Abstract
The view that religion, as a source of moral guidance and social support, can function to prevent or protect individuals, especially children and adolescents, from a range of deviant and delinquent behaviors is largely (but not completely) born out in the literature. In nations with strong religious identities such as the USA, there is a normative expectation that adolescents who identify with religion are less likely to engage in deviant behavior than those who claim no religion. The present study explores this issue using data from over 10,000 American middle school and high school youth to examine the relationship between religion, nonreligion, and various forms of deviance. Results indicate that youth who identify with a religious (rather than nonreligious) label are not less likely to be involved in deviant acts after controlling for protective factors. The effects from some of these protective factors are significant and stronger than the effects from religion.
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Notes
The responses available for the first four indicators were: most of the time, often, some of the time, not often, and never. The responses for the other four indicators were: never, before but not in past year, a few times in past year, once or twice a month, once or twice a week, and almost every day. These responses were reverse-coded for the first six questions listed above so that higher values corresponded to a stronger parental relationship for all indicators.
Religiosity is a more complex issue than we can account for here. For the purpose of the present analysis, we are largely conceptualizing it in terms of religious identification and frequency of religious activity, as measured by church attendance. We do not presume that faith, specific beliefs, or other cognitive dimensions of religiosity are captured by this measure.
Although there is a significant relationship between religious identification and attending worship services, the effect is by no means absolute. In eighth grade, for example, 33% of students identifying as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise without a religion reported at least occasionally attending worship. Thus, although these variables are related, they measure different concepts (belief vs. actions, for one) and provide different data. Collinearity statistics for the regression models indicate only trivial overlap.
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Acknowledgements
The data used in this research were collected by the University of Delaware Center for Drug and Health Studies as part of a study supported by the Delaware Health Fund and by the Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health, Delaware Health and Social Services. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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DeCamp, W., Smith, J.M. Religion, Nonreligion, and Deviance: Comparing Faith’s and Family’s Relative Strength in Promoting Social Conformity. J Relig Health 58, 206–220 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-018-0630-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-018-0630-2