Girls who go to church work harder

I wonder if the same applies to boys? I went church every week, received all the sacraments, and was even an altar boy for a time, which meant that I sometimes served mass every day. At 7 in the morning. In the summer.

Thing is, though, that I never believed a word of Christianity. From the beginning, it made no sense to me. Perhaps being forced to do what I didn't want to do prepped me for the working world. It's not so much of a work ethic as a cross to bear.

This past weekend I attended my niece's first communion. Seeing her dressed up like a tiny bride, hearing the talk of crucifixion and cannibalism, watching the guy in the special clothes sprinkle the special water on people to make them special too--I wanted to grab her a run like hell, to save her from a lifetime of conflicted emotions and guilt.

I feared that even witnessing such claptrap would make my daughter crazy. But when the priest said that we were in the presence of God, I heard her say, "Well, I'm not." I stifled a cheer.

"religious observance when young may give women a direction or “calling” to their personal conduct as adults, including a grea ter focus on market work. “Religious participation in childhood may instill a work ethic that is driven by early religious training, beliefs, or practice,” he says."

Maybe it's more like girls who go to church learn the "Shut up and do it" ethic better than girls who don't, which also applies to the workplace?

Ahem...I say that as a churchgoing Catholic.

I'm sorry that the author encountered scarring. However, while I wasn't raised in a christian household, I became a born-again Christian during college. Looking at how life works, which is laid in clear times in the Bible, my life is better. I do try my best work hard, and that's at everything I do. I struggling being lazy like everyone else, but I'm called to be responsible for what I'm given. However, this doesn't mean we're to be work-aholics, that was why God created the Sabbath :) So, there's a balance, and I think it's good when some places can encourage a hard work ethic instead of lazy "what can I do to get by and make the most money" which we all struggle against.

I am not Catholic so I have no idea what's that's like but I say to the Gentlemen in the first comment if that's the way you feel about your religion do something about it. If you ever feel like that about you religion then obvestly it isn't what God wants for you. I can tell you from my own experience that feeling like you want to run away from somthing usually means you have to stand up and do something about it. For me I was going to a church where God wasn't the leader and therefore my heart was in the wrong place and yes it took time but I found my heart in Christ and in a different church. And I couldn't be happier.

My question about this is how any of this is wrong? By going to church and learning that being in this world that there are responsibilities? I see no wrong in that and I think that no scarring can come from that. If you are guilty that means you haven't given your sins to God. He CAN and WILL forgive you for them you just have to love him with all of your heart. Now if the parents of the child refused to let the child have a mind of it's owns and explore the world of religion then don't blame church blame your parents. Church by all means is NEVER a bad thing. I mean really think about it if you find as church that really has the spirit of Christ think of the possibilities...

God's are endless. He made the sun and moon stop for Joshua and his army. He took Paul, a murder of christians and showed him compassion. Grow from Christ and let Him love you.

I am not Catholic so I have no idea what's that's like but I say to the Gentlemen in the first comment if that's the way you feel about your religion do something about it. If you ever feel like that about you religion then obvestly it isn't what God wants for you. I can tell you from my own experience that feeling like you want to run away from somthing usually means you have to stand up and do something about it. For me I was going to a church where God wasn't the leader and therefore my heart was in the wrong place and yes it took time but I found my heart in Christ and in a different church. And I couldn't be happier.

My question about this is how any of this is wrong? By going to church and learning that being in this world that there are responsibilities? I see no wrong in that and I think that no scarring can come from that. If you are guilty that means you haven't given your sins to God. He CAN and WILL forgive you for them you just have to love him with all of your heart. Now if the parents of the child refused to let the child have a mind of it's owns and explore the world of religion then don't blame church blame your parents. Church by all means is NEVER a bad thing. I mean really think about it if you find as church or a family that really has the Spirit of Christ in them...think of the possibilities...

God's are endless. He made the sun and moon stop for Joshua and his army. He took Paul, a murder of christians and showed him compassion. Grow from Christ and let Him love you.

Nothing related to your post, but welcome back!

Out of sheer habit, I kept on clicking on your blog link, only to see "I'm the turkey in this sandwich." (Incidentally, only reminded me of Dagwood and how much I like Turkey club sandwiches)

Glad your back.

Oh, yeah, Lisa. Welcome back.

And Maggie, I did do something about it: I realized I'm an atheist.

From Maggie - "Church by all means is NEVER a bad thing."

What are your thoughts on the ranch in Texas? That's church.

I wonder where the study pulled the sample from? If in Athens, GA, then it seems like the results would be skewed since the majority of people here grew up going to church regularly. When so many people go to church - the probability of those who work harder also going to church often would be pretty high.

AND what if working harder is not what you want to do, but working smarter is. Then wouldn't it benefit you if you didn't go to church regularly as a girl? If you work smarter then you have more time off with your family. Isn't that important to God?

I suspect this has more to do with the structure of going to a certain place at a certain time every week, versus really the fact that it's "church". So it's not about any sort of belief system as it's how the act alone of getting into some sort of focused routine at an early age will reflect at a later age in one's work ethics.
I would like to know the extent of the study though and if this would be the same if taken in a big city where less people go to church.

Gosh forbid there are institutions that teaches us at a young age the virtues of hard work. Sad day when these institutions are insulted for simply instilling in us a sense of pride for doing the right thing.

As far as working harder, I agree with the person who noted that lots of people go to church. Maybe this study should do a few more cross tabs and see if other factors also influenced hard working behavior. Possibly those working longer are also working smarter, the study didn't analyze that.

Concerning the other comments, I went to church and the first time I heard that I should feel guilty was in high school when the guidance teacher informed us all that people who went to church felt guilty. The Catholic kids didn't feel guilty either.

The surprising and hurtful thing was that the non-churchgoers believed the teacher. But I realized that kids naturally want to go along with the teacher and some said that they were concerned for their grade. The teacher was wise not to ask us churchgoers since it was obvious that he would not believe us if we said that we did not feel guilty. Maybe churchgoers may work harder because sometimes comments about churches are hurtful and churchgoers may feel that they have to do better to be considered equal. Did the study look into that?

Is this a gender related issue at all? How strong is the correlation with "girls". Are women included in the sample.

Seems to me that the corporate mind has managed to do it's fair share of brain washing for either gender. A cousin of mine is a CPA. Talked with him last week, and said he had put in a 120 hour work week. He attends a baptist church in one of Obama's narrow minded, gun totin' small towns.

Can you enjoy a lazy moment or do your thoughts move so fast that you must be productive, driven, and escapist into work so as not to feel. Time for a good arm chair, cup of something hot and a good novel.

This is just a load of garbage. Out of all the women that I've ever known and still to this day have ever demonstrated is laziness and the expectation of someone else doing everything FOR them. If anything, I see ALOT more people that do NOT attend church having to prove themselves more and work harder in life. Whoever wrote this is an idiot and living in a dream world! Most that go to church have no inclination of the world around them and are closed-minded to everything. They can't handle any type of pressure or doing anything on their own, and they are also oblivious to anyone around them.

Shocking, a college in the Bible Belt spews out this study.

Please do a little more investigative work. Which Christian organization funded this study?

My, my, my. The comment section is on fire!

I grew up and still am Lutheran (Missouri Synod). I never had issues with guilt (beyond the normal, "I hope mom doesn't find out I skipped school!"). I met about a dozen or so Catholics in high school and college that claimed to be riddled with guilt. Then I heard someone tell a joke about Lutherans and guilt a couple years ago. I was totally confused. My mom explained that it was well known us Lutherans had some guilt issues. I was dumbfounded.

Point: To some a broken arm is a battle wound they will never forget. To others it is just something they need to stop by the doctor's office to get fixed.

Another interesting point: If you read through the comments carefully you will find a couple people totally misunderstanding each other. It's facsinating! It's like watching a game of Telephone when the story gets changed bit by bit until it's nowhere near the original story anymore.

As a scientist one question would be how did you arrive at these statistics. Another question would be define work. For women that continue going to church as adults, does work include volunteering at church and other things like that that beyond the workplace is just one subquestion to this point.My 3rd question would be how does your design of experiment ensure that the link to higher hours truly is related/isolated to childhood church attendance. Is this the old ice cream consumption increases in summer and auto accidents increases in summer therefore ice cream sale increases causes more car accidents kind of statistics.
I find it ironic that some of the same folks who are responding are also so quick to combat Christian beliefs as indicated by the responses, but yet are so quick to blindly believe a study like this. I guess putting a university name behind the study is the modern day Bible.

I think the article is misleading--it shows the girls who go to church work longer, not necessarily harder. To assess if the women who went to church work harder one would have to show that they accomplished more in the same amount of time as women who did not go to church went they were kids. however, the article does seem to imply that working longer is better....and I'm not sure that it is.

It's the truth. Now let's see the study which shows how lazy and abusive the men who grew up in the church turned out to be.

This study was done by the business wing of the University of Georgia. That's a state school, not a church college as some have suggested.

As far as statistical method, the most likley one was a simple survey with fairly straight forward anaysis of variance on the results. This is afterall a business school so socialological methods are the most likley.

Since they actually reported a difference it was almost certainly signicant at a 95% confidence interval, anything less would have gotten them laughed at. Of course the error was likley estimated based on the number of surveys, changing those assumptions might change some of the the results but probably not enough to push it out of the 90% confidence range.

More interesting to me was what they didnt report. After collected a large number of what were likley long surveys and correlating every factor to every response, the only significant correlation they could find was that women work more hours if they have gone to church. I get an image of a grad student desperately combing though the data looking for something, anything that they might draw a conclusion from.

I sounds like they were trying to understand the effects of childhood activities on future work performance, a perfectly reasonable thing for a business school to be doing. But I also thing that the correlation between good parenting and church attendance isnt as clear cut as they might have been hoping.

What truly bothers me is the way this study will be misquoted by those that have already assumed that good==church.

FYI, I am a Presby, heck I'm even a serving elder.

This is further proof that the school system has failed at providing the ethical leadership that the church does, which is sorely needed as our culture demands more entitlements.

As far as your personal experience, I feel very sadly for you and am disappointed in your negative commentary. Not everyone shares your opinion, although you write as though this is a common belief.

Our adult children do share your sentiments; they attend church regularly. Our youngest just finished her second missions trip and is returning this summer to Brazil for at least one more year.

Whether your bad experience was due to your parents, the church, or both, I sincerely hope you have or develop a personal relationship with the Lord.

friends--judging by your comments here and your numerous e-mails, i'm seeing that many of you have passionate opinions about just WHY women who grew up religious would work harder as adults. and that my catholic jokes don't go over with non-catholic readers. the joke, friends, is that catholics are motivated in large part by guilt. i don't presume to speak for other christians. in fact, i don't presume to speak for all catholics--just this lazy, guilt-ridden, bad-joke-making one. peace to you all. :)

Maybe the Catholic church, with its lumbering hierarchy and convoluted and contradictory belief system, creates a greater share of guilt than a less centralized denominations. The guilty people I've known--myself included--have had a difficult time reconciling what they've been taught and what they think is true--cognitive dissonance. I have never met a Catholic who agrees with the pope's views on major (or minor) issues or even knows Catholic theology all that well, which means they aren't Catholic. Even my mom, who thought about becoming a nun as a child and goes to church, um, religiously, laughed at me when I told her that Catholics are supposed to believe that the host physically turns into human flesh and the wine into human blood. She thought I was kidding. I had to show her a book that talked about transubstantiation, and she still doesn't believe it.

I'm not guilty anymore because I don't believe the stuff I was taught as a child. But this weekend, during my niece's communion, my mom burst into tears. Later she told me she was crying because my brother's kids will be the only ones who receive the sacraments because neither my sister nor I are Catholic. Jeez, thanks ma.

I agree so much much with this, but i don't think it has to do at all with guilt. I think it's just an inner conviction to seize the day. we only have so much time!

What I find interesting is that in the last quote block Lisa posted it says

"'Religious participation in childhood may instill a work ethic that is driven by early religious training, beliefs, or practice,' he says."

It doesn't say "Religious participation in childhood will instill", or "is likely to" or "has been shown to". Instead, it just says "may". That doesn't seem very definitive at all.

I don't think that this study is saying that children who regularly attend church become better, more productive members of society, or more positive people. All it is saying is that they "may" work longer hours through their lifetime. Regardless of your religious beliefs, is that a good thing? Is it a goal of any church to train children to work more hours in their lifetime instead of spending it with family, or producing art, or giving it to their faith?

What struck me was that the study is probably right, with some people. Religion doesn’t take with everyone, in fact, the behavior of some of the fanatics strongly turned me off so much I felt like they were psycho-manipulating my mind & ran away. It took me 15 yrs to start looking seriously at Christianity again, to be able to separate the people from the teachings.

Religion brings out the extremes in people. Good and bad. Churches are no better than the people in them. The woman who said look for a church that has real love is right, if you can find it. (As you can see, I’m still skeptical about love in churches.) I admire the Shakers, who put simplicity & purpose in their work; their motto was, “Hands to work, hearts to God.” They combined work with Godliness, they didn’t separate them.

I woke up about 10 yrs ago and realized I was living life from “the outside in” instead of from “the inside out”, as Martha Beck says. My church did not teach us to feel God, it taught us to obey. Maybe that’s what a ‘midlife crisis’ really is. I know one thing, since I woke up, I don’t want to be a part of the rat-race ever again. I want a meaningful life, not one lived fanatically adhering to someone else’s idea of ethics, one lived according to my instinctive knowledge of right & wrong.

Work should be wonderful. If it’s not, I figure I’m in the wrong job. And I’ve been in wrong jobs way too long.

It’s a shame people don’t live to be 500. It's taken me 50 yrs to learn to enjoy life.

Jeni - Good for you! Great comment.

response to mike---not having seen the study, I would have to agree with your guess on the statistical method. If so, this is very entry level statistical analysis(high school really). With all the dynamic variables that go into an individual's make up, that is way to simple of a statistical method to be drawing those conclusions. You can make data say anything you really want if you massage it enough or don't analyze it enough or don't apply the proper methods. Thanks for your comment mike.
It is still amazing to me how many conclusions people draw from simple statistics that are not even looked at with a critical eye.
FYI--a scientist and a Christian and a woman who decided in freedom not guilt to leave the workplace for a year for the value of rest

I don't see why people are getting up in arms over this. It does NOT draw any definitive conclusions.

"religious OBSERVANCE, WHEN YOUNG, MAY give WOMEN a direction or “calling” to their personal conduct as adults, INCLUDING a greatER focus on market work."

It's not saying "being religious", it's saying "religious observance" - i.e., most likely following the family rules. It re-emphasizes that they only have information on WOMEN who did this activity WHEN YOUNG. It acknowledges that the work ethic thing is only one possible effect of this activity, if it is an effect at all ("MAY"). It doesn't specify what the "focus on market work" is "greater" THAN.

So yeah, pretty much everyone except for the actual researchers were the ones drawing conclusions.

[Shelgrl: It's really quite depressing to realize that I am actually a crazy, close-minded, oblivious idiot who expects everyone else to do my work and can't handle any pressure. I was so oblivious and close-minded that I never realized that before. I am forever indebted to you for having brought me to my senses.]