Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States

[Le Jacquelope]

Yes, I googled it.
Veryblueeyes can kiss my ass.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience...e/teenbirthrateshigherinhighlyreligiousstates

Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States
Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com jeanna Bryner
senior Writer
livescience.com Wed Sep 16, 7:08 pm ET

U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests.

The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise.

Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health. (See the full top 10 below.)

However, the results don't say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: "We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."

The study comes with other significant caveats, too:

The same link might not be found for other types of religious beliefs that are perhaps more liberal, researchers say. And while the study reveals information about states as a whole, it doesn't shed light on whether an individual teen who is more religious will also be more likely to have a child.

"You can't talk about individuals, because you don't know what's producing the [teen birth] rate," said Amy Adamczyk, a sociologist at the City University of New York, who was not involved in the current study. "Are there just a couple of really precocious religious teenagers who are running around and getting pregnant and having all of these babies, but that's not the norm?"

Strayhorn agrees and says the study aimed to look at communities (or states) as a whole.

"It is possible that an anti-contraception attitude could be caused by religious cultures and that could exert its effect mainly on the non-religious individuals in the culture," Strayhorn told LiveScience. But, he added, "We don't know."

Bible states

Strayhorn compiled data from various data sets. The religiosity information came from a sample of nearly 36,000 participants who were part of the U.S. Religious Landscapes Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted in 2007, while the teen birth and abortion statistics came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For religiosity, the researchers averaged the percentage of respondents who agreed with conservative responses to eight statements, including: ''There is only one way to interpret the teachings of my religion," and ''Scripture should be taken literally, word for word."

They found a strong correlation between statewide conservative religiousness and statewide teen birth rate even when they accounted for income and abortion rates.

For instance, the results showed more abortions among teenagers in the less religious states, which would skew the findings since fewer teens in these states would have births. But even after accounting for the abortions, the study team still found a state's level of religiosity could predict their teen birth rate. The higher the religiosity, the higher was the teen birth rate on average.

John Santelli of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University calls the study "well-done," adding that the results are not surprising.

"The index of religiosity is tapping into more fundamentalist religious belief," Santelli said. "I'm sure there are parts of New England that have very low teen birth rates, which have pretty high religious participation, but they're probably less conservative, less fundamentalist type of congregations."

Other factors that may have been important to consider include ethnic backgrounds of state residents, according to Adamczyk, the City University of New York sociologist.

"We know that African American women on average tend to underreport their abortions, which means they could also underreport the likelihood that they got pregnant," Adamczyk said. "If you're dealing with states with a high number of African American wome, you might run into that problem."

Adamczyk's own, separate research has shown a nearly opposite correlation, at the individual level. "What we find is that more religious women are less likely to engage in riskier sex behaviors, and as a result they are less likely to have a premarital pregnancy," Adamczyk said during a telephone interview. But for those religious teens who do choose to have premarital sex, they might be more likely to ditch their religious views and have an abortion, she has found.

Cause and effect?

Adamczyk says the idea that anti-contraception principles could be behind the link is controversial, as studies on the topic have varied results. "The idea is that in the heat of the moment, a young woman who has said, 'I'm going to be a virgin on my wedding night,' is with her boyfriend and she says 'Let's just do it.' And since they didn't plan it, nobody has a condom. And so it increases their chances of a pregnancy," Adamczyk said.

Earlier marriage among religious individuals could also partly explain the finding.

"In the south, there is a higher rate of marriage of teenagers. And one possible explanation is just that in the southern states, which are also more religious, people just get married earlier and have planned pregnancies and those have perfectly good outcomes," Strayhorn said. He added that he doesn't think the earlier marriage idea explains the religion-birth link.

Top 10 states with highest teen birth rates:
Mississippi New Mexico Texas Arkansas Arizona Oklahoma Nevada Tennessee Kentucky Georgia

 

[The_Trouvere]

I am interested in knowing how Republican and Democrat states compare in terms of crime, illegitimacy, and divorce. Does anyone know?

 

[JamesSD]

I'm not especially shocked by the teen birth rate stats, although the fact that they held up even factoring out income.

Although I don't have statistics on hand, I know that those who marry young are more likely to divorce, and young marriage is more popular in Red States. Violent Crime rates are typically higher in blue states, mostly because they are more urban. Given the number of committed, cohabitating couples who plan children but don't get married, the term "illegitimacy" is rather outdated at this point in history.

As a side note, Utah is often the "trend breaker" in a lot of these sorts of studies. Despite being very, very Red, their divorce rates are extremely low, and I note they didn't at least crack the top 10 on the teen birth rate list. You have to give the Mormons credit for accomplishing their goals where other religions fail.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I am interested in knowing how Republican and Democrat states compare in terms of crime, illegitimacy, and divorce. Does anyone know?

From The Next American Nation (1996), by Michael Lind:

Conservatives do not recognize how much the nation has changed since the fifties in its religious attitudes. It may be that the religion of nominal Christians in the United States can no longer be described as traditional trinitarian Christian. The scholarly term for their belief is henotheism, the belief that all ethnic groups and cultures have, and should have, their own gods and rites. In Christian theology, this is the heresy of indifferentism. Robert Linder and Richard Pierard have described the evolution of American civil religion: "Its umbrella has changed from evangelical consensus to Protestantism-in-general, to Christianity-in-general, to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general, to deism-in-general." The decline in belief in Christianity as the only true religion has been extraordinarily rapid in the United States. In a poll taken in 1924 in Muncie, Indiana, 94 percent of high school students agreed that "Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it." By the late 1970s, merely 38 percent of respondents in a later poll in Muncie agreed that Christianity was the only true faith. Two-thirds of the respondents in a 1991 poll agreed that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists "pray to the same God."

This sentiment no doubt appalls Christian and Jewish theologians. From the point of view of those concerned with national unity, however, it is an encouraging development. It lessens the chance that religious discord will produce civil strife. Of the policy of ancient Rome, Edward Gibbon wrote: "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful." In the United States, "Potomac piety" has been promulgated by statesmen taking the side of the magistrates, from George Washington, who thought that Christianity was useful in protecting "property," that is, the rich minority, from attacks by populists, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who declared: "Our government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply religious faith, and I don't care what it is." Tocqueville noted: "An American sees in religion the surest guarantee of the stability of the state and the safety of individuals . . . much the same may be said of the British." Will Herberg noted that in the United States Christian and Jewish "denominations" are less religious institutions than instruments of social integration.

The new, semi-official American religion of indifferentist theism (there is one God and many equally true religions) does not solve the problem of a common ethic. On the contrary, it makes it all the more pressing. Indifferentism necessarily leads to a divorce between religion and ethics, for the simple reason that there is no single, authoritative generic-theist table of commandments. Fortunately, moral consensus does not require theological consensus. As the neoconservative scholar James Q. Wilson has pointed out, "Religion is for many a source of solace and for a few a means of redemption, but if everyday morality had depended on religious conviction, the human race would have destroyed itself eons ago." Somehow Japanese classrooms manage to be orderly without a copy of the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall (a goal of American fundamentalists). Indeed, outside of North America, the most prosperous, least crime-ridden and most educated countries are the post-Protestant societies of Northern Europe, in which traditional Christianity is in serious long-term decline, and the highly secular Confucian societies of East Asia. Conversely, the parts of Europe and the Americas in which institutional Christianity has been strongest in recent centuries, the Catholic and Orthodox countries, have been characterized by poverty, tyranny, and political instability, which exist to an even greater degree in the Muslim world. The most religious part of the United States, the South, has long been the poorest, most violent, and most illiterate section of the country.

Of course, there is still a very large minority in the U.S., probably nearly a third of the total population, that is still "Christian" in the older, traditional sense, believing that all who do not accept salvation through Christ are damned to suffer eternally in Hell. We might call this minority "fundamentalists" but that's really a subcategory of evangelical Protestants; I think a better term for them is "traditional Christians," which does not exclude conservative Catholics who share the view that non-Christians are damned. Really conservative Catholics believe Protestants are damned, too, and vice-versa, but that attitude is (I think) slowly fading. The real religious divide in America today is not between Catholics and Protestants, but between those who are deeply and traditionally religious and those who are not.

The traditional Christians, although a minority, are as noted a very large minority; and a very well-organized minority, with numerous standing permanent organization centers known as "churches," not to mention the TV stations, etc.; and they are a very vocal minority; and a very politically interested minority with a powerful presence in Washington. And the traditional Christians' consciousness that they are now a minority merely adds to their determination to fight a rising tide of secularism and religious indifference; and in the more extreme variants, it even reinforces their expectation to see the Rapture and the Apocalypse within their lifetimes; and this sometimes, very rarely, leads them into extreme and violent actions. Therefore, the traditional Christians get a lot of attention in the press, even more than their substantial numbers would warrant.