In the US, the relationship is the other way around: More religious areas have elevated levels of violent crime, substance abuse and a couple of other things generally considered dysfunctional. But religion (at least as it is measured in these surveys) correlates with poverty and poor education, which are known risk factors for all these things. I am not aware of any body of studies that has stripped out those confounders, nor established which way(s) the cause-and-effect relationship runs between an excess of piety and a lack of wealth and education.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.