The researcher, one of the first to investigate quantitatively the relationship between religion and income, claims he has addressed the obvious fallacy of disentangling causation from correlation; I am not convinced. His argument relies on sociological data on the ethnic mix of neighborhoods and congregations and hinges on excluding “ethnic density” (ghettoization, in other words), since the ghetto has a negative impact on your income, to measure the supposedly independent effect of the density of “co-religionists”. defined as “the proportion of the population that shares your religion but not your race.” He finds that living near different ethnic groups of the same religion correlates with higher income and — here’s where his argument doesn’t hold water — that the result cannot be mediated through any other civic activity than the influence it has on churchgoing. But the finagling he has done means precisely that churchgoing is not the independent variable he makes it out to be. Living closer to ethnically diverse co-religionists correlates with socioeconomic differences for a host of reasons apart from frequency of attending church.
Wealth From Worship?
Is going to church more than its own reward? “Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims that regular religious participation leads to better education, higher income and a lower chance of divorce. His results (based on data covering non-Hispanic white Americans of several Christian denominations, other faiths and none) imply that doubling church attendance raises someone’s income by almost 10%.”(The Economist )
