The two collected data from 59 countries where a majority of the population followed one of the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. They ran this data - which covered slices of years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God, afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance - through statistical models. Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries. Most strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.
I assume that it is the author of the article (and not the researchers) who has confused correlation with causation. Their results show a "strong correlation between economic growth and certain shifts in beliefs". However, the article then says that "if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies". It should say that "if church attendance actually rises, it correlates with a slowing of growth in developing economies".
However, the researchers do not escape blame entirely. In the next paragraph:
McCleary says this makes sense from a strictly economic standpoint - as economies develop and people can earn more money, their time becomes more valuable. For economic growth, she says, “What you want is to have people have their children grow up in a faith, but then they should become productive members of society. They shouldn’t be spending all their time in religious services.”
For Christians (the only one of the four religions studied with which I am very familiar), this seems wildly implausible. An hour every Sunday spent in church causes the GDP growth for the entire country to slow?
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