Does religion have anything to do with social values and the welfare of U. S. citizens?

Geoffrey Stone, Distinguished Professor of Law at University of Chicago, recently did some research on the values and social conditions in the ten most religious states.    

Those states are, in order:   Mississippi, Utah, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Oklahoma.   Here are some of the things Professor Stone found:


Eight of these ten states joined the Confederacy and fought a bloody Civil War to defend the institution of slavery.  [The other two did not become states until much later.]
 
Nine of these ten states still had racially segregated schools at the time of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education;  and five are still among the worst states in the nation in terms of the continuing racial segregation of their public schools.

Eight of these ten states are among the eleven states in the nation with the highest rates of incarceration.  All ten still have the death penalty. 

Seven of these ten states are among the ten states in the nation with the highest percentage of their citizens living under the poverty level. 

Nine of these ten states are among the twenty worst states in the nation in terms of gun deaths per capita.

Nine of these ten states rank in the bottom eighteen states in the nation in per pupil expenditures for public education. 

A majority of these states rank in the lowest groups in five different categories concerning health.

Another link is that all ten states are fervently Republican:   80% of their senators are Republicans, compared to 36% of the remaining forty states.


Professor Stone was not quite sure what to make of all this. Perhaps it just means that people who live in states with bad values are more likely to turn to religion and the Republican party.

I would suggest another explanation.   In all of these states, "religion" means fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity or, in Utah, the Mormon church.    One characteristic of such fundamentalism is the continued literal belief in their religious texts, untouched by modern experience, scholarship, science, or moral philosophy.

Perhaps it is that anti-intellectual, anti-progress, narrow-minded literalism, rather than religion itself, that is the important factor.

Ralph