Good without God: The Battle over Statistics

For all of the mud that gets thrown around in the battle between conservative religious groups and Atheist organizations, it’s important to note that both sides can have fun with the numbers. I was reading an article about Ricky Gervais (link), and he cited a statistic that Atheists make up 10% of the all U.S. citizens, but only 0.2% of the U.S. prison population. Pretty compelling stuff, right? I’ve seen this in a few places, and the “total” percentage can be as high as 20%. Thinking it would make an excellent “Checkmate, Religion!” infographic, I set out to locate the original survey data. Well as it turns out, this statistic is not atom bomb that non-theists would make it out to be.

(Really? People using random statistics to make huge claims in their favour? Who would do such a thing?)

The original study where this oft-cited statistic comes from is a 1997 survey by Denise Golumbaski (link) They asked 93,112 people in the U.S. prison system what their chosen religion was. Out of this, 74,731 (80%) gave some response, and the rest are listed as “unknown/no response”. A total of 156 people chose the specific response of “Atheist”, out of the total 93,112. An accurate conclusion would be that—according to a 1997 study—only 0.168% of prisoners identify themselves expressly as “Atheist”.

How does this compare to the overall U.S. population? There is no one survey that will give you all the necessary data, and most surveys don’t make a clear distinction between “non-religious/unknown/don’t care” and “Atheist”. If you simply grab the first “Unaffiliated/No Religion” number, you will get the 8–20% statistic that is normally used. Using a 2007 Pew Research Center study (link) you can see where the mistake comes from: 16.1% of respondents labelled themselves as “unaffiliated”, but only 1.6% chose to identify themselves as “Atheist”. This is far less condemning for Religion, by a factor of ten.

You can’t have it both ways. You either take both “Atheist” figures (0.168% prison vs. 1.6% overall) or both “Non-Religious” numbers (20% vs. 16%). And before either side goes “Ah HA! Look there are more [non-]religious people in prison!”, you have to understand these surveys have completely different categories and were taken a decade apart. You cannot compare every religion because the ones listed vary wildly from survey to survey. However, even with these badly-sourced numbers, one must admit that the relationship between the prison population and the overall population is far less earth-shattering than first gleaned:

There are a few anomalies worth nothing but again, you have to look beyond the raw statistics. Islam is actually one of the fastest-growing religions inside of prisons, so this does not take into consideration what religion they were when they actually committed the crime (which is what we’re really trying to prove here, isn’t it?).

I think it’s important to look at what people actually do, not what they say. Organized religion believes that if you are good on earth, you will go to Heaven. Logic would posit that people who are religious would want to do less bad things, leading to a smaller number of inmates who are religious. However, when one examines the statistics, it appears that people who are religious are just as likely to commit crimes as anyone else. Perhaps the question of morality has very little to do with one’s chosen spiritual path and more to do with a personal history, financial situation and one’s own unique moral compass.

In the end these statistics actually don’t prove anything, for either side. There doesn’t appear to be a proper, current, comprehensive study on religiosity and incarceration in America. What we need is a study designed to corroborate several key data points: Religious preference (including separate responses for “Atheist”, “Agnostic” and “Non-Religious/Don’t Know/Don’t Care”), Age, Religion of Birth (Again, most Muslims in prison were not born Muslim), and Crime/Sentence (What would happen if we learned that 50% of murderers were Atheist? Or 92% of rapists were Catholic?). Until we have a specific, targeted study done, the  ”Good without God” argument remains open for debate.