Inductivist

The total fertility rate in the US has fallen to 1.7.  That means the average woman will have fewer than two children, not enough to replace the population. Does greater religiosity predict fertility, and if so, how strongly? I organized data on the total fertility rate (TFR)(World Population Review, 2021 data) and the percent of the country thinking religion is important (World Values Survey, various years) for 78 countries. The Spearman rank correlation is .61 (p < .001), which means that religiosity strongly predicts higher fertility. Here is a scatterplot:

Here is the scatterplot with country labels:

If we assume that a TRF of at least 2.1--replacement level--is best, then a country evidently needs close to half or more of the population believing that religion is important. 

According to Steve Sailer, the mass shootings committed by disciplined, skilled killers are on the rise because fewer young men fear there is a hell waiting for them. Do the data support this? 

The General Social Survey asked respondents, "Do you believe in hell?" I lumped those who answered "definitely yes" and "probably yes" into one group, and the same for the no's. Here are the results for men ages 18-29:

The percent not believing in hell bounces around a little 1991-2008, but it jumps up to 47% in 2018.  

Here is a graph of the trend in high body count mass shootings in America--the type usually committed by the kind of men Steve is talking about:

The rate accelerates around the same time we see a jump in skepticism about hell. 

 A follower on Twitter indicated that he is not Christian and wondered what percent of Americans under 40 are. Well, you know I'm a sucker for that kind of question. The General Social Survey asked people about their religious affiliation in 2018--the latest published data. Here are the results: 

If we add up the numbers for Christians, we get 59%, and it's probably closer to 60% since I did not include "Other", which, for example, probably includes quite a few Mormons, who consider themselves Christians and restorationists, not Protestants. If we we create a table with adults 40 and over we get this:

Added up, 78.2% of older Americans are Christians, so the percentage among young people is dramatically lower. It's not a coincidence that many young people also favor socialism.  

The General Social Survey asked respondents if it is true that: "I sometimes try to get even rather than forgive and forget." Below you see the answers by religious affiliation. 

All groups have higher rates of vengefulness than Christians, including the "nones." This makes sense since Christianity stresses forgiveness.

Among Christians, those that attend church all the time are the most forgiving. 

And nowadays many of the people with no religion like to accuse devout Christians of being the haters.  

A common claim by liberals and anti-Christians is that Christians are unhappy because the religion is repressive. 

The General Social Survey Survey asks people how happy they are overall these days with answers ranging from not too happy (1) to pretty happy (2) and very happy (3). Here are the means for various Christians and those with no religion:

All five Christian groups have higher happiness averages than the "nones." 

What about devout Christians? Maybe they are the miserable ones.

Mean happiness rises with more frequent "repression" (church attendance). 

The research literature in general reports that religiosity is associated with a wide range of positive characteristics, but that doesn't stop smug, ignorant anti-Christians from going on about how religion is harmful. 

This interesting new study of between 76 and 179 countries (it varies by the model estimated) finds that more religious countries are more corrupt. I'm skeptical of their interpretation. They admit the finding is counterintuitive but claim that either religion is the "opiate of the people" so they don't care and are oblivious to corruption, or the corruption drives them to escape in religion (the latter seems more likely). I suspect that race/ethnicity is driving the correlation. For example, Scandinavian people are less religious and less corrupt, while Latin Americans tend to be the opposite. Plus, it's always dicey to draw conclusions about individuals from aggregate-level data.

Let's use individual-level data from the General Social Survey. We'll narrow the ethnic variation by keep the sample large by focusing on whites. Here are the results:


People who attend religious services are clearly more likely to think that cheating on one's taxes is wrong. The correlation (not shown) is .18. Now, this is an attitude question about one kind of illegal behavior, and it's not about behavior itself, but it still supports the view that religious people are not more corrupt than the non-religious.

This study, using a sample of ~94k teens and young adults, examined the link between religiosity (church attendance and saying religion is important in their life) and drug selling and theft. The researchers found a robust inverse association for various age and demographic groups. The magnitude of the link was considerable for black males and females: the incidence of drug selling and theft was between 1.6 and 3.3 times higher for irreligious blacks compared to their religious counterparts.

Of course, a correlational study can't tell us anything about causation, but this study provides pretty good evidence that one finds more law-abiding blacks at church, and the Church has always been a central institution in the black community.

If you're like me, you could use a break from all the coronavirus, stuff, so let's focus for a moment on race, IQ, and religion. The 2010-2014 World Values Survey asked 88,042 around the world whether they were religious, not religious, or atheist. Here are the percentages listed by country who answered that they were religious:

Percent religious

Pakistan    99.7
Georgia   97.1
Ghana   97.0
Nigeria   95.9
Rwanda   95.9
Qatar   93.8
South Africa   90.7
Haiti  90.3 
India  88.8
Armenia  88.5
Yemen   86.3
Poland   86.2
Turkey   83.5
Colombia  82.5
Morocco   82.4
Peru   81.5
Romania  81.4
Philippines   80.7
South Africa  80.0
Brazil  79.7
Trinidad and Tobago  78.8
Cyprus   78.3
Iraq   76.8
Algeria   74.2
Mexico   74.2
Azerbaijan  73.2
Palestine  72.4
Ecuador   71.1
Libya   68.5
Ukraine   68.3
Argentina   67.8
USA   67.0

Total Sample  66.7

Tunisia   65.1
Slovenia   64.2
Lebanon   63.6
Belarus   62.2
Kazakhstan   61.7
Malaysia   53.7
Russia   53.1
Singapore   53.1
Uruguay   50.8
Chile   50.3
Germany   49.5
Uzbekistan   48.7
Netherlands    43.8
Taiwan   43.3
Netherlands   43.8
New Zealand   42.7
Spain   40.0
Thailand   32.0
Sweden   31.2
Estonia   30.9
Japan   20.9
Hong Kong  19.8
China  12.5

First, the world is quite religious: two-thirds of the total sample described themselves this way. On the other hand, there is tremendous variation. Almost all Pakistanis are religious, while few Chinese are.

On the issue of race, noticeable patterns emerge. South Asians and blacks tend to be very religious, and while the numbers here suggest Islam is associated with greater religiosity, countries like India, Ghana, and Rwanda show that South Asians and blacks do not need to be Muslim to be highly religious. The least religious country with lots of blacks is Trinidad and Tobago, but it is still well above average.

On the other end, East Asians are typically secular. China is at the bottom with 12.5% religious. Filipinos are the exception. This raises the importance of IQ in explaining religiosity. Depending on the estimate, mean IQ for the Philippines is between 74 and 86, and research clearly shows that lower IQ people tend to be more devout.

Europeans vary a lot with levels from 97.1% in Georgia down to 30.9% in Estonia.  Historical factors are important, but a virtue of focusing on IQ is that it helps simplify the world--a major goal of science. Estonians, for example, have a mean IQ of around 100, while it is in the low to mid-90s in Georgia.

Muslim-dominated societies vary quite a bit, too, from 99.7% religious (Pakistan) to 48.7% (Uzbekistan). IQ appears to be a little higher in Uzbekistan. Malaysia, another somewhat secular,  Muslim-dominated country (53.7% religious) has a mean IQ somewhere in the low-to-mid 90s. Overall, Muslim countries are religious.

Latin Americans countries are also fairly devout. On the high end, 82.5% of Colombians are religious, and on the low end, 50.3% of Chileans. Again, IQ might help explain the pattern: it's in the high 80s in Chile, but the low 80s in Colombia.

It looks like any association between race, ethnicity and religious devotion is, in large part, simply a reflection of differences in IQ.  The simple three-race categorization works very well: blacks (low IQ/high religiosity), whites (medium IQ/medium religiosity), and East Asians (not Filipinos) (high IQ/low religiosity). We could add South Asians as well (low IQ/high religiosity).

Clearly, anyone who believes that astrology is scientific doesn't understand what science is, but how common is this belief, and what's the statistical profile of a believer?

The General Social Survey asked respondents the question with answers varying from "very scientific" to "not scientific" at all (sample size = 5,548). 36.6% of people said astrology was at least sort of scientific. That's a lot of dummies.

Here are the factors that predict belief (standardized OLS coefficients):

Predictors of thinking that astrology is scientific

Female   .09
Black   .13
Other race    .04
Age   -.07
IQ   -.17
Educational level   -.11
Church attendance   -.04
Political conservatism   -.04

All of the coefficients are statistically significant at the p < .01 level (or higher, two-tailed test).  So the profile looks like this: female, black (vs. white), other race (vs. white), young, unintelligent, uneducated, non-churchgoer, and liberal. The coefficients indicate the strength of the prediction: IQ is the best predictor of thinking astrology is not scientific.

The Left dislikes evangelicals as much as they dislike anybody, and one of the reasons they don't like them is because they tend to reject the theory of evolution--which is ironic since the Left rejects the implications of evolution for human nature. But what about Muslims? Don't they reject evolution as well? The Left is usually silent about Muslim fundamentalism.

How many American Muslims don't believe that humans descended from earlier species of animals? General Social Survey (GSS) respondents were asked this question. Here are the percent who answered no listed by religion (sample size = 6,353):

Percent who don't believe humans descended from animals

Muslims  65.6
Christians  65.5
Protestants  63.6
Catholics  36.2
Orthodox Christians  32.1
Jewish   20.1
No religion  19.8
Buddhists   4.5
Hindus   3.2

Muslims are at the top of the list. Compare them to Buddhists and Hindus. An enormous difference.

If fundamentalism is an impediment to a pro-science culture, why isn't it a problem when it's found among Muslims? For the Christian fundamentalists always you have with you, but inviting the growing Muslim world to move to the US is a choice.

UPDATE: My 12-year-old son informs me that Hindus naturally accept evolution because they believe in a God that is an elephant.

Does loyalty to one group you belong to predict loyalty to other groups?  I suspect that religious people are also more likely to value their ethnicity.  The General Social Survey (GSS) asked people how important their ethnicity is to them with answers ranging from unimportant (1) to very important (4). 

I categorized people as not religious if they attend religious services no more than once per year. All others I lumped into the religious group. The means for thinking ethnicity is important to you are listed below--the means for the religious in parentheses, the means for the irreligious without parentheses (sample size = 2,110)

"My ethnicity is important to me"-- means

American Indian  3.50  (3.50)
Black  3.47  (3.53)
Chinese  3.40  (3.75)
Mexican  3.22  (3.47)
Puerto Rican  3.19  (3.60)
Italian  2.85  (2.72)
Jewish  2.76  (3.26)

Total  Sample  2.60  (2.84)

Scottish  2.55  (2.44)
Irish  2.45  (2.60)
German  2.35  (2.50)
Swedish  2.29  (2.67)
Russian  2.25  (2.95)
English/Welsh  2.21 (2.50)
Polish  2.13  (2.67)

For most of the ethnic groups, ethnocentrism is higher for the religious group. The differences are generally not large but look, for example, at how religious Swedes are almost as ethnocentric as secular Jews.

The difference at the extremes is large: the gap between religious Chinese Americans on the high end and the irreligious Poles on the bottom is well over one standard deviation. The typical Chinese person who goes to church says his ethnicity is 'moderately' or 'very important.' Compare that to the average Polish American who is not religious: he says his ethnicity is 'slightly important.'

A reader at Reddit pointed me to this table from GenForward, an online survey of young Americans (ages 18-34). It's associated with the University of Chicago. You can see the question they asked about identity and the results by race:
















The results are consistent with my analysis GSS data of adults of all ages, but the identity politics is seen more sharply here among young Americans.

Race is most important for nonwhites. Race (probably some of it ethnicity) is 3rd most important for whites. Religion is not important in any group except for Hispanics, perhaps. It's 5th for whites. Class and gender are important. Sexuality ranks highest among blacks which supports the stereotype of blacks being more obsessed with sex than the rest of us (which is saying a lot).

The one thing that could unite us--American nationality--is one of the least important identities. It reaches its peak--4th--among whites. The future looks like identity politics.

The one type of identity that will probably be considered illegitimate by elites for the foreseeable future is whiteness. Every other interest group will push, but when whites qua whites push, they will likely be crushed by the powers that be. I could be wrong, but I don't see a time when elites will ever see whites as simply another normal interest group.

UPDATE: One problem with the question is that it seems to be designed to emphasize the kinds of identity that are closely linked with politics. While the sample is of young adults, some people will be married and have kids by their early thirties, but 'marriage' or 'parenthood' (or something like 'family' which can be important at any age) are not included. These identities are important to many people, and I suspect the popularity of gender might be linked in people's minds to family roles.

Also--since the question asks about identities that "have the most impact on your life." some liberals whites might be want to choose race since they feel their white privilege is so consequential. I'm thinking of a new Inductivist slogan: "The definition of white privilege (or Jewish or Asian privilege) is the accident of being part of a social network that has more people who have their shit together."

The view of many human biodiversity (HBD) people is that genes are a critical determinant of human behavior and culture, and the power of genes gets expressed at the individual, family and ethnic/racial levels. The contention that race as a genetic reality is a tremendous social force is, of course, the most controversial.

In a recent piece published at Unz.com, E. Michael Jones challenges this view by arguing that the key distinction among Americans is religion, not race.  While some HBD-ers contend that the fundamental conflict is racial, and old-time Marxists would argue that it's class, Jones sees the central struggle between the alliance of Protestants and Catholic versus Jews. He would update his view to include the growing presence of Muslims, but he sees people with no religion as lacking an identity, as being social nobodies, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the irreligious are drawn to identity politics. So it sounds like Jones is acknowledging the growing power of non-religious identities like feminist, gay, racialist, etc.

One way to measure identity is to look at marriage: If religion is really important to you, you will probably marry someone of the same faith.  Using General Social Survey data, I looked at the percentage of people who marry inside their group. I include ethnicity (i.e., where your family originally came from) as well as current religious affiliation. Religious denomination is shown in bold.

Percent who married within their own group 

Blacks  90.4
American Indian  87.5
Asian Indian  86.4
Protestant  86.3
Southern Baptist  83.6
Lutheran Missouri Synod  82.8
American Lutheran  81.9
Chinese  80.8
Orthodox Christian  80.0
Mexican  79.7
Jewish  79.5
United Methodist 79.1
American Baptist  77.8
Catholic  76.8
United Presbyterian  73.4
Episcopalian  73.2
Japanese  68.8
Puerto Rican  67.6
Filipino  66.7
No religion  42.9
Greek  38.9
German  37.6
Dutch  34.4
English/Welsh  34.0
Russian  32.1
French Canadian  31.5
Spanish  29.8
Irish  27.6
Polish  27.3
Norwegian  21.6
Czech  18.5
Austrian  14.8
Danish  12.5
Scottish  12.5
Swedish  11.7
French  9.4
Swiss  8.3

Keep in mind that many of these people got married a long time ago, so with the recent decline in religiosity, the numbers for religion shown here are probably high.

Having said that, the most endogamous groups tend to be non-whites followed by religious denominations. White ethnicities, even those of a putatively ethnocentric bent (e.g., Greeks, Irish), are the least likely to marry within the group. As sociologists predicted some time ago, white ethnics are simply becoming whites. But the intermarriage rates of whites with Asians and Hispanics (about 60% of inter-racial marriages are between whites and Hispanics or whites and Asians) and the lack of voting as a bloc suggest that white consciousness is pretty weak.

Even though the Protestant endogamous rate is high, I'm skeptical that this is as meaningful as Jones thinks. As a Catholic, he may think they're all the same, but who really identifies as a Protestant? As a Southern Baptist, yes. As a Mormon, yes. There is very little common identity and unity among Protestants. For one thing, there is a major divide between conservative Evangelicals and liberal Christians.

Jones makes a good point that religion is an important source of identity for many Americans, but he overstates the case. Non-whites are growing in number in the US, and for them race is important.  As religion declines, people are developing political identities--progressive, feminist, sexual minority, or racialist. Jones says that "Logos is Rising"--that Catholicism is growing.  According to the data, "Raza is Rising."

This year is the 15th anniversary of the publication of The Jewish Century, a very honest and insightful book by Jewish scholar Yuri Slezkine. Among many other things, Slezkine claims that the Jewish diaspora, compared with majority national groups, has identified more with the tribe and the international community and less with the nation-state.  According to him, when Jews tried to become nationalists, they dominated the highest rungs but, in the end, were rejected as interlopers. 

So, what's the situation in the US now?  Compared to other Americans, do Jews identify more as global citizens and less as Americans?  In 2014, General Social Survey (GSS) respondents were asked, "How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement? I feel more like a citizen of the world than of any country."  I excluded immigrants (sample size = 1,065).  Answers ranged from "strongly disagree" (scored as a 1) to "strongly agree" (scored as a 5).  Here are the means by religious affiliation:

Mean "Citizen of the World" Score

Buddhist   3.00
No affiliation   2.81
Catholic  2.67

Total Sample  2.66

Christian   2.63
Protestant  2.61
Jewish   2.12

Of the groups large enough to include in the list (10 or more respondents), Buddhists and the unaffiliated have the highest globalist scores, while Jews are actually at the bottom of the list.  The gap between the highest and lowest groups is nine-tenths of a standard deviation.  That's a large difference.  According to GSS data, Jews are real patriots.

I showed recently that Americans overwhelming select someone of the same race for a best friend.  Friendship is a good measure of how well groups are mixing, or, on the other hand, how much they cluster.

In this post, let's focus on religion. Does your best friend share your religious affiliation?  I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to answer this question (sample size = 1,932).  Here are the percentages who indicated a religious match between themselves and their best friend:

Percent whose best friend belongs to the same religion

Jews  75.6
Protestants  74.5
Catholics   59.4
None  42.3

Jews emerge as the group that clusters the most.  You might respond that Protestants have basically the same number, but we would expect a high number for a such a large group.  According to the latest GSS, 48.9% of Americans are Protestant, 23.3% are None, 21.2% are Catholic, and 1.7% are Jewish. If Protestants picked their friends at random, their best friend would also be Protestant around half the time. For Jews, a random process would give a Jewish best friend less than 2 percent of the time, and yet the number is over 75%.  This shows an intense level of clustering among Jews.

Steve Sailer speculated on Twitter yesterday that "American Jewish total fertility rates are higher than for white gentiles of similar education level and location."  The General Social Survey can help a little here if we are willing to use data from 2000 to 2016. I calculated the number of offspring for white women ages 40-55.  There aren't enough cases to look at Jewish women with less than a four-year degree, or to look at location:

Total number of offspring by religion

Four-year degree (N = 628)
Jewish  1.30
Protestant  1.72
Catholic  1.75

Graduate degree (N = 346)
Jewish  1.96
Protestant  1.49
Catholic  1.62

At the bachelor's level, Jewish is fertility is lower than of white gentiles, but this reverses at the graduate degree level.  It's an atypical, eugenic trend to see Jewish women with graduate degree having, on average, 2/3 more kids than Jewish women with a four-year degree.

It's been about a decade since I analyzed current fertility patterns in the US, so I plan to do that in the next few posts, and to look at correlates I've never examined before.

The human biodiversity community knows that Jews are the smartest whites, but are they, really?

Using the General Social Survey's IQ measure, here are the top five white IQ groups by religion:

Mean IQ (N = 22,242)

Buddhist  110.9
Other Eastern religion  109.4 (n is only 13)
Jewish  108.1
Episcopalian  107.7
Hindu  106.3 (n is only 6)

Jews actually come in third behind Buddhists and whites following other Eastern religions.  Plus, Episcopalians are pretty close to Jews.  Hindus are smart, on average, too (although we shouldn't make much out of such a small sample).

In case you're curious, whites with no religion have an average IQ of 102.8.

Pacific Life pulled its ads from Fox News after Tucker Carlson said immigrants make America dirtier. In my experience, black and Hispanic communities tend to be dirtier than white neighborhoods (although I lived in a clean middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood), but is this the case for immigrants? 

I don't have data for neighborhoods, but General Social Survey interviewers rated people's homes during interviews. Ratings ranged from very clean (1) to dirty (5).  The mean for people born in the country is 1.93; for immigrants, it's 1.86. So immigrants' homes are slightly cleaner.

Tucker might have had a white/immigrant comparison in mind. The white mean is 1.88 -- a number similar to immigrants.

Let's look at a dirtiness ranking among selected ethnic groups in the US:

Mean household dirtiness (N = 3,657)

Black  2.17
American Indian  2.17
Mexican  2.04
Irish  1.91
Swedish  1.91
Chinese  1.90
Filipino  1.90
India  1.90
German  1.87
Polish  1.85
English/Welsh  1.85
Puerto Rican  1.82
Italian  1.73
Russian  1.71
Greek  1.65

Blacks, American Indians, and to a lesser extent, Mexican Americans have the highest dirtiness ratings which is consistent with my experience of neighborhoods.  Greeks are the cleanest.  It seems to me that cleanliness is a measure of conscientiousness. Jews seem conscientious, so let's look at religion, too, and see if the numbers match my thinking.

Buddhist  2.13
None  2.10
Protestant  1.91
Catholic  1.84
Hindu  1.84
Muslim  1.76
Jews  1.68

Jews come in the cleanest. Buddhists and people with no religion are the dirtiest.  Religious people do tend to be more conscientious.  Keep in mind the differences are not large.  The gap between Greeks and blacks/American Indians is only one-half of a standard deviation.

It's possible that people differ somewhat in terms of indoor and outdoor behavior.  I'm messy in my house but freak out if I drop a gum wrapper in a public place.

The General Social Survey asked Americans their religion at age 16 and also at their current age. The first number you see includes results from 2000 to 2016 (N = 22,659), and the next number shown in parentheses refers to the period 1973-1999 (N = 36,286):

Percent of members not changing their religion
Jewish  81.7  (85.1)
Protestant  79.9  (89.2)
Hindus  71.1  (40.0)
Islam  69.4  (60.0)
Catholic  68.5  (80.2)
Orthodox Christian  68.4  (80.8)
None  59.2  (47.8)
Buddhism  55.0  (66.7)

First, most people do not switch, but Jews switch least.  You'd expect Protestants to be toward the top since they are a huge group, and one could switch from one denomination to another and still say he didn't switch away from Protestantism. This is not the case for small groups like Jews. It is impressive that members of some small groups, surrounded by a sea of people from other faiths, tenaciously hold on to their religion. I consider this to be a measure of a group's chauvinism.

Look how the general trend has been more switching in the more recent period. Don't trust percentages for small groups because they are based on tiny sample sizes. By contrast, the greater tendency of "Nones" to stick with their non-affiliation is probably real. More switching by people who grew up Catholic also seems to be a thing.

When people switch, where do they go? Let's list the modal category for the later and earlier period (in parentheses):

Most popular (non)religion to which one switches

In both time periods, the most common switch is to no religion. Quite a few Nones switch to Protestant in both periods -- I assume this is often evangelical.  The numbers are too small to make anything of the Orthodox pattern, but Catholics used to most commonly switch to Protestant, but now are more likely to switch to nothing.

Keep in mind that all this switching to no religion doesn't mean people drop all religious belief and practice.  In the latter period, 58.1% of Nones pray. There has been an increase in disbelief but also an increase in the deinstitutionalization of belief. (On the other hand, 88.6% of Nones prayed in the earlier period.)

Over the years, I've done a number of analyses that indicate that the psychologically most healthy people are both atheists and people who know God exists. The groups in the middle who are uncertain about God are, for example, less happy and are more likely to drink too much.

General Social Survey participants were asked how often did they feel worthless in the past 30 days.
Answers ranged from "all of the time" (1) to "none of the time" (5). Here are the means for a sample of 1,218 people:

Mean self-esteem score

Don't believe  4.88
No way to know  4.49
Some Higher Power  4.57
Believes sometimes  4.09
Believes but doubts  4.55
Knows Gods exist  4.63

Atheists have the highest mean, while confident believers come in second. At the absolute bottom are those who believe sometimes. This group is one standard deviation lower than atheists, which in English means a huge difference.

This is the pattern we've seen previously. The confident on either side are psychologically better off than those in the squishy middle. Personality might explain this. Decisive, confident people trust their abilities, and if they take a position on God, dammit they know they're right.

People who frequently doubt themselves also doubt their beliefs. One's uncertainty about oneself seems to go hand-in-hand with uncertainty about everything else.  

Also--these results contradict the view that atheists will have a low view of themselves because they are likely to believe they are the accidental product of natural forces, not the children of God. Personality seems to be much more important than people realize.  Self-esteem seems to be in your brain, not your beliefs.