Correlating a nations religiousness with indicators of social morality

An article has appeared in The Journal of Religion and Society, the title of the article is:

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies

The full text can be found here here

I am not going to comment on the validity of the data, the anlysis or the interpretation except to say that I don't buy it, the US looks like an outlier and is less moral on the measures used for other reasons.

But, I do want to say that if this came out the other way, if 'the US had more moral fabric and more religion' what do you think the right wing religious politicians would do? They would freaking run with it and push the ideas down our throats until we didn't know where the original data or ideas came from (and how they are to not really be taken as fact) and collectively the nation would stand behind the greater truth that the US is again superior to all ... and we have our religious background to thank.

Well the study doesn't come out that way. The paper reports that the US is the most religious and also the most devoid of moral fabric. Again, this is the conclusion of the authors.

Now the political other side, the non religious others do nothing with it. Maybe they should use right wing tactics like those used with the false ideas 1) Saddam Hussein HAS weapons of mass destruction or 2) there IS an organized global terror network that wants to kill us all or 3) back in the 80 (spearheaded by Rumsfeld) the idea that there IS this looming evil entity in the USSR and they all wanted us dead as well.

Maybe the left should mimic these tactics with this report? Push it down our throats until we all think it is true. Then we can successfully scrap religion mixing with politics because it would be the moral thing to do and would promote moral family values.

Here are some of the graphs:


Note: Figures were taken without permission.