Is religion killing the U.S. economy?

On Monday, I appeared on public radio’s Word of Mouth program to talk about my article “Satan, the great motivator.” As part of my preparation, I was asked to look at a study arguing that religion actually depresses economic activity in the developed world. Here is a discussion of a counter-argument from an independent researcher, Gregory S. Paul. It boils down to an argument about statistical correlation and actual causation. His actual paper develops what he calls the Successful Societies Scale.

My initial reaction was that Paul’s argument told us what we already expected: religion may catalyze economic growth, but as societies succeed economically, they secularize and become less religious. In fact, Paul thinks religion doesn’t help economies at all.

In writing my piece, I talked with several critics of the statistics used to justify the assertion about afterlife beliefs and economics. None of them thought the underlying premise was wrong, at least for developing countries. Paul does, though he says you can’t apply his scale to developing nations, in part because they don’t keep good statistics.
Perhaps his scale will hold up, but I doubt it. His paper was peer-reviewed yet rife with minor errors, starting with this one in the abstract: “The nonuniversality of strong religious devotion, and the ease with [sic] large populations abandon serious theism when conditions are sufficiently benign….”He repeatedly refers to the sociologist Robert Putnam as “Putman.” At one point, he cites religion as the cause of death for 50 billion children, a statistical impossibility.

Missing words, errors of grammar and blatant typos do not by themselves discredit his scale, though they raise obvious questions about the quality of the journal that published him, Evolutionary Psychology.

My bigger concern stems from his approach. He drops academic phrases ad nauseam, but does not write with academic distance. He often makes loaded comments, like referring to conservative religious practices as pathological. It is no surprise when his Successful Societies Scale shows the U.S. ranks dead last among developed nations in a number of categories. He blames this on America’s status as the only developed nation with significant levels of religious practice. Perhaps he is correct. But he sounds like a man with an ax to grind, which makes his scale look like a whetting stone.