To the church, he’s public enemy No. 1

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

The paper carries the daunting title “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.” The writing is appropriately dry, but it is dry like tinder is dry, and when it was discovered, the tinder was set alight. Now it is burning hot under the skin of Christian believers and thinkers.

This is what it finds:

“In general, 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. ... The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly.”

And with that, its author, paleontologist Gregory Paul of Baltimore, joined the Antichrist of the Month Club.

In the lions’ den
There is a large and robust Christian constituency in the world of Weblogs, and they put Paul on the rack:

• “This intellectually lazy, communist, radical, 1960’s leftover freakoid is doing his fake research at your expense ...”
• “... completely biased and evidently untrained in proper research techniques.”
• “... incompetent to the point of fraud.”

More mainstream religious leaders and thinkers also weighed in.

MSNBC TV VIDEO Dec. 16: Alex Johnson of MSNBC.com explains that the study shows only a correlation between religious faith and social pathologies, not that religion necessarily causes the problems. He speaks with MSNBC’s Alex Witt. MSNBC

The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., wrote in his Web journal: “Here’s how to stack a deck for a false argument. Collect unrelated statistics and pass them off as proving causation.” The Canadian affiliate of Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based evangelical ministry that is highly influential in religious conservative politics, complained that Paul’s numbers did not “measure up with reality.”

And most significantly, George H. Gallup Jr. — of the Gallup Poll — concluded that “it is important to challenge Paul’s assertion forthrightly, because the casual, non-research-minded reader might easily accept his conclusion as entirely plausible on the face of it.”

To which Paul says: “I knew it was going to happen. If I lived in France and published something like this, nobody would care. I live in the United States. I knew this was going to happen.”

Be careful what you read
Much of the criticism stems from the newspaper article that brought Paul’s paper to public attention. Published in September by The Times of London, it reported: “Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.”

Paul was quickly skewered for mixing up correlation and causation. Just because the United States has the highest rate of religious faith and the highest crime rate doesn’t mean religion causes crime.

In fact, Paul’s paper — published in The Journal of Religion and Society by Creighton University, a Jesuit college in Omaha, Neb. — explicitly states that it “is not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health.” But that disclaimer was ignored in the Times report.

In all the confusion over what Paul said or didn’t say, his real contention is often missed. He explained that his research wasn’t really about the United States; it was about the other well-off Western democracies where religious belief is comparatively low. He wanted to examine the idea that a “secularized” society would do worse than a faithful society, which he called “a common theme of many religious people — not all of them, but many.”

“What my study shows is that’s simply not true,” Paul said in an interview.

“In Western society, there are many, many secularized nations that are performing quite well socially. So that’s the main conclusion,” he said. “What I’ve done is I’ve falsified what I call the creationist social hypothesis, and I’ve done that forever. You can never make the claim again that it’s impossible to have a society that’s non-religious that does well.”

What does the paper really show?
Critics who have studied his paper argue that Paul is being too cute by half. MSNBC.com asked statistical and assessment experts to review Paul’s methodology, and while they largely concluded that the study was sound, some said his critics have a point.

Any statistician or social scientist will tell you that showing a correlation between two facts doesn’t mean much. If you like, you can also show a correlation between Paul’s indicators and time zones (the United States spans more than any other nation studied) or the number of McDonald’s restaurants or the number of national leaders named Bush.

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