One reason that the use of later observations on the right-hand side of the growth
equations may be satisfactory is that church attendance and religious beliefs exhibit a lot
of persistence over time. Hence, later values may proxy satisfactorily for the missing
earlier ones, which can be viewed as the true causes of differences in growth rates.
However, the results summarized in Table 2 suggest substantial responses of religiosity
to economic variables. Thus, there is a good chance that the religion measures would
pick up reverse causation from economic development to religiosity, rather than the
reverse.