With awful logic, Christian professor says atheism leads to more sexual assault and self-harm

Correlation does not imply causation. Unless you're sociologist Philip Truscott and you're desperate to publish a bad paper.

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When the title of someone’s journal article is “Rape, Suicide, and the Rise of Religious Nones,” you know it’s not going to end well. Or start well. Or have anything useful in the middle. And the conclusions reached by sociology professor Philip Truscott of Southwest Baptist University, in his paper for the Journal of Sociology and Christianity, are exactly what you’d expect.

Image via Adobe Spark

After looking at state-level data regarding religion, suicide, and sexual assault, and seeing how the shapes of the graphs look similar, Truscott argues that the rise of non-religiosity has led to a loss in self-control, and that atheism is therefore “a plausible mechanism driving both increased rape and suicide.” He doesn’t go all the way and say the loss of religion causes rape and suicide, only that the three things are correlated and isn’t that interesting?!

In the graphs below, Truscott shows the correlation between the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data published by the FBI and the national “no religion” rates, the campus rates for sexual assault groups by states along with their “no religion” numbers, and the national suicide rates (offered by the CDC):

So the graphs move in similar directions, kind of, and… that’s it. That’s his proof. His charts are like something out of Chapter 1 of a statistics textbook, where students are asked to point out logical fallacies. All you have to do is find a statistic that peaked around 2018 and you can do the same thing.

Here’s another problem with his graphs: When trying to figure out a link between atheism and sexual assault, Truscott uses information from college campuses (courtesy of Clery Act data) as a proxy for all assault allegations… but it never occurs to him that campuses with more religious diversity (and thus less organized religion) might also be the campuses where sexual assault is taken more seriously, which means more students can report it knowing that their experiences won’t be dismissed.

(Actually, Truscott does acknowledge that for a moment, writing, “Since more religious states might attach a greater social stigma to sexual behavior, victim-blaming and correspondingly lower reporting rates might be the reason for lower apparent crime rates.” He gets it!… except he then ignores that possibility and just continues with his analysis anyway.)

Speaking of the Clery Act, Truscott neglects all the reports of religious schools looking the other way regarding sexual assault allegations on campus. Just last year, the Department of Education levied a record $14 million fine against Liberty University for not keeping students safe from sexual violence. Women on campuses like that know that coming forward with those stories might mean admitting they broke school rules regarding sex before marriage or drinking or staying out too late. As one damning article noted, “How do you report sexual assault at a place where authorities seem skeptical that such a thing even exists?” At some level, if there are more reports of sexual assault, it’s partly because new policies have made it a bit easier for victims to come forth, including at religious schools. But without any actual data linking religion with sexual assault, it would be unfair to say the former causes the latter.

That’s the sort of self-control Truscott doesn’t seem to have.

Bob Smietana of Religion News Service explains how Truscott linked these factors and what he hopes to achieve by perpetuating these claims.

Truscott draws on data tracking crime on college campus and religious affiliation surveys to show that states with higher percentages of so-called “nones” — people who claim no religious affiliation in surveys — have higher rates of sexual assault on campus as well as higher suicide rates overall.

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While he falls short of claiming that loss of religion causes more suicides and assaults, Truscott has subsequently argued that his findings prove the need for more state vouchers for private schools, most of which are religious. Families that choose religious schools for their kids can play a role in reversing the decline of religion in America, Truscott told RNS in an interview, which he argues will reduce the rate of suicide and campus sexual assaults.

The problem with his data, as even non-sociologists could argue, is that he’s cherry-picking facts to support a conclusion, instead of considering all the possible reasons those numbers might be moving in the same direction. It never occurs to him that a decline in organized religion and a rise in violence could be caused by different factors entirely.

Sometimes, Truscott just blames atheists without any evidence whatsoever, like when he claims a rise in alcohol and drug use could make atheists more likely to commit sexual abuse:

A plausible mediator between religious non-affiliation and rape is increased drug and alcohol use. As noted above, the non-religious are associated with increased drinking and illegal drug use… The increasing state-by-state trend towards recreational marijuana legalization may have accelerated this trend. As self-intoxication is often presented as a “victimless” crime, it is easy to believe atheists and agnostics feel free to partake once the element of religious self-regulation is removed. As noted by McCauley et al. (2010), binge-drinking, marijuana, and illicit drugs were all associated with increased probabilities of rape, in which case these victimless crimes succeeded in finding victims. To put it another way, some non-religious men made a short moral step into substance use and then, in a diminished state of self-control, made a much larger one into criminality.

It’s “easy to believe” only if you’re predisposed to thinking atheists have no morals. But there’s no evidence suggesting any of that. Also, the idea that marijuana is a gateway drug to criminal acts has been widely debunked.

Sociologist Ryan Cragun told Smietana this was all a shoddy argument and that he could play the exact same game in the other direction (if he wanted to be as careless as Truscott) by linking gun violence to evangelical Christians. After all the most religious states in the country also have the highest rates of gun violence.

“If I were to use his logic, then I should be able to argue that evangelicals are more likely to kill people,” said Cragun, co-author with Jesse M. Smith of “Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization.”

Cragun actually shared some calculations with me to hammer home the point that you can link any two things together without much work. For example, there’s also a strong correlation, he said, between iPhone sales and the rates of rape and suicide. He joked: “If, as Truscott claims, correlation IS causation, evangelicals are murderers and Apple is the leading contributor to suicide and rape in the US!”

If there was proof that non-religious people were committing these violent crimes (to others and themselves), that could be a discussion worth having, but there’s no suggestion in the paper that’s happening.

Sociologist Phil Zuckerman has made the argument before that, if anything, atheism is correlated with more morality, not less.

In terms of who supports helping refugees, affordable health care for all, accurate sex education, death with dignity, gay rights, transgender rights, animal rights; and as to who opposes militarism, the governmental use of torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment, and so on — the correlation remains: The most secular Americans exhibit the most care for the suffering of others, while the most religious exhibit the highest levels of indifference.

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… When it comes to the most pressing moral issues of the day, hard-core secularists exhibit much more empathy, compassion, and care for the well-being of others than the most ardently God-worshipping. Such a reality is necessary to expose, not simply in order to debunk the long-standing canard that religion is necessary for ethical living, but because such exposure renders all the more pressing the need for a more consciously secular citizenry, one that lives in reality, embraces science and empiricism, and supports sound policies — not prayer — as a way to make life better, safer and more humane.

When I asked Zuckerman about Truscott’s paper, he noted that if it were true that secularization caused harm, “then why don’t we see the highest rates of rape and suicide in the highly secularized nations of Scandinavia, Estonia, Czech Republic, UK, Japan, etc.” Even if you look at Canada, he added, the most secular province, British Columbia, doesn’t have the highest crime rate: “Indeed, BC’s rape rate is well below the national average.”

The bottom line is that rape rates and suicide rates are caused by many, many factors—economic, cultural, political, psychological, historical, etc., etc.—and to pin either on secularization is absurd.

If you want to make an argument that religion (or a lack of it) leads to less violence (or more), you better have a damn good case for it, not a handful of numbers moving in the same direction without a thorough consideration of all the other possible causes.

That may be why Truscott had so much trouble publishing his paper. He said other social science journals wouldn’t consider printing it, but the Journal of Sociology and Christianity, which is published by the (private Christian) Omega Graduate School and the Christian Sociological Association, said yes.

His explanation for that? Everyone else is just too damn liberal:

In an interview, he claimed that if his research had linked greater incidences of suicide or sexual assault to more widespread religious belief, journals would have flocked to publish his study. “The social science journals, they lean to the left politically,” Truscott said. “They are very anti-religious.”

Or—just tossing this out there—the other journals aren’t interested in faith-based propaganda where the holes in logic are this obvious. The problem isn’t that they wouldn’t publish his paper; the problem is that this one did.

Dr. David Speed of the University of New Brunswick and Daniel S. Dacombe, a Ph.D. psychology student, are two academics who are working on a formal rebuttal to this paper and plan to discuss it on the Voice of Canadian Humanism podcast (which Dacombe hosts). They told me the fact that this paper was rejected by at least a few journals is a sign of the process working—and Truscott should have embraced those decisions instead of reading into the reviewers' motivations:

With such a heavy responsibility, researchers should expect their work to be challenged, and should want their fellow scientists to be absolutely ruthless in the process of peer review. Anything less diminishes the value of the research we do and the trust people place in the process of science.

With all due respect to the author, while he was able to publish his work we expect future analysis will reveal this paper’s shortcomings in depth, and hope that readers will recognize its conclusions are not representative of what we know about criminal behaviour and non-religion.

I don’t expect Truscott to see that light. After all, he also told RNS that it was up to his critics to prove he’s wrong, implying that it was never his responsibility to prove he’s right:

Truscott said that he is glad the paper is getting attention, even if it’s negative attention, and hopes it leads to more study about the social implications of the decline of religion.

To critics he simply says, “Prove that I am wrong.”

For what it’s worth, there are papers that say atheism and suicide are linked and others that don’t. Usually, the bigger issue is whether you belong to a community (which churches can provide) rather than anything stemming from godlessness itself. As for sexual assault, if the argument is that God keeps you moral and therefore atheists are more likely to commit violence, all you have to do is look at All Things Catholic Church or the daily barrage of headlines involving pastors getting arrested to realize how faulty that line of reasoning is.

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