During their Christmas break from school I took my teenage kids to see “The Golden Compass”—a movie based on the popular children’s books by Philip Pullman. In his famous trilogy, Pullman attempts to communicate a decidedly atheistic worldview through a compelling fantasy narrative. The film was fast paced, well acted, and visually splendid so it kept my attention for the entire two hours.

Of course, even though the anti-religious aspects were diluted in the movie, I was busy drinking in all the symbols and the obvious atheistic world view that was being set forth. Over burgers and fries after the movie I asked my kids what they thought the underlying message of the movie was. All three agreed: religious people steal children and then harm them all in the name of what is good; religious people believe unscientific myths and then manipulate everyone and everything in order to protect their myths. I think they nailed it.

“The Golden Compass” film is by any measure a pop-culture thrust of the new atheist movement that has books at the top of the best seller lists. One common thread that runs through the new atheism is that people who set aside belief in God can be just as good and moral, if not more so, than traditional religious people—who are usually thought to be decidedly harmful to civil society.

At a conference this fall in Washington, D.C., prominent social scientists from Princeton, Penn State, and Baylor put this idea to rest. Analyzing data over a forty year period, the scholars concluded that by a whole range of measures, religious people are more likely to contribute to, stabilize, and enhance the societies to which they are attached. Fun facts along these lines: religious people are 30% more likely to engage in altruistic actions, 2.4 times more likely to engage in civic volunteerism, and among teens almost every study ever done shows religious commitment to reduce significantly drinking, drugs, sex, and suicide.

One of the new atheist icons, Christopher Hitchens, has become famous for saying that “religion poisons everything.” Fictional motion pictures may be the best place to try to make this charge stick because the facts derived from careful study of the matter certainly don’t show this to be the case.