WHAT HAPPENED TO GOD?
Rodney Stark in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "If asked what the word 'religion' means, most religious people will say it's about God or the Gods. Yet, for a century, most social-scientific studies of religion have examined nearly every aspect of faith except what people believe about Gods. When and why did we get it so wrong?"

By "wrong" he means emphasizing the study of religious ritual instead of the study of people's beliefs about God.

"Recently, I conducted an elaborate research study to test those conclusions, based on data for the United States and 33 other nations. The results were consistent and overwhelmingly supportive. In each of 27 nations within Christendom, the greater the importance people placed on God, the less likely they were to approve of buying goods they knew to be stolen, of someone failing to report that they had accidentally damaged an auto in a parking lot, or of smoking marijuana. The correlations were as high in Protestant as in Roman Catholic nations and where average levels of church attendance were high or low. Indeed, participation in Sunday services (a measure of ritual activity) was only weakly related to moral attitudes, and those correlations disappeared or became very small when the God 'effects' were removed through regression analysis. That is, God matters; ritual doesn't."

It's a little esoteric for us non-sociology majors but still worth a glance. Link to the complete article.