Scholarly discussion and empirical study of the religion-crime relationship goes back to the beginning of criminological thought, though at times such discussion and study has been limited in content and crude in approach. Nonetheless, religion has rarely been incorporated into major theories of crime and criminological research. However, scientific studies of the influence of religion on crime and drug use have been increasingly conducted, particularly since the publication of Hirschi and Stark’s landmark study “Hellfire and Delinquency” (Hirschi and Stark 1969, cited under the “Hellfire” Study and Controversy), which reported no relationship between adolescent religiosity and delinquency. This rather unexpected finding drew two opposite reactions in the form of empirical research. One line of research suggested that Hirschi and Stark failed to find a significant religiosity-delinquency relationship because they analyzed the type of delinquency and data that was less likely to have a significant relationship detected. The other offered a theory explaining how the null finding confirms the spuriousness (i.e., nonexistence) of the religiosity-delinquency relationship and an empirical test of the theory. However, according to reviews of existing research—whether based on a method of traditional literature review, systematic review, or meta-analysis—a majority of studies tend to confirm significant negative associations between religion and crime and drug use. The negative associations have been found in research conducted at both micro and macro levels. To explain the micro-level relationship, researchers have mostly applied control theories or learning and socialization theories (or both), though other theoretical perspectives have been employed as well, such as general strain theory, a social capital perspective, and developmental/life-course perspectives. In testing these theories, researchers have examined bidirectional or reciprocal relationships between religion and crime rather than assuming that the religion-crime relationship is unidirectional. Macro-level research on religion and crime, on the other hand, has been conducted to test Stark’s “moral communities” thesis and other contextual effects of religion. In addition, some researchers have raised and addressed methodological issues in research on religion and crime, such as selection bias and appropriate statistical and modeling approaches to properly estimate the religion-crime relationship. Although negative associations between religion and crime tend to have been empirically established by previous studies, the “criminology of religion” as a subfield is still in its infancy.
Antithyroid drug use during pregnancy and the risk of birth defects in offspring: systematic review and meta‐analysis of observational studies with methodological considerations