Hellfire and Delinquency Revisited

Abstract

While Hirschi and Stark conclude that religiosity is unrelated to delinquency, their findings and a replication of their study in the Pacific Northwest (Burkett and White) may not be generalizable to other areas of the country. Using self-report data from 1,383 Atlanta tenth graders in 1970, we found a moderate negative relationship between church attendance and delinquent behavior. Our data also suggest a causal structure in which respect for the juvenile court system links church attendance with delinquency. We suspect that church attendance may be a truer reflection of adolescents' experience in the South than the West, so accounting for the differences between our findings and those of previous research. Social scientists have long been interested in the relationship between religiosity and delinquent behavior. Some have argued that religion is a deterrent to delinquency, whereas others assert that religion promotes delinquent behavior due to the perceived insincerity of church leaders, the ethnocentrism of denominationalism, and the identification of the church with society's power structure (Gannon). Research findings have been equally conflicting. Glueck and Glueck, Nye, and Travers and Davis found that children who attended church regularly or had a higher degree of religious intensity were less likely to be delinquent than non-attenders or those having a lower degree of intensity. On the other hand, Kvaraceus concluded that there were no significant differences between the proportion of delinquents in the general population (New Jersey) and among those who were active church members. Since these early studies are generally unsophisticated methodologically, they are often inadequate for testing the relationship between religiosity and delinquent behavior. Hirschi and Stark's research does not suffer these same limitations. Their analysis revealed that church attendance was unrelated to delinquent behavior. They concluded that the commonsense notion which regards religion as a deterrent to delinquency is simply wrong. They also found that one set of variables, which they called measures of acceptance of moral values (e.g., respect for the police), was negatively related to delinquency, but unrelated or weakly related to church attendance. Therefore, they argued that previous researchers who did find modest, negative relationships between church attendance and delinquent behavior should have explored possible causal structures that might have linked the two, rather than assuming a simple and direct causal structure. A recent partial replication (Burkett and White) of Hirschi and Stark's research essentially corroborates their finding of no relationship between religiosity