Religious people are nicer than the rest of us?

Simon Smart’s opening sentence in his The Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece of 9 September 2011, God's truth, believers are nicer,  anticipates reader reaction:

I'm getting ready to duck, but don't shoot the messenger. The results are in: religious people are nicer.

He goes on to say about the book American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us:

Their most conspicuously controversial finding is that religious people make better citizens and neighbours.

It isn’t until the thirteenth paragraph that Smart (a director of the Centre for Public Christianity) admits that religious belief itself is not what is driving this so-called ‘niceness’ and, he entirely neglects other pertinent  aspects of the book.

This is what David Campbell (co-author of the book) said on the subject on 16 December 2010:

One is, we have a lot of evidence in our book that religious Americans are happier and, for the most part, better citizens and neighbors than their more secular counterparts. And what do we mean by better citizens and neighbors? Well, they’re more likely to volunteer. They’re more likely to give money to charity. They’re more likely to help out in informal ways their neighbors and those around them.

I want to emphasize that that’s not just religious people giving to religious charities or volunteering for religious groups. The secular volunteering and the secular giving of folks who are religious is actually higher than folks who are secular. And so that’s the part of this chapter that gets religious people all excited. Oh, great, there we go; we’re better than everybody.

But it turns out the story’s not quite that simple because the explanation for why we find those high levels of giving and volunteering and just general good citizenship and good neighborliness among religious folks is not what you might expect. It’s not what they believe. We can find no evidence, in tracing 25 different religious beliefs, no evidence that any one of them explains this relationship between religious — religious folks who give a lot.

Instead, it’s their congregation or, more specifically, it’s the friends they have at church. So it’s not just having a lot of friends. Anybody who has a lot of friends is actually more likely to do these good citizenship sort of things. It’s whether or not they have a lot of friends within their religious congregation, which suggests that perhaps what’s going on could be replicated in secular organizations, although the sort of secular group that would replicate what a congregation does is pretty rare. We’ve actually not found many examples of it, but it’s useful fodder for discussion.

Which one can see changes the emphasis somewhat as it denies a strong correlation between actual religious belief and volunteering/giving/good citizenship.

John Green, during that same Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, observed:

The religion that Campbell and Putnam describe seems to be very good at making people happy, but it doesn’t seem to be particularly good at making for a more just and equitable society. It may very well be that the sociability that surrounds religion has real limitations and what it may really be creating is a private-regarding society rather than a public-regarding society. From that point of view, both people on the progressive side who advocate social justice and people on the more traditional side who advocate morality may be on the outs because both of those approaches to religion in public life demand public justice of one kind or another.

This highlights another area neglected by Simons – the close relationship between those stating religious belief (particularly Evangelical Christian belief) and the U.S. Republican Party as demonstrated in this Putnam and Campbell graph, when read in conjunction with other statistics in their book:

While the strong emphasis on perceived religious values within American politics and the decline in religious belief since 1973 are similarly ignored.

Even though it would appear that the politicization of religion is possibly causing a significant number of Americans to deny any religious belief because of this general association with conservative right-wing politics and, this would suggest that ‘niceness’ is not always associated with professed Christianity.

The fact that religion plays a disproportionate part in the American political culture is perhaps borne out by  Mark Chaves’ paper (later a book) The Decline of American Religion,  which also notes a growth in the number of people who state they have no religious belief and either slow growth or no growth in the number who state they hold religious beliefs.

He also observes that; Involvement in religious congregations, which mainly means attendance at worship services, is softening.

In the original newspaper article under discussion here, Smart attempts to draw a correlation between his ‘nicer’ Americans and Australians professing a religion. He cites a 2004 report by the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Research and Philanthropy in Australia, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics as supporting this position.

However the 2004 study  clearly states:

International research indicates that people who are religious are more likely to give and to give more than those who are not. However, this effect does not necessarily hold when giving to religion is excluded.

In fact it shows that, when one excludes the amount of money given by Australian churchgoers to their own religion, the mean total and frequency of donations across the board markedly decline. While a higher frequency of church attendance also indicates that a person is less likely to give to secular charities/community groups.

When it comes to volunteering there is also little to choose between believers and non-believers, with the exception that believers who volunteer in the secular sector tend to do so for more hours..

So are people holding religious beliefs generous, more altruistic and more involved in civic life as Simon says? Perhaps they might possibly be towards each other and within their relatively closed church communties. However, while probably more visible to researchers, what they are not is generally much better people than those found in the wider population.