New Research has highlighted more than a handful of studies that document an inverse correlation between measures of adolescent religious commitment (church attendance, church membership) and juvenile delinquency, premarital sexual experimentation, and substance abuse. New Research has also found that more devout forms of religious devotion, particularly among conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants, exert an even greater restraint on such adolescent behaviors.
Building upon these studies, Mark D. Regnerus at the University of Texas at Austin has found that communities, such as schools and counties, that register a high degree of conservative Protestant homogeneity, correlate with lower levels of theft and minor delinquency, suggesting that religion does not only influence individual adherents but their neighbors as well.
Regnerus examined two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (popularly known as "Add Health") of students in grades 7 through 12, one from 1995 and another from 1996. He then utilized county-by-county religious data from 1990 published by the Glenmary Research Center in conjunction with the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, which permitted him to differentiate between church attendance in general and "conservative Protestant" affiliation in particular. His findings may surprise those Americans who think that "born again" or evangelical Christians drive down neighborhood property values.
In Wave 1, theft appeared slightly more common in schools where fewer students attend church on a weekly basis. However, theft was also more common in both waves where fewer born-again Protestants made up the student body. Likewise, self-reported theft was slightly less likely to be found among students (in Wave 1) living in counties with higher religious adherence rates, but as conservative Protestant "market share" increased, slightly fewer incidences of both theft and minor delinquency in both waves were documented.
Furthermore confirming his theory, Regnerus discovered that lower degrees of conservative Protestant homogeneity in a community tended to weaken the relationship between a student's own religiosity and his reported delinquency. "In schools where a high percentage of students consider themselves to be 'born again' Christians, those students who identify as such self-report less theft and minor delinquency than their 'born again' counterparts in schools where their numbers are comparatively fewer."
These specific correlations led Regnerus to conclude that conservative Protestant communities "appeared to constitute an effective and robust social control against delinquency" relative to mainline Protestant and Catholic communities. Challenging the "moral communities" theories of noted sociologist Rodney Stork, Regnerus maintains that "the mere collection of religious adherents or attenders does not a moral community make, nor does simple religious homogeneity of any type."
