Crime Rates and Religious Beliefs

Posted on September 19, 2012 Updated on May 19, 2014

GOVERNMENTS labouring to deliver effective crime-prevention policies could do worse than consider divine deterrence. In a paper published this summer in PLoS ONE, Azim Shariff at the University of Oregon and Mijke Rhemtulla at the University of Kansas compared rates of crime with rates of belief in heaven and hell in 67 countries. Citizens of those countries were asked which of heaven and hell they believed in, and each country’s overall “rate of belief” was calculated by subtracting the percentage of hell-believers from that of heaven-believers.