Archives: Better

Many recent studies have evaluated whether Christians are happier than their secular neighbors and compared the proportion of Christians happy with other religious groups. The question of what makes people happier has been a question pondered by philosophers throughout time.  Philosophers from Aristotle to Jacques Rousseau and Bertrand Russel have considered happiness to be one of the principal goals of human existence. What makes one person happy may not work for other individuals.  Happiness, after all, relates to emotion and is often not defined by empirical data but rather by changing feelings. Happiness is generally thought to represent a sense… Read More »

The effect of religious practice on work ethic has been a topic of investigation for many years.  There has been much complaint concerning the “younger generation” concerning their reduced work ethic and tendency to be self-centered.  This complaint probably has been leveled at every generation by their parents and employers. However, there is no good research to show that being involved in church activities promotes a good work ethic which positively impacts the ability to keep a job.  Just as positive values have a positive impact on math and reading scores through the effect that religious values have on homework,… Read More »

Christians benefit society because their religious beliefs inform their behavior.  This favorable behavior means Christians save society considerable money when compared to their secular counterparts. We will go over the areas where Christian behavior benefits society and attempt to derive a rough estimate of cash savings. Crime A huge literature on the financial costs of crime is available but many of these only evaluate a part of the cost.  There is a tremendous infrastructure involved in dealing with criminal behavior including the court system, police, courts, prisons, etc.  Clearly, the cost of crime in the United States runs into hundreds… Read More »

Christian children do better in life than do their secular counterparts on many levels.  These differences begin at birth with Christian and Jewish mothers more likely to nurse their children than secular parents. As the children grow up, Christian parents do a better job of raising their children as demonstrated by multiple metrics; there is improved parent-child relationships, closer supervision and more responsible discipline, better education with less delinquency, and much greater concern with their children’s education. Parent-Child Relationships More religious college students feel closer to their parents.  A definitive study of mother-child relationships over twenty-four years demonstrates this increased… Read More »

Faith and family are becoming increasingly important in Europe; the countries there are slowly disappearing.  The people are disappearing, taking with them the culture that has defined Europe for millennia.  The cause of this decline is due to a reduction in fertility. Simply put, families are not having enough children to replace the population.  The fertility rate is so far below replacement level that there will soon not be any ethnic Germans left in Germany, no Swedes left in Sweden, no English left in England, and indeed, no Europeans left in Europe. The failure of the younger generation to populate… Read More »

The relationship between Christians and depression has only recently been investigated. The usual narrative heard in modern secular mental opinion articles is that mental health is adversely affected by Christianity.  For example, the famous expert Sigmund Freud denounced Christianity not just as a cause of mental health issues, but actually as a form of mental illness.  Freud considered it as a “poison” that leads to “neurosis” and a “childishness to be overcome.” Freud wrote a book in 1927 titled “Future of an Illusion” referring to the future of religion. Albert Ellis, another famous psychiatrist from the early twentieth century, denounced… Read More »

There is a causal association between Christians and success as defined by multiple measures.  For example, there is a causal significant association between Christianity and economic achievement. Christians are better educated, graduate more frequently from high school and college, get into less legal trouble as a youth, are less depressed or anxious with fewer mental health issues, and more frequently achieve prestigious jobs than their non-religious counterparts. Society may have many definitions of success; by more measures, Christians achieve more of it. Education Christians have been at the forefront of education in the western world.  The very effective homeschooling movement… Read More »

Many believe there is no difference in the association between Christians and the law and secular citizens.  Criminology is devoted to determining why people do bad things – why they become criminals. Society is interested in inhibiting criminal behavior while promoting social behavior.  Society is also interested in trying to prevent return to criminal behavior after discharge from prison. Religion and Crime There has been a great deal of research in the association between religion and crime.  A review of research studies published in the last part of the twentieth century found there was a strong positive effect of religious… Read More »

Prisons and prison ministries are modern inventions used for warehousing people for various time intervals ranging from a few hours to a lifetime. Prisons were a foreign idea to the ancient Jews.  They were given justice in other means such as fines, expulsion from the land, or corporeal punishment. Prison is viewed in modern society as a place of punishment rather than a place for rehabilitation.  Prisoners lack social and job skills to have a successful life when released leading to high recidivism rates.  Christian prison ministries were developed to have a positive effect on these high recidivism rates by… Read More »

We all know the trope – it is propagated by Christian and non-Christian alike: Christians and education cannot be in the same sentence.  For example, the respected Christian scholar Mark Noll began a book with this sentence, The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. He then charged that churches have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel but have largely abandoned … the arts, and other realms of high culture. The twentieth century has been full of such charges.  The common precept is that religion is not… Read More »