As already mentioned, church attendance is highly correlated with the religious
beliefs—the correlation of the monthly-church-attendance variable with the belief
variables is 0.75 for hell and 0.81 for heaven. The attendance and belief variables also
have similar sample standard deviations (see Table 3). Therefore, if we consider cases in
Table 4, such as columns 1 and 2, where the estimated coefficients on the two religiosity
variables are of similar magnitude but opposite sign, the results suggest that being more
or less religious overall would not have a strong relationship with economic growth.
That is, if church attendance and religious beliefs move together in the usual fashion, the
overall relation with economic growth tends to be weak.