OK, Dave, I read the original article that your article cited. The original article is here:
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
Essentially the study says: USA has a higher rate of religiosity, and has a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases, teen abortion, and under-five mortality rate, etc., than other first world nations, so these social ills must be due to the religiosity (not, say, an abysmal public health policy).
The study did not consider the higher birthrate in the USA (there being a high correlation between young men and crime), the huge mixing of immigrant populations (that makes parts of the USA "third world"), extremely liberal gun-control, the wealth and disparity of wealth, the apartheid-like conditions of the social structure of just a generation ago, the cult of individualism, and so many other factors unique to the USA.
All of the data is presented as correlations of gross populations. On closer look, all of the countries in each of the charts, except the USA, were in a fairly random cloud. So if you compare the center of the cloud with the single point for USA, you could make the statement "the USA generally had higher markers for religiosity and also had higher rates of socially undesirable acts than the rest of the select nations studied", which is not the same as asserting "if you are more religious you are more likely to act immorally". But that is, in a nutshell, what they were asserting. Most anomalies to this assertion were explained away.
The study lumped the entire USA together, and compared it with relatively small European countries, as well as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It would be interesting to see the USA divided up by regions, but again, there would be only correlation, not cause-and-effect. The Eastern European countries are omitted, which conveniently omits "anomalies" of high atheism in combination with high abortion rates, low life span, and other social ills. South Africa is also conspicuously absent.
So to summarize, I'm not convinced.