Are Religious Countries Better Off?

Studies of individuals agree on the direction: religiosity goes with less crime. Baier and Wright’s meta-analysis (2001, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency) pooled 60 studies. Their own summary is that religious beliefs and behaviors exert a moderate deterrent effect on individuals’ criminal behavior. As the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel reports their figures, the meta-analysis had 79 effect sizes, with a mean of r = −0.12 (standard deviation 0.09), and not one was positive.

A later meta-analysis by Kelly, Polanin, Jang, and Johnson (2015, Criminal Justice Review) covered 62 studies and 193,656 adolescents. It found correlations of r = −0.16 to −0.22 between religiosity or church attendance and alcohol use, illicit drug use or other delinquency. Correlations of −0.12 to −0.22 explain 1–5% of the variation.

Both meta-analyses assume the relationship is linear. Jan-Philip Steinmann and Miriam Kiene (Justice Quarterly, 2026) drew on six surveys of more than 45,000 adolescents in Germany between 2013 and 2024. They tested whether religiosity goes with less violence only up to a moderate level, after which the link reverses. They report such a curved relationship for violent offending. Steinmann and Kiene’s study covers one country, one age band, and self-reported offending, so the direction is established but the shape is not.

Rodney Stark’s “moral communities” hypothesis (1982; elaborated 1996) holds that religion deters crime most where collective religious commitment is high. He compared Provo, Utah, where most people were Mormons, with Seattle, which had one of the lowest church-membership rates in the United States. In Provo, the correlation between boys’ church attendance and their self-reported delinquency was gamma = −0.45, against −0.13 in Seattle. Gamma measures how strongly ranked answers go together, from −1 to 1. A negative value means boys who went to church more often reported less delinquency.

A 2012 test on geocoded General Social Survey data found no support for that community effect for any form of deviance examined. Among 1,362 previously incarcerated people, though, county-level religious adherence went with lower recidivism (Stansfield and Mowen, 2019). A person’s own religious involvement in prison did not, over longer periods after release.

At the societal level, the pattern among individuals flips. Gregory Paul (2005, Journal of Religion and Society) compared 17 prosperous democracies. He found the United States, the most religious of them, was the only one that kept high homicide rates. The least religious, such as Japan, France and the Scandinavian countries, did best on lethal crime, deaths of children and young adults, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and abortion. He used scatter diagrams and bivariate correlations with no controls.

R. Georges Delamontagne redid the exercise in 2010 (Evolutionary Psychology) across the fifty states plus the District of Columbia, using multiple regression. His results were only minimally supportive of Paul’s hypotheses: education, income and race had more substantial explanatory power. He put the American mix of high religiosity and high dysfunction down to the country’s high social inequality.

Heaton (2006, Journal of Law and Economics) found that the usual link between county-level religious membership and lower crime went negligible once he allowed for crime affecting religious participation. To do so, he predicted each county’s current participation from its religiosity in the past. He found that the arrow also runs the other way, from crime to religious participation.

Large American surveys agree that religious people give more. Arthur Brooks (Policy Review, 2003) used the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey of 2000. He counts as religious those who attend services every week or more, 33% of his sample. He counts as secular those who attend less than a few times a year or say they have no religion, 26%. The 41% in between are left out.

Brooks found that religious people were 25 percentage points more likely than secular people to donate money, 91% against 66%. Religious people gave $2,210 a year on average, secular people $642.

The averages include gifts to the donor’s own congregation. With political views, income, education, age and race held equal, Brooks puts the gap at $1,388 a year. For non-religious causes alone, 71% of religious people gave, against 61% of secular people.

Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study (2016) counts as highly religious those who pray daily and attend services weekly. Of these adults, 65% had given money, time or goods to help the poor in the past week, against 41% of other adults. Also, 45% had volunteered in the past week, against 28%. Pew’s volunteering gap comes mainly from church volunteering: 23% of the highly religious volunteered mainly through a church or other religious organisation, against 4% of everyone else.

Most of what congregations receive pays for the congregation itself. In the National Study of Congregations’ Economic Practices (Lake Institute on Faith & Giving, 2019), a survey of 1,231 American congregations, personnel and facilities took nearly three-quarters of the average budget. Mission, service and charity, at home and abroad, took 11%, and the study counts them together, so it does not say how much of that is charity.

Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace (2010) rests on the 2006 Faith Matters Survey of about 3,100 American adults. It confirmed that religious Americans gave and volunteered more, for secular causes as well as religious ones. But tracing 25 religious beliefs, the authors found no evidence that any explained the gap, as Campbell told a Pew Research Center forum in 2010. What predicted it was having friends in one’s congregation, which Putnam called “supercharged friends”. He said he did not know what it is about religious groups that makes the difference.

Li, Stampfer, Williams and VanderWeele (2016, JAMA Internal Medicine) found that attending services more than once a week was associated with 33% lower all-cause mortality than never attending. They followed 74,534 women in the Nurses’ Health Study from 1996 to 2012. The hazard ratio was 0.67 (95% confidence interval 0.62–0.71).

The association rises with frequency: 13% lower for less than weekly, 26% for weekly, 33% for more than weekly. Over the sixteen years, women who attended once a week or more lived on average about five months (0.43 years) longer, though that estimate’s confidence interval includes no difference.

VanderWeele, Li, Tsai and Kawachi (2016, JAMA Psychiatry) followed 89,708 women from 1996 to 2010. They found attendance once a week or more associated with an “approximately five-fold lower rate of suicide” than never attending. The hazard ratio was 0.16 (95% confidence interval 0.06–0.46). That result rests on only 36 suicides in the whole cohort, which is why the interval is wide. The cohort is female nurses, predominantly white and Christian.

If you are thinking about suicide, or are worried about someone who is, How to Help Someone With Depression lists helplines for several countries.

A meta-analysis by Yaden et al. (2022, Journal of Happiness Studies) covered 256 effect sizes and 666,085 people. It found an overall correlation of r = 0.18 between religion or spirituality and life satisfaction. But religious attendance, the measure closest to congregational life, gave the smallest, r = 0.11.

First, Garssen, Visser and Pool (2021, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion) pooled 48 longitudinal studies across 59 independent samples. They got r = 0.08 between religion or spirituality and mental health, with a confidence interval of 0.06 to 0.10, a small effect measured precisely. Religion and spirituality “might not have a substantial effect on mental health”, they write. Harold Koenig and colleagues disputed this conclusion in a published commentary. Gabriele Prati’s 2024 study of 8,146 adults in Germany, followed over nine years, found “almost no evidence” that changes in religion predicted later changes in mental health.

Second, people who attend services may differ from those who do not in personality, health behaviors or social support, in ways that could produce some of the health gains themselves. Li and colleagues adjusted for many such factors but say their results “may still be subject to unmeasured confounders and residual confounding”.

David Campbell, co-author of American Grace, summed up the Faith Matters Survey’s findings: religious Americans were “for the most part, better citizens and neighbors than their more secular counterparts”. Campbell also described them as more likely to volunteer, to give to charity and to help their neighbors informally.

General Social Survey data analysed by Valente and Okulicz-Kozaryn (2021, Review of Religious Research) shows a split. Social religiosity (attendance, church membership) predicts more trust and less misanthropy. But individual religiosity (prayer, closeness to God, belief in God) predicts lower trust and more misanthropy.

A later study by Valente and Ryan Smith (2023, Religions), on General Social Survey data for 2000 to 2018, found that the pattern differs by race. Black and Latino weekly attenders show more misanthropy than white weekly attenders, and white Americans who attend more often show less. Belonging thus goes with more trust, at least for white Americans, while private belief went with less in the 2021 study.

Experiments find in-group favouritism, but not only among the religious. Hallin, Moche, Andersson and Västfjäll (2024, Judgment and Decision Making) ran three dictator-game studies with hypothetical money (N = 1,719, in the USA, Sweden, Egypt and Lebanon). In a dictator game, one player decides alone how to split a sum of money between themselves and others. They found religious participants more generous than non-religious ones only when the recipients’ religion was visible. All three groups, Christians, Muslims and atheists, gave more to their own.

Two earlier online experiments with American participants (Everett, Haque and Rand, 2016) found no convincing evidence that the religious favoured their own group. Christians gave more than atheists to Christian and atheist partners alike, and in the dictator game it was the atheists who favoured their own group.

Across countries the pattern runs the other way from the pattern among individuals, in which people who attend services do somewhat better on crime, giving and health. Gallup’s 2009 surveys covered 114 countries. The median share of adults saying religion is an important part of their daily lives was 95% in the poorest countries and 47% in the richest. The poorest are those with average incomes per person of $2,000 or less, the richest those above $25,000.

Across American states, too, religiosity goes with a lower Human Development Index. Harry Roy, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, set Gallup’s 2009 religiosity figures for the fifty states against each state’s Human Development Index. His analysis found a correlation of r = −0.669, the more religious states scoring lower. It is a blog analysis, published by the biologist Jerry Coyne in 2012, not a peer-reviewed study.

Gallup describes the United States as one of the rich countries that buck the trend for richer countries to be less religious. In 2009 only Italy, Greece, Singapore and the Gulf states among high-income countries had a larger share saying religion was important.

American outcomes lag on several measures. The American homicide rate was 5.8 per 100,000 people in 2023 on World Bank and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime figures, against 0.8 for Denmark. US life expectancy reached 79.0 years in 2024, the highest on record. That year the average for eleven comparable wealthy countries was 82.7. The gap has narrowed from 4.1 years in 2023 to 3.7.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s Sacred and Secular (Cambridge University Press, 2004) argues that religion fades as existential security grows. Development and welfare safety nets reduce the threats to survival, and “this enhanced sense of security lessens the need for the reassurance religion provides”. The book draws on World Values Survey data from scores of societies.

Frederick Solt (2014), analysing attendance at religious services in more than thirty countries over half a century, found that rising income inequality is “soon followed by rising levels of religiosity”. His explanation differs: inequality draws the wealthy to religion and gives them more power to shape what others believe. But the order is the same, with inequality first and religiosity after.

Across countries the correlation is strong: students in more religious countries perform lower in science and mathematics. Stoet and Geary (2017, Intelligence) used scores from two international tests, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). They set the scores against religiosity measured by the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey. They found correlations of r = −0.65 to −0.74. In their analysis, human development and the time spent on religious education appear to account for the relation.

Rachmatullah, Ha and Park (2019, South African Journal of Education) studied 68 countries. They found an education–religiosity correlation of −0.793 that falls only to −0.701 with socioeconomic status controlled. The religiosity–socioeconomic correlation, though, collapses from −0.532 to a non-significant −0.142 when education is controlled.

Among individuals the link is much weaker. In Zuckerman, Silberman and Hall’s meta-analysis of 63 studies (2013), intelligence and the strength of religious belief correlated at r = −0.20 to −0.25 among college students and the general population. The link was weaker among younger participants.

Dürlinger and Pietschnig’s larger update (2022) covered 89 studies and 201,457 participants. It found r = −0.14, which they describe as small but robust. Either way these effects explain between 2% and 6% of variance.

Within the United States, religiosity often predicts better academic outcomes. Horwitz, Domingue and Harris (2020, Social Science Research) compared siblings in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a comparison that holds family background constant. They found the more religious sibling earned a higher high school grade point average and completed more years of education fourteen years later.

Meisenberg, Rindermann, Patel and Woodley of Menie (2012) worked from World Values Survey responses from 345,743 people in 96 countries. They describe a weak negative relationship between education and religiosity among individuals that is culturally amplified into far larger differences between countries. Within countries the partial correlation between education and religious belief is negative in 70 countries, positive in 25 and zero in one. In sub-Saharan Africa it is more often positive than negative.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level (2009) documented that 11 categories of health and social problems are significantly worse in more unequal developed countries.

Gill and Lundsgaarde (2004, Rationality and Society) found a strong negative relationship between welfare spending and religious participation after controlling for other aspects of modernization. Their explanation is that churches have long provided welfare, so as governments take it over, people who sought it from churches attend less.

Self-reported attendance in the United States is also inflated. Hadaway, Marler and Chaves (1993, American Sociological Review) estimated actual church attendance at roughly half of reported levels. Brenner (2011) compared survey answers with time diaries in 14 countries over four decades. He found American overreporting consistently extreme, while outside North America the two measures largely agree.

No. Religious countries are not better off. The poorest countries are the most religious. The more religious a country, the lower it tends to rank on human development and in international science and mathematics tests. The United States, one of the most religious rich countries, has more homicide and shorter lives than its peers.

Two findings decide what that means. Where researchers add controls, the link between religiosity and poor outcomes largely gives way to education, income and inequality. Where they look at timing, insecurity and inequality come first and religiosity follows.

That does not make religion harmful to the people who practise it. Religious Americans give more, commit somewhat less crime and, in one large study of nurses, died less often. A meta-analysis, though, found the mortality benefits of non-religious social participation not significantly different from those of religious participation.

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