Religiosity and Deviance

Religiosity and Deviance/Crime in Free Society

The first major empirical study of religion and deviance/crime was published by Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark in 1969. These researchers used survey data on youths from California to test what they called the Hellfire Hypothesis, which predicted that religion could deter crime through the fear of supernatural punishment and at the same time could encourage prosocial behaviors through the hope of supernatural rewards. The authors investigated whether individuals who attended church were less likely to engage in a variety of deviant behaviors than individuals who did not attend church. They also investigated whether belief in supernatural sanctions for bad behaviors could deter those bad behaviors. Hirschi and Stark found no relationship between religious attendance or belief in supernatural sanctions and self-reported deviant acts. The researchers concluded that the youths' decisions to commit deviant acts were linked with perceptions of pleasure and pain on earth rather than on purported heavenly rewards for good behavior or hellfire for sinful acts.

In a subsequent study, however, Stark and colleagues reconsidered their original findings. They argued that their previous findings were due largely to the moral makeup of the area in which it was conducted (Richmond, California). In what has become known as the moral communities hypothesis, Stark contends that religion is most likely to reduce deviance/crime in more religious areas of the country (e.g., southeast and Midwest) than in less religious areas (e.g., northeast and Pacific Northwest). Stark characterized Richmond, California, as a “secular community” rather than as a “moral community.” The moral makeup of the community thus helped explain why religiosity did not reduce deviance/crime in the original study.

Steven Burkett and Mervin White offered a competing explanation for Hirschi and Stark's findings. They suggested that the effects of religion on crime will vary depending on the type of crime. Using survey data on high school students in Pennsylvania, they found that religion is most likely to reduce behaviors that have a strong moral or ascetic connotation in religious circles but are not universally condemned in society (e.g., alcohol/drug use, premarital [Page 596]sex, and gambling). The authors reported that higher levels of religious participation led to significant decreases in students' use of alcohol and marijuana but did not affect involvement in property or violent offenses. Burkett and White's work has been called the antiasceticism hypothesis.

...