Telegraph (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
Dawkins and Hitchens are wrong: Religious people are actually much nicer than atheists, according to new study, 16 November 2010
by Toby Young
There’s an interesting article in USA Today by David Campbell and Robert Putman, two political scientists who’ve just completed a magisterial, five-year study of the way in which religion affects American society. They try and present their findings in an even-handed, politically neutral way, but there’s no escaping the fact that religion and religious people emerge vey well. Their new book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us All, sounds like a definitive rebuttal to Christopher Hitchens’s assertion that “religion poisons everything”.
One of Campbell and Putman’s main discoveries is that religious people are “better neighbours” than their non-religious counterparts. By this, they mean that they’re more likely to volunteer to help out those less fortunate than themselves, as well as give to charity:
Forty percent of worship-attending Americans volunteer regularly to help the poor and elderly, compared with 15% of Americans who never attend services. Frequent-attenders are also more likely than the never-attenders to volunteer for school and youth programs (36% vs. 15%), a neighborhood or civic group (26% vs. 13%), and for health care (21% vs. 13%). The same is true for philanthropic giving; religious Americans give more money to secular causes than do secular Americans. And the list goes on, as it is true for good deeds such as helping someone find a job, donating blood, and spending time with someone who is feeling blue.
Perhaps more surprisingly, this activism extends across all forms of civic engagement, not just philanthropy:
[T]he “religious edge” holds up for organized forms of community involvement: membership in organizations, working to solve community problems, attending local meetings, voting in local elections, and working for social or political reform. On this last point, it is not just that religious people are advocating for right-leaning causes, although many are. Religious liberals are actually more likely to be community activists than are religious conservatives.
The authors were initially a little sceptical of these findings, but after controlling for a huge range of factors – women are more religious than men, for instance – their conclusions proved to be robust. Interestingly, the high degree of civic activism among religious people doesn’t vary according to what particular religion they belong to. “We examined the possible impact of 25 different religious beliefs on civic behavior, and none explains religious Americans’ good neighborliness,” write Campbell and Putnam.
They believe the explanation lies in the friends religious people make while engaging in religious worship or related forms of social activity:
The answer lies not in their beliefs but their friends. Specifically, having friends at church (or synagogue, temple, mosque, etc.) fosters neighborliness. While having more friends is, for civic purposes, better than having fewer friends, what matters most is having friends within a religious congregation. And the type of congregation does not matter. Friends found in Catholic parishes, Jewish synagogues, Protestant churches, Mormon wards — and every other type of religious grouping — all produce the same civic effect.
It’s safe to assume that a similar survey of British religious people would produce the same results and that, in turn, tells us something about the shape the Big Society is likely to take. Assuming that religious Britons, like religious Americans, are more likely to get involved in civic projects, then the Big Society will probably have a religious character – or, at least, religious people will constitute a disproportionally high percentage of those involved in Big Society groups. Indeed, it’s already happening – approximately 50 per cent of the first wave of free schools approved by Michael Gove have a faith component.
For Left-wing secularists, this will be yet another reason to oppose the Big Society. In fact, as Campbell and Putman make clear in this fascinating new book, the willingness of people of all faiths to give up their time to help others may be Western society’s best hope of civic renewal.
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