitical or religious terrorism)
Continued from above. Sorry.
… this is a Northern European and North American phenomenon. It is virtually unknown in Southern Europe and Latin America. Having lived in all of these places, the common denominator is the degree of privacy afforded and permitted socially permitted by the society. Here in the U.S., we are socially inhibited from intervening in other people’s personal lives. In the Hispano-Latin cultures, most people here would find it shocking how intrusive people can be in other’s lives. And, they do not take “Go away!” for an answer. Having lived in those cultures, it would be nearly inconceivable that someone could arrive at that level of desperation and isolation without everyone in the neighborhood knowing about it and working actively to defuse the situation.
As the data evidently exhibits, religious belief has a minimal affect on crime rates. To paraphrase; It’s the culture, stupid.
Geoffrey Britain–But wasn’t–at least up until several decades ago–religion a large component of “culture,” and the further back down the centuries you go, a dominant part of our Western culture?
Culture as concept isn’t all that old. Starts sometime around the early to mid 18th century, then gets a nice polish up from Kant and Co. Who the heck knows with culture though? Vague doesn’t even begin to cover the landscape there.
As I recall, Joseph Campbell said that for human children a semi-workable mythology about the world is as necessary as the marsupial pouch for infant kangaroos.
You can’t just give four year-olds a lecture on postmodernism and expect them to create a fulfilling lives somehow.
In the past this was a function for religion. These days I think modern parents can manage it without religion though it takes work and above-average parents.
Whether religious affiliation is high or low in a community, a subculture, or a nation is not the factor I’m referring to as inversely correlated to anti-social behavior. Many people are “affiliated” with religious institutions who don’t have the slightest shred of a belief that their actions during life will someday, somehow be judged. Members of the Mob, for example, are notorious for their outward affiliation with the Church. Members of Latino and Russian gangs frequently have tattoos of crosses and the Virgin Mary. Tele-evangelists are regularly arrested for sexual or financial misdeeds.
Ray never answered my question, so let me put it in simpler terms: without a belief in a judgmental God, if I don’t think I’ll get caught, or I don’t care if I am caught, why shouldn’t I kill you for your new sneakers?
Ray never answered my question, so let me put it in simpler terms: without a belief in a judgmental God, if I don’t think I’ll get caught, or I don’t care if I am caught, why shouldn’t I kill you for your new sneakers?
Richard Saunders: Jordan Peterson suggests basic ethics are encoded into us via evolution.
A vivid research example he provides is that rats love to play-wrestle. However, the bigger rat will win every time, so unless the big rat lets the small rat win 30% of the time, the small rat will refuse to play.
Obviously rats don’t have an honor code they can articulate. Nor do rats, so far as is known, believe in a judgmental God who will punish them in the hereafter for violating such a code. Yet rats do have a code and you can measure it in their behavior.
I’ve never been impressed with arguments that only belief in a judgmental God can provide moral structure for human beings. IMO religion can reinforce what morals are already there and that’s a good thing, but not the only thing.
Huxley;
You seem to have missed the approach that Jordon Peterson uses for the question of morality; he is looking for answers as a scientist, the tools of science give scientific answers.
SJWs mock him as Mr Lobster for their own “reasons” I don’t mock him.
I’m not impressed that a process dependent on random events lead to where we are today. Because Evolution! Because Progress!
Huxley — then why is mankind’s most widespread and persistent — even to today — governing principle, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must?”
Of course not. I don’t know anyone who believes that. Familial affection, loss of social standing, exclusion from benefits, shame, or physical punishment from other mortals are enough to enforce some workaday rules that develop more or less ad hoc.
Furthermore, some rules limiting exploitation and cheating will have to be enforced or even the most degraded and revolting society – and plenty of them have survived for a time – cannot exist.
But that is not the issue, or what most people mean by “moral” in this kind of discussion. Every accumulation of interacting people on the planet has some kind of mores or customs. Instead, they mean a rule of respect for, or a boundary and limitation that is recognized and applied to all who are classified as men; and a rule which ought to be obeyed even when there is nothing in it for you.
This is a supposed universal morality.
Let’s suppose that we recognize that different cultures have different customs and taboos. Let’s pretend that the Chinese devalue the lives of female infants and see nothing wrong with killing them or leaving them to die on the sidewalk.
Suppose that I, a comfortable Westerner come across that obviously Chinese infant girl who everyone else is willing to let die.
Is there a moral imperative as to what I should do that spans the cultural cases?
If so, what is it and how do you establish it?
https://theothermccain.com/2019/06/30/godless-commies/
An interesting piece to add to the conversation…
John Guilfoyle on June 30, 2019 at 8:10 pm said:
https://theothermccain.com/2019/06/30/godless-commies/
An interesting piece to add to the conversation…
* * *
Interesting indeed.
That last sentence does sound a bit familiar, and it is not limited to “atheists.”
When discussing the value of religion as a moral betterment of society, it is well to consider what principles and attitudes are considered to be part of its doctrines.
Over in the “candidates” thread, I found this link:
Barry Meislin on June 30, 2019 at 9:25 am said:
Speaking of definitions….:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-cold-truth-about-sweden/
* * *
And in that article, I found this observation:
“As the political philosopher Richard Weaver once quipped, the problem with the next generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.”
And that led me to remember this warning:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Ronald Reagan
40th president of US (1911 – 2004)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33739.html
And so, that is the Great Chain of Being Linked.
The reason you should not steal sneakers is because your exp will go into the negative levels, even without a gm god modet banning you for exploits.
Another reason is that you will become noth victim and thief.
Anothet reason is that sometimes your target is a ymar and they can go nuclear, plus they have a host of angels equivalent to yeshua s online heavenly army.
“Godless Commies” is a riff on “an essay by Harry Stein about the continuing relevance of Eugene Lyons’s 1941 book The Red Decade because of its eerie parallels to the Stalinist tendencies of the 21st-century Left.”
The original essay is worth reading in its entirety, and I have excerpted some relevant portions here and on the “candidates” and “SJW” threads from Saturday.
(“Intermezzo” didn’t seem to have much to do with the burden of Stein’s arguments, except insofar as Communists had penetrated the world of entertainment in general.)
https://www.city-journal.org/eugene-lyons-the-red-decade
RTWT
I’m not a believer, nor a disbeliever. We have a choice between equally preposterous alternatives- some intelligent entity built all of this and yet is not directly visible to us, or it all developed by chance. Neither of those seems like a reasonable thing to believe, as far as I’m concerned. What interests me is the idea that is so prevalent among believers, that if one doesn’t believe in God, he doesn’t believe in absolute right and wrong. We’ve all experienced pain and loss, and that seems to me to be all you need to know in order to realize that it’s wrong to inflict these things on others.
Of course not. I don’t know anyone who believes that.
DNW: Richard Saunders seemed to believe that in the comment to which I was responding.
Huxley — then why is mankind’s most widespread and persistent — even to today — governing principle, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must?”
Richard Saunders: That’s not mankind. That’s largely the way biological organisms have functioned since life emerged on the planet four billion plus years ago.
The wonder is that protections have been put in place for the weak long before your judgmental God emerged.
PS. Though not perfect protections. Since perfection seems to be a requirement for conservatives when considering whether humans are capable of functioning beyond “nature red in tooth and claw.”
Huxley:
Mr Strawman askes who are these conservatives you speak of who demand or expect perfection? And this judgmental God, who in your mind (?) is not loving and yet merciful to man? Ah, but Evolution and Progress! 😉
The world can, at times, or perhaps most times, be a chaotic, bewildering, lonely, and frightening place—at one moment, at times full of life, contentment and meaning, and at another moment or time grey, devoid of meaning, at once full of discontent and yet, at the same time, empty—the wind whistling over a cold, wet, grey, and stony moor–and, moreover, things can change in an instant.
I think that most of us, at one time or the other, or perhaps continuously, are searching for good advice, for a guidebook that will point out for us and lead us along the best—however you define “best”—path through life; something that offers us—however briefly and transitory in nature—some connection, contentment/satisfaction, and joy; evidence that we’ve done some things right.
I happen to think that, for our culture here in West, the Bible or the Torah are the best guidebooks, or perhaps one of the the Philosophical systems or outlooks developed by the Greek or Roman philosophers, in the East, it might be the writings of the Buddha, or the Hindu scriptures.
There are of course, other guidebooks—the antitheses of those above—which can be consulted and followed, with far less happy results.
huxley — I guess Thucydides got it all wrong, then. Cortés must have been wrong when he reported the Aztecs were cutting their captives’ hearts out and eating them — they wouldn’t do that, there were protections for the weak, weren’t there? Hobbes, too: “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And William Golding — that “Lord of the Flies” book is completely off the wall!
That’s good to know — now I’ll just breeze off to South Central with $100 bills sticking out of my pockets and know I’ll be perfectly safe.
Mr Strawman askes who are these conservatives you speak of who demand or expect perfection?
Mr Strawman: Most of the conservatives arguing here for humanity’s evil in a earlier topic. As I recall, you were a prominent proponent. Anytime I brought up humanity’s goodness, your response was what about this genocide or that.
Richard Saunders: I’ve read history. Sure, humans commit violence, sometimes absolutely horrific. But that doesn’t cancel out the obvious progress in reducing it. But that doesn’t seem to matter to you.
To answer your earlier point: I’ve been agnostic most of my life. Yet somehow I’ve never had the remotest impulse to kill someone for their sneakers. How to explain?
om & Saunders: How much violence would you allow for humanity, before you would grant humanity’s goodness (with or without a judgmental God)?
My impression is you would require perfection, though perhaps I am mistaken.
If I recall aright, Hobbes points out that the weak can kill the strong while the strong are sleeping. So, more a war of all against all in his telling.
On the other hand both Hobbes and his teacher Thucydides are themselves personally aghast at the injustices they see and recount, nor do either of them live by these precepts imputed to them.
But then where on the green earth did these ideas they each share — of loathing of barbarism and love of justice — come from? What is it, are Thucydides and Hobbes some sort of anomalous human beings?
How do you “know”, and I assume that by “know” you mean possessed of an intellectual conviction, that it is wrong to inflict pain on others because you have experienced it yourself? Perhaps they have inflicted it on those who are important to you, and are disinclined to stop or listen to reason.
Retaliation is one of the oldest laws “on the books”; and it is the threat of it, which probably gives any completely secular system of law its ultimate force.
Perhaps one day, we will be able to stop malefactors by dropping them to the ground, unharmed but in a state of paralysis, and then expel them to some remote from human society place, with a few creature comforts, forever.
But I am willing to bet that some people would think that that is a kind of unjustifiable infliction of “pain” … i.e., throwing the obnoxious back on their own company; forever.
Huxley:
You were taken aback and scandalized that progress and human goodness did not prevent the slaughter of the millions not that long ago. So yes I do not expect perfection or goodness in human nature; empathy, altruism, kindness, love of thy neighbor are not default conditions of human behavior. Sometimes humans are good, but none are perfect, and some human societies are better than others, but generally that is the exception.
huxley on July 2, 2019 at 5:11 pm said:
Re. that last. I think that that is a very dubious proposition Hux.
You’re pretty well read. Can you think of a datable ancient legal code which mandates protection for the weak based on pure sentiment, or a contractual system, or a claim of common identity, or some combination of these, which either predates or does not implicitly or explicitly reference a divine lawgiver as well?
You’ve obviously read Thucydides. Were you ever, ever, able to muster the slightest sympathy, or pity for those dead Athenians?
I’m not sure what moral we are supposed to derive from a war between red and black ants.
Thucydides aims to teach. He says as much, even for all time, he says ( he’s got some big balls, no?).
What? What’s he teaching?
How about this: Democracy stinks as a regime? It’s hubristic and fickle, so gets what’s coming to it.
Hmmm, could be James Madison even learned a thing or two from the great historian.
huxley — “To answer your earlier point: I’ve been agnostic most of my life. Yet somehow I’ve never had the remotest impulse to kill someone for their sneakers. How to explain?”
Because you were brought up in a culture whose rules were based on the Bible and you absorbed them. I could take you a few miles from my house to neighborhoods where they grow up under Thucydides’ rules. You would be very hard pressed to find rules for the protection of the weak there — “Lord of the Flies” country.
“om & Saunders: How much violence would you allow for humanity, before you would grant humanity’s goodness (with or without a judgmental God)?
“My impression is you would require perfection, though perhaps I am mistaken.”
Ani ma’amin: (Traditional)
I believe with perfect certainty that the Messiah will come,
And though he tarries, I will wait for him every day.
Richard Saunders:
Most cultures have a belief in some sort of diety or dieties, but the morality that goes with that varies to a certain degree. However, murder is generally not tolerated, even though it is defined differently (broadly or narrowly) in different cultures.
Cultures where it’s completely dog-eat-dog tend not to survive too long. (Even the Ik—if you’re familiar with the work of Colin Turnbull—were a transitional culture in a state of flux, who said he made them out to be worse than they actually were.)
Which comes first, the religion or the prohibitions and rules? Or do they come together and are linked?
Please also see this for a discussion of related topics.