Purity is one of Jonathan Haidt's five moral factors and it is part of the cluster where religious/conservative people score higher than secular/liberal people. 
 
My guess is that there is a sort of moral general factor too and that if you score higher on purity it indicates that the person has stronger overall moral instincts.

An analogue would be going to see a really bad art film that everyone says is brilliant. You don't actually enjoy the movie itself, but you do enjoy the fact that you have the good taste to see such a "brilliant" piece of art. 
 
There is a nice bloggingheads with Paul Bloom that is relevant here: 
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20086

I think ben g has it. The secular are still picking off the young of the marginally religious. Eventually though I suspect that this will be subject to diminishing returns as those most genetically disposed towards conservative religion will simply ignore any secularizing indoctrination/propaganda they get from public education and the media. 
 
I don't think that the secular have much reason to fear the religious beating them by breeding, at least in the short to medium term, for the simple reason that the secular are still the overwhelming majority of the population. 
 
Please note that secular != atheist or agnostic.

I used WVS waves 3 & 4 and aggregated them together. I looked at WVS 5 separately. So some nations are entered twice. 
 
My bad.

Incidently, quite a few of the really religious Dutch have immigrated to rural areas of Canada, where they are quite prominent in conservative Protestant circles.

Why are Great Britain and the Netherlands lister twice? And with different numbers.

I think it is also important to note that human societies have mostly been getting less and less violent over time. The rise in crime in the 20s and 30s and again up since 1960 was a reversal of this general trend.

What I'm saying is that it's possible that the average for this factor truly decline among the population -- not that it stayed the same, but that we threw a bunch of the highly criminal in jail. 
 
It is possible. The question is what is the most likely explanation and it seems unclear at this point.

Child abusers are very hard to catch and lock up, so greater incarceration rates are minor at best. 
 
The problem with this is that by throwing tons of bad guys in jail for whatever crime you happen to nab them for, you reduce the number of people with more general criminal tendencies. For example, U.S. drug laws aren't really about stopping drugs, but rather function as a kind of a broad dragnet for getting undesirables off the street. Throwing a bunch of low level drug dealers or petty criminals in jail will de facto throw a lot of child abusers into jail. I guess what I am saying is that we have to look for a general factor for criminality, somewhat like that for intelligence, before we start assuming that people are generally just becoming better behaved.

Well, the uncontested fact is that violent crime is still about 2-3 times what it was in 1960. 
 
I would guess that the 50s represented a kind of sweet spot where society had the benefit both of more efficient law enforcement and fairly socially conservative mores. Now we only have the former. 
 
gc is right that we have managed to clamp down on crime through: 
 
1. throwing a huge portion of people, particularly but not exclusively, blacks in jail 
2. better crime prevention technology 
3. having less valuable stuff to steal 
 
A couple more points: 
 
1. I mean really, who carries cash around anymore. Does robbery pay anymore? 
 
2. Stuff is now cheap. Or are you going to break into my house and steal my $50 DVD player? Or my CD collection? Puhleeease.

As the 19th century wore on, aristocratic patronage was becoming less and less important, and artists had to make a living by appealing to the public. Contra Steve, the late 19th century wasn't the peak of music let alone painting, but it was the peak of music and art oriented towards the general public.

there is currently an irrational fashion bubble for that time period -- it had to be some period, so why not that one? 
 
The art from this era may be overvalued compared to it's merits, but that doesn't make it's popularity irrational or arbitrary. Late 19th Century artists were just very good at producing art that was accessible to the general public as well as being worthwhile for the artistic elite. Hence, I think it is likely that art from that era will remain popular with the public. For example, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky and Verdi were very good at writing melody and the Impressionists were great at giving us cheerful, colourful things to look at. Those things aren't going to lose their appeal to the general public anytime soon. 
 
Things work both ways too. Experts, who like to hone their own prestige as gatekeepers, tend to devalue works of art that are immediately accessible to the public and need little interpretation. Accessibility decreases their prestige. Ulysses requires experts to understand, Great Expectations does not. Guess which one is preferred by the experts. People like Dickens, Tchaikovsky, Disney, Spielberg are penalized for being able to appeal to the general public as well as the aesthetes.

TGGP: 
You are right. Pure deduction is way too strong. But I would still maintain that Darwin and Smith's theorizing went way beyond the data they had access to and yet they still more often than not got it right.

It's interesting that fellows like Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and Charles Darwin got so much right considering the limited amount of data they had compared to today's political scientists, economists or biologists. Pure deduction can get some people pretty far, but you have to be _extrordinarily_ honest and self aware, and most people are not. I don't think it is stupidity per se (lots of really, really smart people say really stupid shit, while Darwin did what he did with a ~135 IQ) so much as factors like sloppiness, ideological blinders and falling in love with your own ideas.

I scored 33 on that libertarian test . . . and I consider myself a paleoconservative! Doubtless my libertarian score would have plummetted though had they asked more questions on social issues.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Mormons an afterclap of puritanism. 
 
Also, Mormon teaching bears a lot of resemblance to liberal, self help, power of positive thinking theology of the New England type.

Good god, isn't Larison still in his twenties? He looks 40 in that video. _That's_ what he should be worried about. Then there is me. I'm 34 and I look 26. Definitely some disadvantages, but much better for chasing the younger women. Isn't that right, agnostic? 
 
I think we should start some wild speculation on why some people look older than they are and some younger. ;)

Why _did_ the the best eras for music (the mid to late 60s and the early to mid 90s) coincide with some of the most ridiculous political posturing ever?

When I was doing a little bit of internet dating, I found that a lot of girls on those sites often choose photos that do not do them justice. So, if they looked even remotely attractive, I went out with them. I got quite a few pleasant surprises, though there were some shall we say less than pleasant shockers too.

I already presented nationally representative data showing that's not true. 
 
Follow the money.

Uh, ever hear of the Hays code or the even stricter censorship on television. You couldn't even say the word "pregnant" on TV. 
 
Elvis' dancing could only be shown from the waist up. And now we have Dirrty being blasted into livingrooms everywhere. 
 
In my own lifetime, I can remember even during my undergrad years almost no one in polite converstion would admit to watching porn. There was none of this stuff about coming up with your porn name or whatever. 
 
Porn consumption went way up with the introduction of videocassetes, where you didn't have to go to some sleazy theatre.

First of all, in the past the culture was a whole lot less sexualized period. To name only one example, porn is way more mainstream now. Whatever sexual images or ways of dressing that were out there may have featured younger girls, but those images and ways of dressing were a _lot_ tamer than the images put out today. 
 
Second, people may have been more comfortable with teenage girls being at least somewhat sexual because those girls were often getting ready for marriage at 18 or 19. Since the teenage years were a prelude to matrimony, not a career, people were pretty realistic that these young girls were going to be trying to attract husbands at that age. 
 
Combine the two, much less sexual imagery on an absolute scale and a more respectable goal, and it is not unreasonable for people to be upset with the sexually provocative images and dress of young girls.