Maggie's Farm

Correlation, not causation, is one of the first rules of statistics. Cause is often very difficult to establish, even in hard sciences. The research you suggest would only tell you associations, not causes. Speaking French does not cause people to eat cheese. Being black does not cause them to play basketball. Increased pornography has occurred in a context of sexual crime going down, despite the fact that sexual criminals are more likely to obtain pornography. It turns out pornography is the cart, not the horse. It is not just that no one has bothered to check whether violent people use video games, it as been checked repeatedly, but there is zero evidence that it is a cause, despite many people being hopeful of the opposite.

I disliked the article about Roman Catholics and the Real Presence despite agreeing with parts of it. Too many people confuse disliking stylistic changes with a deterioration in piety and belief, simply because it appears to them that the two must, simply must, be related. We don't actually know what percentage of Catholics understood and fully believed in Real Presence in 1950, or 1850, or 1150. We know what they were supposed to believe and officially believed, little more. It's not only Catholics who fall prey to this false belief about the past. Selection bias and confirmation bias rule in this area.

I dislike some modern Christian music and what people choose to wear to service, but I recognize that those are more deeply related to my culture and their culture than it is to their piety, character, or orthodoxy. I dress better now and more deeply respond to traditional music than when I was young and scruffy, but I may have been a better Christian then.