Water is wet, the sky is blue...

...Belief in hell, according to international data, is associated with reduced crime.

The study, appearing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, found that criminal activity is higher in societies where people's religious beliefs contain a strong punitive component than in places where religious beliefs are more benevolent. A country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell, for example, is likely to have a much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal. The finding surfaced from a comprehensive analysis of 26 years of data involving 143,197 people in 67 countries.

"The key finding is that, controlling for each other, a nation's rate of belief in hell predicts lower crime rates, but the nation's rate of belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates, and these are strong effects," said Azim F. Shariff, professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Morality Lab at the UO. "I think it's an important clue about the differential effects of supernatural punishment and supernatural benevolence. The finding is consistent with controlled research we've done in the lab, but here shows a powerful 'real world' effect on something that really affects people -- crime."

Last year, in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Shariff reported that undergraduate students were more likely to cheat when they believe in a forgiving God than a punishing God.

Religious belief generally has been viewed as "a monolithic construct," Shariff said. "Once you split religion into different constructs, you begin to see different relationships. In this study, we found two differences that go in opposite directions. If you look at overall religious belief, these separate directions are washed out and you don't see anything. There's no hint of a relationship."

The new findings, he added, fit into a growing body of evidence that supernatural punishment had emerged as a very effective cultural innovation to get people to act more ethically with each other. In 2003, he said, Harvard University researchers Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary had found that gross domestic product was higher in developed countries when people believed in hell more than they did in heaven.

Apparently, water is wet, the sky is blue, and ...

a belief in Hell promotes good behavior.

Ignatius Insights reports:

In experiments involving 100 students at UBC, the researchers found that a belief in God doesn’t deter a person from cheating on a test, unless that God is seen as mean and punishing.


Students who believed in a caring, forgiving God were more likely to cheat — as likely, in fact, as students who professed no belief in God.

“When you look at the division between nonbelievers and believers, there was no difference in cheating,” Shariff said. “It doesn’t matter so much whether you believe in God, but what God you believe in.”

Shariff said he wasn’t necessarily surprised that students who believe in a punitive God would be less likely to cheat. That’s consistent with a “supernatural punishment hypothesis” that has long recognized that societies can “outsource” the time-consuming task of promoting moral behavior to a supernatural agent, he said.

“Rulers have known for a long time that God is an incredibly effective way of keeping people in line,” he said.

Shariff said he was more surprised that students who believe in a forgiving God were more likely to cheat.

“It almost gives people license to act in an immoral way because they have a supernatural agent who will forgive them regardless of what they do,” he said. “They’ll think, ‘It’s OK to do this because I won’t be judged too harshly because my God is a forgiving God.’ ”

And:

Without having seen the study, it sounds as if students had to choose between polar opposites that are, from the standpoint of orthodox Christian theology, quite misleading and misrepresentative. Further, it sounds as if the notion of "loving" in the study equates, at least in the minds of many of the students, to "letting me get away with cheating", or at least "will forgive me for cheating without asking for anything in return". That, needless to say, isn't a loving God, but a Dr. Spock-inspired, coddling, spineless enabler. And, on the other end, the belief that punishment is somehow part and parcel of being "mean-spirited" is equally misguided. After all, how many of the students, I wonder, believe that criminals should get away with, say, murder, rape, or molestation without being punished in some way?


A basic problem is that "love" is too often divorced from a sentiment-free view of reality that is rooted in the belief of an objective, moral order. If no such moral order really exists, then "love" simply becomes a matter of sliding-scale sentiment, in which one's subjective affections become the arbitrary and voluntaristic basis for relationships, order, and community. Not surprisingly, when people adopt this basic perspective, they read it back into their notion of God. Of course, as Benedict XVI pointed out in his Regensburg address, it was a voluntaristic understanding of God that led, step by logical step, to a relativizing of morality and the creation of a false love severed from any transcendent source.