This exploratory study examines whether country-level childhood lead exposure is ecologically associated with the belief that morality requires belief in God (Pew 2014, 46 countries). The principal contribution is methodological. Four lead-related indicators that differ in year, age, and construct yield sharply different results on the same outcome: a hand-curated BLL series (r = 0.87, 100% of 32 specification-curve combinations significant), IHME mean BLL (r = 0.69, partial r after GDP = 0.34, 47% significant), prevalence above 5 µg/dL (r = 0.71, 28%), and lead-attributable DALYs (r = 0.20, 0%).Leave-one-out analysis on the IHME measure (n = 45) shows reasonable stability (r range: +0.67 to +0.71). Two subnational probes qualify the pattern: in England and Wales, higher BLL is modestly associated with retained Christianity (r = +0.22, p = 0.008) but lacks deprivation controls; in India, BLL is negatively associated with declarative religiosity, indicating the cross-national direction does not generalize uniformly. The main conclusion is methodological: ecological inference is highly sensitive to indicator choice, and the present data do not establish a robust independent lead-specific association with moral theism.
Roman Petrov (Fri,) studied this question.