Religion and Delinquency: Cutting Through the Maze

Research on the relationship between and delinquency has produced contradictory results, with some investigators uncovering a positive association, others a negative one, and still others none. Recent attempts to reconcile these findings have involved arguments that where, or in what social context, we measure the religion-delinquency association can affect our results. Herein, we show that how we measure that association can have an even more basic impact on our findings. When PRE-variety measures and chi-square statistics with multiple degrees of freedom are used to describe and test the significance of religion-delinquency associations, we find weak associations for some offenses but not others and even these vary according to how is measured. When odds ratios and more sensitive tests of significance are employed, we find strong effects of on all offenses regardless of how we measure it. In his recent presidential address to the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Stark announced his conversion to the belief that religion has truly potent effects [on delinquency] (1984, p. 273). This is the same Stark who in 1969, with Hirschi, published a brief article entitled Hellfire and Delinquency which suggested that it made no difference how often children attended church, how often their parents did the same, or how feverishly they believed that hell awaited sinners; religious youngsters were no less likely to be delinquent than their irreligious counterparts. church is irrelevant to delinquency, they concluded at that time, it fails to instill in its members love for their neighbors and because belief *Support for this research was provided by the Center for the Study of Youth Development at the Catholic University of America. We thank Travis Hirschi for providing some of the data for this report, Robert D. Ketterlinus for his help in analyzing the data, and the anonymous referees for their useful comments on an earlier draft. Address correspondence to Douglas M. Sloane, Center for the Study of Youth Development, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064. ? 1986 The University of North Carolina Press