A new study that shows that children from religious families are less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households reminded me of Ryan Duffey Strode, above, a North Carolina kid who was so filled with the loving spirit of Jesus that he told his headmaster ‘you will go to Hell’.
Strode, then aged 10, finally had to be removed from his elementary school in Marion in the late 1980s for abusive behaviour, along with his two equally god-addled siblings. They were given to calling fellow pupils “whores” and “fornicators” and threatening them with hellfire.
From Wikipedia:
Strode and his 5-year-old brother Matthew (accompanied by 6-year-old sister Pepper), began preaching Bible scripture outside their Marion, North Carolina elementary school. The boys’ idiosyncratic style of preaching consisted of bellowing rote-learned excerpts from the Bible (particularly those pertaining to hell and whoredom) at their classmates.
Anyway, back to the study. According to this report, academics from seven universities across the world studied Christian, Muslim and non-religious children to test the relationship between religion and morality.
They found that religious belief is a negative influence on children’s altruism.
Said the authors of “The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World”, published this week in Current Biology:
Overall, our findings … contradict the commonsense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others. More generally, they call into question whether religion is vital for moral development, supporting the idea that secularisation of moral discourse will not reduce human kindness – in fact, it will do just the opposite.
Almost 1,200 children, aged between five and 12, in the US, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa participated in the study. Almost 24 percent were Christian, 43 percent Muslim, and 27.6 percent non-religious. The numbers of Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic and other children were too small to be statistically valid.
They were asked to choose stickers and then told there were not enough to go round for all children in their school, to see if they would share. They were also shown film of children pushing and bumping one another to gauge their responses.
The findings:
Robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households.
Older children, usually those with a longer exposure to religion:
Exhibited the greatest negative relations.
The study also found that “religiosity affects children’s punitive tendencies”. Children from religious households “frequently appear to be more judgmental of others’ actions”, it said.
Non-religious children were found to be the least judgmental, while Muslim children demanded harsher punishment than those from Christian or non-religious homes.
At the same time, the report said that religious parents were more likely than others to consider their children to be:
More empathetic and more sensitive to the plight of others.
The report pointed out that 5.8 billion humans, representing 84 percent of the worldwide population, identify as religious.
While it is generally accepted that religion contours people’s moral judgments and pro-social behaviour, the relation between religion and morality is a contentious one.
Keith Porteous Wood of the UK National Secular Society said the report was:
A welcome antidote to the presumption that religion is a prerequisite of morality. It would be interesting to see further research in this area, but we hope this goes some way to undoing the idea that religious ethics are innately superior to the secular outlook. We suspect that people of all faiths and none share similar ethical principles in their day to day lives, albeit may express them differently depending on their worldview.
According to the Pew Research Center, which examines attitudes toward and practices of faith, most people around the world think it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person. In the US, 53 percent of adults think that faith in God is necessary to morality, a figure which rose to seven of 10 adults in the Middle East and three-quarters of adults in six African countries surveyed by Pew.
• The photo of Strode was taken from this video.