According to a poll conducted 24-27 August 2000, 68 percent of Americans surveyed affirmed that they were a member of a church or synagogue.  Thirty-five percent of those polled claimed to attend a church or synagogue service once a week, with another 11 percent "almost every week" and 15 percent more once a month.  However, only 43 percent claim to have attended a religious service in the past seven days.

(Source: Wendy W. Simmons, "Though Very Religious, Americans Most Likely to Say Government is Responsible for the Poor" Poll Release, Gallup News Service, www.gallup.com, January 30, 2001, and other Gallup Polls, August 24-26, 2000.)

"The universal conflict is between these two polar opposite values of greed and community: When we raise our children, we want them to be good neighbors, but we also want them to have that advantage so we can put a sticker on the back of our car that says 'My kid's on the honor roll'...The catharsis is in seeing people who are greedier than we are, and we feel somewhat better..."

(Source: The Chicago Tribune, Aug. 24, 2000.)

Going to church helps teenagers to resist the enticements of crime--especially if they worship with both parents.    The power of religion to steer adolescents away from wrongdoing stands out clearly in a study recently published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency by a team of criminologists from the University of Pennsylvania.   Parsing data collected from a national probability sample of 1725 young men and women ages 11 to 17, the Pennsylvania researchers clearly establish that "religiosity consistently has negative direct effects on delinquency."  Indeed, the effects of religiosity in suppressing criminal activity are "quite robust [even] after controlling for all the other independent variables, such as race and household income."

However, the authors of the new study acknowledge that overall effects of religiosity on delinquency are "partly mediated by social bonding and social learning variables."  For instance, one of the reasons that religious involvement holds down delinquency is that it significantly reduces "delinquent association" (p < .05), a strong predictor of delinquent acts.  Further scrutiny reveals that the church is not the only influence in teens' lives capable of reducing delinquent association: "Adolescents of disrupted family backgrounds [i.e., adolescents not living with both biological parents] are more likely to have delinquent friends than friends of intact family backgrounds" (p < .05).

It seems that law-enforcement officials need not worry too much about teen crime in areas where family devotions are an integral part of community life.

(Source: Byron R. Johnson et al., "Does Adolescent Religious Commitment Matter?  A Reexamination of the Effects of Religiosity on Delinquency," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 38. No. 1 [2001]: 22-40.)