Want to be good? Science says go to church

NYTimes science blogger John Tierney:

If I'm serious about keeping my New Year's resolutions in 2009, should I add another one? Should the to-do list include, "Start going to church"?

This is an awkward question for a heathen to contemplate, but I felt obliged to raise it with Michael McCullough after reading his report in the upcoming issue of the Psychological Bulletin. He and a fellow psychologist at the University of Miami, Brian Willoughby, have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control.

This sounded to me uncomfortably similar to the conclusion of the nuns who taught me in grade school, but Dr. McCullough has no evangelical motives. He confesses to not being much of a devotee himself. "When it comes to religion," he said, "professionally, I'm a fan, but personally, I don't get down on the field much."

His professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.

These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn't account for all the benefits. In the new paper, the Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength.

"We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control," Dr. McCullough. "For a long time it wasn't cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control."

Well, sure: if people believe they will be accountable to a higher authority for their thoughts and actions, they will act with more self-control. This is what John Adams was getting at when he said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." He meant that American-style liberty can only work for people who have the ability to control themselves -- a degree of self-control Adams believed was only possible for most people with religion.

The point is not that religiosity guarantees virtue, or that virtue requires religiosity in every case. The point is that for most people, self-discipline and virtue have to be grounded in religion. Would I, your blog host, be good if I weren't religious? There probably wouldn't be a huge difference between the way I behave now and the way I'd behave if I had no religion. But that's because I was brought up and I live in a cultural milieu saturated with Christian values. And I live in relative prosperity. If I were under serious material duress, though, and had my conscience formed by a less religious culture, I have no doubt that I'd be a substantially different man, and not a better one. How can we even assert confidently that there is a such thing as Good and Evil absent religious belief? It's a far more tentative thing to say, "I believe that is good/evil" than it is to say, "That is good/evil."