One of the often-quoted fundamentalist Christian diatribes is that the United States needs Christianity in order to improve the moral fiber of the country.  Presumably if more of the country were Christian, there would be less crime and other social ills.

The absurdity of this claim can be pointed out by looking up the crime statistics by state for the United States. A good place to find these statistics is the United States Census Bureau’s website at

http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html

Note that, on average, the states with the highest rate of crime per capita are also the states within the Bible Belt. So Christianity does nothing to help reduce the rate of violent crimes in the United States, even in the states with the most Christians per capita.

According to the Pew Forum’s Religion in Prisons: A 50 State Survey of Prison Chaplains:

“On average, chaplains say that about 11% of the inmate population is atheist, agnostic or has no particular religious affiliation. The median estimate of inmates with no religious preference is 5%. By comparison, in the U.S. public as a whole, half (50%) of adults identify as Protestants and about a quarter (23%) are Catholics. About one-in-five adults (19%) are religiously unaffiliated (describing their religion as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”).”

In other words, while 19% of the American public is atheist, agnostic, or ‘nothing in particular,’ only 11% of the prison population is identified as such. So there are more theists in prison per capita than there are theists in the general population. In short, Christianity does little or nothing to prevent people from becoming criminals.

There is another interesting property of the Bible Belt. A look at Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores by state demonstrates which states are lagging behind others in terms of SAT performance. While SAT scores are not intelligence tests, they are correlationally linked to intelligence and are used to predict a student’s success in college. SAT scores by state can be found at

http://testprep.about.com/od/satscores/l/bl_SAT_Scores_By_State.htm.

The states with the worst SAT scores are almost invariably the Bible Belt states. It can therefore be inferred that states that are more likely to have strong Christian spiritual beliefs are also states where less intelligent people live. In 2005, Gregory Paul released his study, Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look. This study looked at a wide variety of social problems in developed nations with high degrees of religiosity and with lower degrees of religiosity. What Paul discovered is that countries with higher degrees of religiosity had higher degrees of social problems across the board. Some of these social problems included higher rates of homicide and other violent crimes, higher rates of teen pregnancy, higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and higher rates of suicide.

While correlation does not prove causality, it is interesting that such a correlation exists. Obviously, those who claim that Christianity is good for America mean that it is only good if you want America to be a land of ignorant criminals.