The legacy media often portrays the rise of irreligion as harmless—merely a matter of Americans owning up to their declining belief in God—but a groundbreaking new study reveals a terrifying correlation between the increase of Americans who identify with no religion and upticks in rape and suicide rates.

The Ph.D. sociologist who uncovered this connection argues for universal school choice, especially programs that enable parents to direct the education funds for their students to religious schools, in order to preserve the self-control that accompanies religious observance, according to his research.

“If the parents want to choose religious schools and want to preserve the religious faith of their children, well, my research indicates that’s going to be very good for everyone,” Philip Truscott told The Daily Signal in a Zoom interview Tuesday. A sociologist who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Surrey in England, Truscott taught as a professor of sociology at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, for 10 years, ending in July.

If religion makes a comeback, “everybody’s less likely to be a rape victim, everybody will have less need for public expenditure on mental health, because for every completed suicide, you get like 10 that are attempted suicides,” he said.

Rape and Religion The academic journal Journal of Sociology has and Christianity published Truscott’s abstract “Rape, Suicide, and the Rise of Religious Nones,” in its fall 2024 edition. In the paper, Truscott compares five sets of data: the rape reports colleges and universities submit to the Department of Education, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (where police departments report rapes), the Pew Religious Landscape Survey from 2014 (where respondents identified their religion as “none”), the Public Religion Research Institute’s surveys from 2014 onward (where respondents recorded their religious affiliation as “unaffiliated”), and the suicide rates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Truscott’s analysis showed a very clear correlation between increases in the rate of Americans identifying as religious “nones” and rape and suicide rates.