Religion and Well-Being: Conservatives Have it Backwards
By: James Peron
Tags: Economic Prosperity, Religion, Max Boot, Secularism

Conservative Max Boot is not normally on my reading list. His foreign policy views are far too out of kilter with my own and I generally prefer to read factual pieces rather than opinion pieces. If I wanted unsubstantiated opinion I’d go to Facebook.

But a new piece by Boot in the Washington Post caught my eye because it’s on something I’ve written about frequently and his conclusions are close to identical to my own. Boot looks at the lament of the theocrats around Trump who whine about secularism and how it is destroying America.

Boot says, “This tendentious reading of U.S. history ignores reality. By most metrics, the country is far better off than when [Attorney General] Barr was a boy.”

Of course, the merchants of fear lie about things. And lots of people believe those lies. This fear mongering is meant to stampede the herd in the direction of the extremist pushing it and it isn’t just right wing. I hear whiners such as Elizabeth Warren or the perpetual nasty and angry Bernie Sanders telling their own series of lies. They make up fake data to try to prove we are on the verge of economic disaster, in spite of fewer and fewer people at the bottom of the economic ladder.

The more extreme the politics of someone they more they rely on fear.

The theocrat’s answer is you must embrace their religion and their authoritarian agenda. For the likes of Sanders it’s you must embrace his Marxist substitute for religion and his equally authoritarian agenda. Either way the goal is the same — give them power over other people’s lives so they can force those people to behave in a manner consistent with the faith beliefs of the new ruler.

Boot notes the facts are far different from the fear—they usually are.

Consider some of the improvements since 1960. Real per capita gross domestic product has increased 216 percent, from $18,268 in the first quarter of 1960 to $57,719 in the first quarter of 2019, driven in part by a 230 percent increase in output per hour for non-farm workers as of 2015. The share of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from college has tripled as of 2016. Infant mortality has fallen nearly 80 percent as of 2018. The homicide rate was unchanged as of 2018 — five murders per 100,000 people — but that disguises a vast improvement since the homicide rate peaked at 10.4 per 100,000 in 1980.



The reality is by most metrics life have gotten better for most people. That’s very different than the litany of bad news hyped in the media. But don’t blame the media, they are responding to the viewing preferences of the masochistic public who thrive off bad news. Good news stories may be praised but most viewers or readers want blood, gore, disaster, violence and sex. In other words they want to troll the gutter the way the Daily Mail does. There is a reason the unofficial slogan of reporting was: If it bleeds it ledes*.

I suspect people want to believe the worst because it makes them feel better by comparison.

Boot had his research assistant look up the data for the most religious nations on the planet and compared them to the least religious. Secular nations are better off than religious ones. The results showed:

…the less religious nations are much better off. Average GDP per capita in the least religious countries is more than five times higher, while the unemployment rate is more than twice as low and the poverty rate is one and a half times lower. The homicide rate is five times lower. Life expectancy is 22 percent higher, and infant mortality is 1,000 percent lower — in part because the least religious nations spend 50 percent more per capita on health care. The least religious countries are also better educated, with a mean 12 years of schooling per capita vs. 7½ years in the most religious countries. Income inequality is 24 percent lower in the least religious countries, and gender inequality (as measured by the World Bank) is more than 400 percent lower. Finally, the least religious countries are freer, with an average score of 87.6 from Freedom House, compared to 56.5 for the most religious countries.

I have run similar comparisons in the past for the most religious states in America versus the least religious. The results were the same. With secularism came a decline in crime, greater wealth, and less social dysfunctionality. In 2014, at Huffington Post I used a survey from the evangelical-oriented Barna Group and the American Bible Society regarding the “Bible-mindedness” of 100 U.S. cities.

They used the results to determine the most “Bible-minded” cities and the least. I compared the ten most “Bible-minded” with the ten least. Homicide rates were higher in the “Bible-minded” cities as was rape and burglary. The comparisons of the states showed higher poverty, higher crime, less education, higher teen pregnancy and higher divorce rates in the religious states. All the evils theocrats say religion will ward off are higher the more religious the state.

Boot concluded, “Declining religiosity is not the result of a leftist plot. Capitalism has done more than the Supreme Court to break down traditional beliefs.” I can’t even remember the number of essays I’ve written making that point. Capitalism has changed America for the better, no matter what the panic-politicians of the fringe Right and extreme Left claim. Both are wrong and both threaten that which is best in America.

*Lede: the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.