The Societies That Were Supposed to Fail

The claim gets stated from pulpits and from podiums and it is not hedged. Take religion out of a society and the society comes apart. Crime climbs. Families dissolve. People stop having children and stop caring what happens after they are gone. Whatever else that is, it is a prediction that names outcomes governments count.

Several countries have met the conditions. Nobody designed the experiment.

Under the prediction, a population that stops attending, stops believing and stops raising its children in the faith should show the damage inside a generation. Violence up, trust down, the ordinary machinery of a society grinding. The least religious places on earth should be the hardest places to live, and the gap should not be subtle, because the claim is not made subtly.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czechia and Japan hold some of the least religious populations ever surveyed. They are also among the safest countries in the world by the measure hardest to fudge. Japan records well under one homicide per hundred thousand people a year. The United States, where affiliation and attendance run several times higher, records an order of magnitude more. The pattern holds inside the United States as well. Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama sit near the top of every survey of religious commitment and near the top of the homicide tables. Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine sit near the bottom of both.

The standard reply is that the comparison is confounded, and it is. Those countries are wealthy, equal, policed by consent and covered by health systems that catch people before they fall far. Causation may run the other way entirely. Populations may drop religious observance because they already feel secure rather than becoming secure after dropping it. Every one of those objections is sound.

Notice what granting them costs. If wealth, equality and provision explain the outcomes, then social order is tracking material conditions rather than belief, which is the position the prediction was made against. The concession cannot be applied in one direction only. A reply that hands the good outcomes to policy and medicine has given up the claim that belief was holding the society together anywhere.

None of this shows religion to be harmful, and none of it shows a society better off for losing it. The countries above kept a great deal of their religious inheritance in law, in calendar and in habit, and what a population reports on a survey is a thin measure of what it practises. What the record rules out is narrower. The specific prediction is that a society which stops believing stops functioning. It has been checked where the conditions were right and the collapse has not arrived.

There is a test in this and it needs a search engine. Take the claim in the form it is made locally and find the country it names as the warning. Then find that country's homicide rate, its life expectancy and the age of its democracy. If the warning is about a place that is doing well, the claim was never reading the numbers.