Chart of the Week – Irreligion vs. Absentee Fathers

So there is this Catholic psychologist named Paul C. Vitz peddling the idea that atheism is often born of fatherlessness. This is not a book of apologetics, as one might expect, but rather an extended circumstantial ad hominem:

As he did in the first edition, Vitz makes an important point — the book does not try to prove or disprove the existence of God. Rather, its goal is to examine some of the “irrational” underlying reasons some people become atheists.

If we wanted to explore whether fatherlessness generally leads to godlessness, we should try to find some sort of mathematical relationship between the two in any given society. I was unable to find exactly the social variables that I would have liked, but the general approach might look something like this at a state-by-state level (including D.C. and Puerto Rico):

If Dr. Vitz is correct in his hypothesis that fatherlessness often leads to godlessness, we should expect to see at least a modest positive correleation between those living in single parent families (custodial fathers comprise only 17% of these) and those who profess no religion. What we see instead is a weak negative correlation (R2=.15) indicating that as the probability of being raised by a single parent goes up, the probability of rejecting religious faith goes down. Of the states which are above the national average in single parentage (35%) only two are above the national average for irreligion (20%), those being Delaware and Nevada.

This is a really quick-and-dirty back-of-the-envelope sort of analysis, relative to the powerful statistical tools one usually sees deployed in the social sciences literature, but I would wager that this chart is still evidentially superior to anything you are likely to find in Vitz’s book. I will give him props for originality, however, I’ve never before seen anyone attempt to bolster the nightmarish worldview of Catholicism with the pseudoscience of Freudianism.