It is known that intact families whether religious or not are more stable and the children less prone to crime.

I don’t dispute that.

It is also known that some religions tend to discourage behavior such as adultery, alcoholism, etc which is damaging to family stability and leads to dysfunctional families.

I acknowledged that in my first comment, but I went on to point out that this study doesn’t address adultery and alcoholism. Whether or not religions approve, a very significant majority of the people in this country have been drunk and had premarital sex.

This study would have to be extended to at least age 25 to determine if religion is actually correlated to a decrease in these activities or if it is only correlated to a delay in these activities.

The one factor that is important that I did not see isolated in this study is socioeconomic level of the families involved.

Yes, that is also a significant oversight.

It is known that intact families whether religious or not are more stable and the children less prone to crime.

It is also known that some religions tend to discourage behavior such as adultery, alcoholism, etc which is damaging to family stability and leads to dysfunctional families.

The one factor that is important that I did not see isolated in this study is socioeconomic level of the families involved.

1) The study is specifically on teens, so what you propose would be a different study.

Understood.

I know you will acknowledge that better behavior early in life more often leads to better behavior later. I don’t think any study anywhere would show that teens who’ve generally exhibited responsible behavior when younger make a mass movement toward being poor citizens while the troubled youths make the flip the other way en masse.

- I don’t believe citizenry can be adequately quantified with just the ten behaviors studied.
- It’s not about going from Jekyll to Hyde. Most of the behaviors studied are closely related to teenage rebellions. It’s well within the realm of possibility that the “lead” that religious children enjoy may completely disappear by age 25. I also wouldn’t be the first to suggest that such “delayed rebellions” might ultimately be more destructive than if they had occurred earlier.

3) What “corresponding negative impacts to other personality traits” are you imagining here?

I don’t have anywhere near a complete enough understanding of human psychology to suggest how the difference might manifest itself. I just know that “close adherence to pre-defined rules” and “ad-hoc decision making” are two very different cognitive processes and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that an emphasis on one over the other would have both positive and negative results.

Hi Jeff–

1) The study is specifically on teens, so what you propose would be a different study.

2) I know you will acknowledge that better behavior early in life more often leads to better behavior later. I don’t think any study anywhere would show that teens who’ve generally exhibited responsible behavior when younger make a mass movement toward being poor citizens while the troubled youths make the flip the other way en masse. I would guess that most behavior remains pretty consistent as most people take on the values, faith and voting patterns of their parents.

3) What “corresponding negative impacts to other personality traits” are you imagining here? As Arthur Brooks has clearly demonstrated (http://www.arthurbrooks.net/buy.html), the folks who are brought up in the environments described by the Heritage study are far more likely to take an interest in helping their fellow man via charitable giving and sacrificial activity.

What isn’t addressed by this study is to what degree the effect is permanent and whether or not there are corresponding negative impacts to other personality traits.