The Centre For Social Cohesion

Sorry Johny, was not a lack of courage that meant I submitted anonymously. Just a slip of the key pad at a late hour.

In answer to your points though, what the collated evidence seems to suggest in line with your recommendations is that:

1. {To note that} "Every person’s, formative years are up to the age of about 7" - this is certainly in line with the stats

2. "re-introduce discipline and guidance from the Good Book into schools" - Unfortunately, there still apears no evidence that this would work, as mentioned. Considering evolution in non Christian cultures, loss of religion appears more a symptom of the spiral towards a fragmented society than a cause.

Let us follow a path of causality: (a) People act on motivations: (b) they are motivated when sensing unease, between how things are and how they would like things to be. This suggests that there is no desire to pursue religion, because there is no desire to pursue what the world of religion offers. This appears to be a {personal} world where there can be a trust in higher authority, creating "rewards" which are long-term and more intrinsic.

In David Conway's reference to the Baltimore High School action, was it not that social and economic factors had already seen a change in values, leading to the Supreme Court decision?

In terms of people's ailing relationship with the Bible, Maslow's simplistic but useful "Hierarchy of Needs" can be considered, whereby people pursue needs in life in a certain order. After the satisfaction of needs for food and water, there are needs for social belonging and then needs of ego and self-actualisation (i.e. freedom to live according to self expression). Religion appears to fulfill a need between the social needs and self-actualisation needs.

Needs are only perceived when lower order needs have been fulfilled. Therefore, introducing religion to schools may therefore see a higher take up in the better off! In the less better off, there are more immediate battles to be won before people can adopt the social, altruistic interpretation of religion which would see them refrain from crime at critical moments of perceived need for resources.

Alternatively, it would have to be "re-packaged" to be more relevant. However, it would interesting to understand the impact of religion in (say) the poorest areas of black New York; and question whether religion, in the face of crime and poverty, offers (a positive) solace and solidarity - or - (detrimental) acceptance and responsibility-evasion.

I am reminded of a story by my grandfather, attending a Methodist church service on a Sunday evening, where the congregation were the pottery workers of North Staffs. In rousing tones, the minister renounced how he felt that his church service had come to be the prelude of Sunday evening social drinking session. As he continued, one by one, and then in small clusers, and then in a gradual stream, the congregation stood up and walked out.

3. "Ensure Government policies encourage the traditional family structure, with married mother and father taking their responsibilites and enjoying their children together." - Surely the issue here is what this means. Our HMG would say that they did this already, and point to laudable sounding initiatives. However, I suspect you, I , David Conway and most posters to Civitas - with a general set of values which are probably coming from similar places to each other - would consider effective actions to represent quite different ones to what HMG implemented.

This is not to say that the Good Book has no role; but that a simple causal link (A happens, B results) is not what is happening here. Social and economic factors can be used to build a model. Also - Personal beliefs, leading to group behaviours and social trends, can be seen to build a different model. I would merely suggest that spirtiual belief (encompassing empathy, humility, acceptance and the value of humanity itself) are both being changed by, and changing, in the face of socio-economic trends.

Consequently, I ask whether we ought see the decline in the popularity and relevance of religion as a symptom or factor, rather than a cause.

Countries with the lowest crime rates in the world include Yemem Syria, Burkino Faso... Hong Kong has long had a reputation as the safest city. Come on Civitas, why's this then and what can we learn?!

Once again, Mr. Conway, further to your earlier article you have presented a convincing argument regarding causes of current social ills. A further compelling point was presented by one of the “anonymous” contributors (don’t these people have the courage to give their name?!) who presented statistics, from “Fatherless Homes Breed Violence”, that fatherless children achieve incredibly high rates of social failure.

However, despite all the discussions so far, there is still a fact (and its consequences) trying to get out. It’s one that I mentioned last time and it is that a child’s, i.e. every person’s, formative years are up to the age of about 7. Thus it is the parents - mother and father jointly - who have the responsibility to teach their children the difference between right and wrong, and the reasons why.

What is needed is a person with Balls (*) in authority to be very politically incorrect and:
+ tell parents that they are primarily responsible for their children,
+ re-introduce discipline and guidance from the Good Book into schools, and
+ ensure Government policies encourage the traditional family structure, with married mother and father taking their responsibilites and enjoying their children together.

(*) Perhaps the current Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families would be the most appropriate person.

Furthermore, parents (especially young ones) should be offered appropriate assistance at the start. Many (most?) would need this when it comes to responsibilities and setting proprities, and they need help right at the beginning rather than trying to “repair damaged goods” later.

With the above measures, in about a generation we will start seeing a definite, long-term improvement in society.

As a practising Catholic, and Science Editor of the Catholic Herald (UK), the Bible is extremely important to me. But I think it needs to be taken as a whole; it is not a manual of moral theology.
While it is useful in conveying ideas to others in the faith community, I think it is counterproductive in debate with those who resent being referred to beliefs which they do not share. Much more valuable is the use of Natural Law which, at the risk of over-simplification, simply means examining human nature and inferring what is needed to enable human beings to flourish.
You will find an example at www.secondsightblog.com where, from 23 May, an argument in favour of the needs for fathers is made in natural law terms.

In response to David's challenging question, for other explanations to gun-crime, I think what is debatable about his interesting hypothesis is that the bible's dwindling popularity is the antecedent to crime; rather than a symptom of bigger forces.

Lets consider the following statistics:

85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (U.S. Center for Disease Control);

90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes (U.S. Bureau of the Census);

80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes (Criminal Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26, 1978);

70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988);

85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home (Texas Dept. of Corrections 1992).

According to "Fatherless Homes Breed Violence" (Courtesy Mark Hall, Fathers Manifesto) and Daniel Anneus' The Case for Father Custody (another goldmine for information of this kind),
fatherless children are:

5 times more likely to commit suicide;
32 times more likely to run away;
20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders;
14 times more likely to commit rape;
9 times more likely to drop out of high school;
10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances;
9 times more likely to end up in a mental institution;
20 times more likely to end up in prison.

I doubt that the correlation with bible readers would be anything near as strong; suggesting a lack of father is a much better explanation. In fact, data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in around 1997 was used to make exactly this point - showing that aetheists were about 0.2% of the US prison population, which meant that they were greatly under-represented considering they formed 8%-16% of the US population. (And Catholics were the best represented!) (http://holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm)

Of course the two potential causes ("fatherlessness" and "biblelessness") may not be mutually exclusive.

However, underlying them both, I would consider stronger more basic human forces at play. For these, I would refer to the Robert Wright's fascinating book, "The Moral Animal". In this, crime is again argued convincingly to be due to the lack of father, but Wright makes the point that this is related-to the lack of mate (wives).

Wright notes that an unmarried man between 24 and 35 is about 3 times more likely to murder another male as another man.

He points out that mates are found by more prosperous men - while the less prosperous tend to lose out, with fewer or no mates to share between them. This is because women, serving their own genetic interests, cluster towards the resources now owned by the few. Untrendy though it is, a woman may be better-off sharing a wealthy man's resoures than having a poor man to herself.

Frustrated, crime can then become the only option to secure the mate-attracting resources left open to the poor man. Rape, in extremity, is the ultimately-desperate strategy to achieve the same ends, directly.

Wright therefore suggests, "It is not crazy to think that there are homeless alcoholics and rapists who, had they come of age in a pre-1960's social climate, would have early on found a wife and adopted a lower risk, less destructive lifesytle."

Herein lie another model to explain crime over the time period since the 1960s. This model sees:

1. An increased wealth divide causes an uneven distribution of women amongst men. 2. This is compounded as the women's sense of sexual freedom increases, allowing them to freely pursue wealth, rather than feel obliged to marry out of orthodox conformity. 3. The result is an increased concentration of women being diverted to those with the highest wealth, leaving poor and frustrated males behind with no mates, who behave accordingly. (4) Women can also more readily leave male mates, or behave in ways to end child-bearing relationships, for the same reasons as above. Through such acts, (i) poorer married men are also denined mates, and (ii) a key role of the father is lost: namely, to educate a son on how to win and keep a mate.
(5) The effect thereby self-perpetuates, with a group unable to attract and keep resources or mates.

Therefore, this "education" and rite of passage is lost to the signficant fractions of the entire social strata where the mate and wealth resources are lowest to begin with.

Home Office Figures for 2001 show the highest international murder rates lie in South Africa (55/100000), Russia (22/100000) compared with the UK (about 2/100000). These are countries with very wide distributions of wealth.

As for David Conway's bible obervation: Put yourself in the shoes of these men - Would experiencing this social discrimination not lead you also into rejecting the Bible's promises? Short-termism - criminality -would be your better economic bet in terms of risk and reward. Criminality, in this model, is merely a high risk, short term strategy to gain a mate. It is favourable to those with small resources.

This model also translates to socieities other than Christian ones. And even non-humans.

We need a communist society, full of beautiful and available women!

Yes, the major religions have certainly imposed the restrictions to which William refers and with what result? Three tier status for women, with all ranks lower than men - mothers, wives and whores.

As for illegitimacy, it is not the end of the world. What about adoption? It should be noted at this point that some commentators - notably Simon Heffer - have never shied from the more obviously revolting results of this "Biblical" morality. These include stigmatising illegitimate children as "bastards". I am surprised, therefore, to find the root of this obnoxious, reactionary view expressed on a supposedly Liberal website.

More broadly, the moral rearmament merchants make a great play of "illegitimacy" but this results from the feckless, hopeless lives of the British underclass, not from the behaviour of young people with genuine prospects.

If the lumpenproletariat of today were - by the restoration of selection - turned back into a skilled working class, we should see births out of wedlock fall away dramatically.

For it is not the absence of religion but the presence of socialism, Christianity's ugly sister, which is eroding our society. It has failed to educate, to police or to reward our young. Other countries, just as prosperous and secular as our own, do not suffer nearly as much from troubled marriages and broken homes and no, they are not tub-thumping, willingly ignorant and gladly stupid evangelists.

For I repeat, the religion offered by this line of thought is ultimately the religion of the Taleban: rigid, bigoted, chauvinist and mendacious. The points I have raised concerning the confusion and cloudiness of the Bible as a whole have been left unanswered. All I am offered are some particular statistics from one country under several important influences, the complex USA. The logical objections to religion are similarly swept aside (a la Mark Steyn) with a number of dubious and irrelevant sociological assertions. This can merely mean that the moral conservatives - I deny them the title of Liberal - are every bit as willing as the Politburo to found society upon untruth: "Never mind the argument, feel the social conformity!"

I suggested earlier that socialism was related to Christianity. To clarify, I mean that it is a sort of dark parody of the church. And how does this parody arise? Precisely by making the delicate, personal, forgiving inspiration of Christ the cue for harsh, oppressive, political measures. To the socialist this mean penalising wealth. To the moral arms dealers, it means penalising freedom and pleasure.

"My ways are not your ways," we are warned, which can only mean that the religious should never presume to be too certain. All the just society should offer is morality sufficient to sustain the liberty and privacy of the sovereign individual.

Anthony,

All the major religions support marriage and the family and declare sex outside marriage to be illicit. If young people had a conscience formed by religious teachings including the 10 commandments, they would be less inclined to have sexual relations before marriage and so the illegitimacy rate would decline followed by the crime rate.

One doesn't need to 'force the Bible down people's throats' for them to absorb and be influenced by its wisdom.

The issue is not the Bible itself. It can't be forced down people's throats. But the classical Protestant or evangelical Christianity that has the Bible at its heart is the issue. Such Christianity had a profound impact on the UK as it did also on the USA and is increasingly in many parts of the world. Not everyone needs to be an evangelical, but the cultural impact can make a difference as it did in the 19th century. The message of grace changes lives. Just as such Bible-based Christianity reemerged at a moral and spiritual low point in the 1730s and 40s so it can again.

This won't do. As all good Catholics know, the Bible alone is a dangerous document. In one southern US state there is a sect which has decided to dance with rattle snakes in response to the verse, "And they shall take up serpents." There have been several fatalities. I will not bother to list the number of carnal, bloody and unnatural sects to which yanky protestantism has given rise over the years - an honest mind will acknowledge their existence. Indeed, what Matthew Arnold famously condemned as "hole in the corner" piety is a constant danger to societies of a northern European character.

So we turn to institutional religion, which Arnold defended as offering the majority a way of taking the "disinterested" view - the view which prevents casual murder. In my view it is not so much the religious certainty which offers the benefit as the cultural traditions which have been woven around it. Behaviour patterns arise from the encounter of identity with opportunity.

If we know who we are, we will know the sort of things we do - as well as the sort of things we don't. Trying to root these ethical reflexes in the Bible - the raw, massive, occasionally self contradictory Bible - was the effort of a thousand years and of these only the last century were morally upright. The first nine hundred years of this morality involved every ill from genocide - the twenty thousand Jews burned in fourteenth century Strasbourg - to bigotry and misery - think of Dr Isaac Baker Brown and his famous clitoridectomies for those girls unfortunate enough to have been found to pleasure themselves.

More importantly, the advantage of culture over religion is that it can adapt. A society based on textual religious certainty very rapidly results in the Taleban. A society which reforms and refines its tradition is liberal, prosperous, generous and free. It is not, then, religion we need to recover, but true Liberalism - unafraid of the race-hustlers and doom-mongers of the left; firm enough to crack down sharply on crime of every kind; flexible enough to allow for the freedom which alone confers value on the individual's life. One series of statistics - which ignores the effects of LBJ's welfare splurge among other influences - will not convince me that the joyously casual, unaffected and honest world of today is worse than gloomy, insincere, saccharine, Victorian repression.

Dear Mr Conway
A much more convincing explanation for the rise in gun and knife crime is offered by Professor Charles Murray on your own Civitas website. He traces a substantive correlation (perhaps even a direct link) between the increase in the number of illegitimate births and the rise of youth crime. Forcing the bible down people's throats is unlikely to change behaviour. Controlling illegitimate births is a much better option.