Morality & Politics

Atheist Morality: Crime and Divorce

Last and certainly least, we come to the fundamentalists' claim that secularism is responsible for all of society's ills, particularly the high divorce rate and rising youth crime rates. As the religious bigots say, today's youth don't go to church so they don't respect law and order, and marriage is weak unless it is strengthened by mutual faith in God. Perhaps it would be best to discuss each claim separately:

Youth crime: The problem of youth crime is a difficult one, and psychologists have proposed any of a huge number of contributing factors. These would include parents spending too much time at work, lenient legal systems, the glorification of the criminal sub-culture in television and movies, etc. But why think about all that complicated stuff when we can just pick a convenient scapegoat and blame the atheists, eh? That kind of thinking is oversimplistic and can be self-defeating. Since Christian fundamentalism has actually been on the rise in America since the 1970's, one could just as easily correlate that with the crime rate. Moreover, since atheist youths are no more likely to commit crimes than Christian youths, one can only imagine that the connection between atheism and youth crime is the result of recreational drug use or an active fantasy life, rather than any sort of rational thought process.

"Christ called as his Apostles only men. He did this in a totally free and sovereign way."- Pope John Paul II, September 25, 1988 (sadly, he's correct; Jesus treated women, not to mention non-Israelite races, the same way people treat their canine pets; with love but not equality)

And what about violent crime? Do we need the threat of a Supreme Being in order to cow us into civilized behaviour and prevent violence? That's doubtful, to say the least. If atheism allows violent tendencies to run amok, then why does Japan (the most atheistic nation in the G-7) have its lowest murder rate while the United States (the most Christian nation in the G-7) has its highest? Japan used to have much stronger religious faith, and a state religion; were they even more pacifistic back then? Hardly. In fact, Japan was remarkably aggressive and militaristic when "Shinto" was at its peak, and during WW2, its Emperor was regarded as a God. And what about America? Does atheism correlate to violent crime in America? If so, then why does Louisiana, with America's highest church attendance rate, have twice the national average murder rate? Why is the same true for Texas? If atheism causes violence, why are right-wing fundamentalists unable to find a shred of statistical evidence to back that claim up? It would be unfair to use these statistics to claim that christianity causes violence (cause and correlation being entirely separate concepts), but one could certainly say that there is no truth to the fundamentalist lie that atheism causes violence.

Divorce rate: Is marriage strengthened by mutual faith in God? Are marriages weak without religion? The Barna Research Group conducted a poll of Americans in 1999 in an attempt to show that religious faith reduces the likelihood of divorce. The results shocked them: Atheists had the lowest average divorce rates (defined as the percentage of people who had been divorced at least once in their lives), at 21%. Christian divorce rates averaged about 24% (higher for "born-again" Christians, ie- fundamentalists, at 27%), and even higher for Jews, at 30%. They also collected racial and geographical data, which showed that the white Southern Baptist fundamentalists have no reason to crow about their "family values". Not only did the Southern Bible Belt have the highest divorce rate in the country, but whites as a race are the most likely to split: 27%, as compared to 22% for blacks, 20% for Hispanics, and only 8% for Asians like me (and you thought I was just blowing hot air about that "till death do us part" stuff). UPDATE: interestingly enough, Barna Research later edited that article to lump all "non-born-again adults" into a single category, thus "accidentally" obscuring the embarrassing fact that atheists had the lowest divorce rates.

"As important as the father is in the life of a child, even he must take second place to mother during the first three years of life ... Consequently, mothers actually have more to do with producing a predisposition toward homosexuality than fathers. Two kinds of mothers are particularly harmful -- smother mothers and dominating mothers."- Rev. Tim LaHaye, cofounder of the Moral Majority (and fundamentalists can't understand their high divorce rate)

How can this be? Anti-atheists expressed shock at the figures but offered no real explanation (their usual charges of secular lies were useless since Barna is a Christian marketing research company which aggressively promotes Christianity). George Barna himself admitted that they have never been able to find significant differences in moral behaviour between theists and non-theists despite numerous efforts (which says something about their agenda, since they've obviously been trying to produce statistical support for anti-atheist bigotry), except for this shocker. He stood by his study, saying that the Church needs to do more to strengthen the family (even though the Bible itself is rather dismissive of family loyalty, with Abraham being praised for his willingness to kill his own son, and Jesus ignoring his mother and brothers because his apostles were his new family). David Popenoe at Rutgers University greeted the data with disbelief, spluttering that Christian marriages are based on a bond that "the secular world doesn't have," but he's simply wrong (not to mention bigoted; does he think secular marriage is invalid?). The secular world does have such a bond; it is a bond between a man and a woman, without a third seat for God. Many atheists have suggested that high Christian and Jewish divorce rates are due to the inequities of the patriarchal family models that are favoured by fundamentalists of both faiths (although this explanation is far from conclusive, it would help explain why the Christian fundamentalist divorce rate is higher than the general Christian divorce rate). Sexual equality, after all, is a modern humanist idea that has no support in the Bible. Another potential culprit is sexual repression, since a healthy sex life is a key component to a healthy marriage. But whatever the root causes, atheists are actually less likely to divorce than Christians. So much for the idea that atheism leads to divorce!

Are atheists responsible for rising crime and divorce rates? It sure doesn't seem that way. It sounds more like fundamentalists have a knee-jerk reflex to blame atheists for everything that they don't like in society. However, that is nothing new; fundamentalists have always demonized every group that didn't agree with them.

Continue to 8. Conclusion

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