hmmm, i fail to see much science here. for one, there is no control, which is necessary for all science, even social sciences. a control mechanism would be useful in eliminating exogenous factors. therefore, adding other poor religious and non-religious countries and sampling them over time would alleviate problems inherent in the study. other factors, such as immigration, can easily explain the difference in violent crime rates between western europe and the US. having only one religious country by which one measures makes for poor statistics. it also considers western europe as a unitary, homogenous actor, which is an assumption that undermines its arguement. for example, certainly there are differences in religiousity between sweden and france. do they have different rates of violent crime? none of these statistics are static. surely a scientific study would account for sampling errors by measuring over time. the violent crime rate in the US has dropped significantly over the last 20 years. according to this study, one would expect a similar drop in religiosity. has this happened? the study doesn't even bother to find out. of course the major flaw in this is that it fails to adequately define its terms. just because most americans believe in god does not necessarily make them christians. additionally, it makes a rather poor case for quality of life. claiming that societies are "worse off" inherently implies that their quality of life is lower. however, the quality of life in the US as measured by the economist is much higher than many of the nations listed in the survey. and surely ireland, which was listed in january as having the highest quality of life of all countries on earth, is far more christian than japan, which i don't recall as even being in the top ten. so as far as i can tell, it really doesn't take much critical thinking skills to be published in the Journal of Religion and Society.