>Have you read the source article? It is essentially about societal dysfunction in the USA correlated with religiosity, with the USA having the greatest wealth, greatest religious belief according to surveys, and greatest dysfunction indices in the First world. The comparison is with more secular places such as Scandinavia, France and Japan.

That's a good summary of the article.

>3rd World/Eastern Bloc countries are not included in the comparisons because of lack of survey evidence. Which is unfortunate, since we can both think of secular states with extremely high societal dysfunction.

It would be good to have included China, India, Russia etc - and I believe some statistics would now be available for Russia and other transitional countries for both now and few decades ago. Too bad that the study remained entrenched in the Western cultural circle. I agree the results would be interesting.

I can't claim to be any expert on the matter - even on this same subject within my own country. I remember the seventies and eighties as peaceful, with religion on the margins and low crime rate. Now the low crime rate came probably from two reasons: standard of living was permanently on the rise, and the police was doing their job well, specially with the early retirement of the uneducated guys they had in the forties and fifties.

With the dismantling of socialism we got a high crime rate and high visibility of the church, though I think it's unrelated. The rise of the crime came first from the huge unemployment, hopelessness, and the connections of the post-socialist regime with the organized crime. There are still a few dozen unsolved political assasinations from the nineties, plus rivaling gang shootouts. And the retired "liberators" from the wars knowing how to do only one thing well.

Nowadays I'm seeing in the news from home that the church has become very influental, politically, and many of the people I knew have become religious (my doubts to their sincerity at that). Can't judge the crime rate now, haven't seen any recent statistics there, I only know there's more narcotics on the streets than ever. And few more of the people we know have got divorced meanwhile.

>The author's conclusion is that more research is needed. I'd agree with that- especially since I can think of several other possible correlations, such as size of military which has an extremely strong correlation with societal dysfunction. Obviously that doesn't appear in a Journal entitled "Journal of Religion and Society". ;-) If we look for a causative link, lets not forget the "Chicken and Egg" scenario- is US religious fervor a response to societal dysfunction, or vice versa?

I'd like to see that unearthed as well. From what I think I know of US history (which is often hard to discern from what Hollywood said about it), there were several major players among the early settlers - the entrepreneurial (including any sort of economical migrants), the religious (various religious communities which left Europe to build their utopiae in the new land, plus missions from many churches) and the criminal (adventurers, inmates on the run, exiles etc). At some point we have the confluence of Wild West, religious communities, new business on the rise, and the political elite trying to make a new republic out of it all. And let's not forget the British rule, which helped put rifles in many hands.

I figure trying out to track the history of influences would be a huge task for historians and sociologists, and maybe some of that is already done, and maybe some of that could solve the chicken/egg dilemma. My take is that some settlers brought the chicken, and some brought the eggs - so, both were there from the outset. And it could be that these phenomena are somehow feeding on each other.