Believing in hell doesn’t stop criminals from committing serious crimes. In fact, according to a 2021 study, male inmates are just as likely to believe in eternal punishment as the average American man.
This data complicates President Donald Trump’s claim to reporters on Tuesday morning that having strong religion means less crime.
“When you have strong religion, you have less crime,” Trump said when asked about the Rededicate 250 prayer rally. “It’s like, ‘Gee, I want to go to heaven, so I’m not going to do this or that.’ Who knows.”
Trump also emphasized that “religion is very important for our country” since the United States was built “based on religion.” Trump did not specify which religion he was referring to ― or if he was referring to all religions.
Rededicate 250, a mostly conservative Christian prayer gathering to celebrate the U.S.’ 250 years of independence, was held in Washington, D.C., on May 17 and was led by evangelical Christian leaders. The president gave a video address to the crowd and read from “The Books of Chronicles,” a book in the Hebrew Bible. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also spoke. It also featured speakers who have previously argued the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, a claim disputed by historians.
Despite Trump’s claims on Tuesday, research shows that religion and spirituality can have both positive and negative relationships with crime; community stemming from religion might be what matters most; and fear of divine punishment is actually one of the weaker deterrents to crime.
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“To give religion some credit, there is an association between stronger personal religious beliefs and some crime-related attitudes, behaviors and outcomes,” Amy Adamczyk, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told HuffPost. Adamczyk has researched how personal beliefs can help shape people’s criminal behaviors.
“But they tend to be the more subtle things,” she said, using stealing a $10 item from a toy store as an example. “Religion doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on major crimes,” like robbery, rape or murder.
In a statement to HuffPost, the White House backed up Trump’s claim.
“Once again, President Trump is right about everything! There is plentiful research to support the idea that when you have strong religion you have less crime,” Taylor Rogers, White House spokeswoman, wrote.
Experts said that overall ‘religion doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on major crimes.’
“Criminological research provides empirical evidence that an individual’s involvement in religion or religiosity … is inversely related to criminal and delinquent behavior,” Sung Joon Jang, a research professor of criminology at Baylor University, told HuffPost. But that is based on objective and subjective indicators, and observational data. “Experimenting on the religion-crime relationship is practically impossible.”
Some research on the intersection of crime and religion has found that some aspects of faith reduce criminal activity, but there is no concrete evidence identifying which aspects have strong, positive influences capable of eliminating crime entirely.
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One reason, Adamczyk argues, may be that there are already secular rules in place — laws and authorities — that determine what is wrong, and people follow them. When religion does deter crime, it usually happens through social pressure rather than faith. It has a “contextual effect,” according to Adamczyk.
“It doesn’t always work, but my work and some others have shown that when religious people are around other religious people, they’re even more likely not to engage in deviant acts,” Adamczyk said, pointing to minor infractions like shoplifting. “The whole reason for that is what we call a religious contextual effect. … I’m not religious, but if you drop me in the Bible belt, I’m going to be a little more careful about what I say, what I do because I’m learning from the environment around me.”
While some religious environments can curb misconduct, they don’t deter extreme crime. Sometimes, it can do the opposite. If a crime is severe enough to override basic laws, religion can sometimes operate more as a justification than a deterrent.
“Religion can have the opposite effect,” Adamczyk added. “We can think about murder and terrorism, and in some cases, religion is the motivating source for that.”
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Belief in heaven and hell doesn’t appear to deter crime, either.
“Although there are people who choose not to commit crime in order to ‘go to heaven,’ empirical research does not indicate that is how religion generally works in reducing crime,” Jang said.
This distinction is found in a 2021 study by the Percy Foundation, a nonprofit that studies religion and criminal justice. Researchers interviewed 526 inmates and found that the majority were religious believers prior to their arrests.
Notably, 69.5% of *** offenders and 62.7% of the non-*** offenders said religious faith was “somewhat or very important” to them based on self-reported views prior to their arrests. While this is compared to 73% of adult men in the general U.S. population who say religion is “somewhat or very important,” according to a 2014 Pew survey, it’s still noteworthy that the majority of incarcerated men were religious before committing a crime.
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“It is striking that such a strong belief in eternal punishment did not deter these individuals from committing serious criminal acts,” the Percy Foundation reported.
The research argues this could happen because criminals construct their own religious loopholes based on what they know.
One 18-year-old convicted of theft mentioned in the Percy Foundation report claimed to be a religious believer and told researchers he wasn’t going to hell for stealing because “Jesus forgives you for all your bad **** if you donate some money to the church, or pray and say you’re sorry.” A 40-year-old convicted for scamming people also featured in the Percy Foundation report added there were people committing worse crimes than they were, so those criminals would go to hell over them.
Low crime rates can more likely be attributed to community.
Where religious congregations are associated with lower crime rates, the effect is strongest in areas with greater socioeconomic disadvantage and high income inequality, according to a 2025 research article.
Researchers argue this is not necessarily because they’re religious institutions, but perhaps because these communities lack other institutions or support systems that more affluent areas have, like childcare and youth programs.
Adamczyk argues this creates a greater sense of belonging and mutual accountability that keeps crime down, not religion itself.
“This is not about a fear of God, [it’s about] communities and connectedness, and supporting each other and feeling like people are taking care of you, looking out for you,” she said.
