I think there is no need to be concerned that the retraction won't be widely covered in the long run in this particular case though -- all the religious interest groups will make a big fuss about this...
That's almost like saying it's OK to falsely report about religion in the first place because "the religious interest groups will defend themselves adequately", etc.
False reporting of any sort (including the failure to correct prior false reports, whether intended or not) always causes harm. Truth and principles matter.
Furthermore, reducing ideas to power struggles between those who speak them is to commit both the genetic fallacy and the ad-hominem fallacy.
> Why would an idea exist other than to serve a purpose
Because ideas are the substrate of thought, belief, motivation, desire, and human life itself. Without ideas we lack the ability to understand anything at all.
Because it is true, or someone believes it to be so.
Because it carries explanatory power - something we all strongly desire.
You might call those reasons “purposes” - if so, I don’t disagree. But the truth or falsehood of an idea transcends any “purpose” someone may have for speaking it. This is the academic posture: to dispassionately evaluate truth claims without fearing the speaker.
Yes I understand that the naive position may be used as a default position for understanding ideas, and that is fine.
That doesn't stop us from acknowledging the fact that ideas and worldviews have strong ties and are intermingled enough that they almost always warrant an underlying motivation whether that be a noble search for truth or a way of digging further into denial.
A good religious institution should rise above the fray and not even bother fussing about something like this. No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study. It's the religious equivalent of a political cartoon--it changes no one's mind, it just fills up space and generates clicks/citations.
"Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'" (Luke 16:31)
No-one who would otherwise have accepted Christ would have rejected him based on that study.
It may be true that reading about the study would not have convinced anyone to become a practicing Christian. But there were undoubtedly people who were on the fence about going back to church, either for themselves or for their kids, who decided not to based on the purported conclusion that it made kids less generous. So just because the study alone might not have convinced anyone to follow Christ, there still might be more practicing Christians if the study had been done correctly (and therefore garnered very little coverage) or if the correction had been covered as widely as the original flawed study.
False reporting of any sort (including the failure to correct prior false reports, whether intended or not) always causes harm. Truth and principles matter.
Furthermore, reducing ideas to power struggles between those who speak them is to commit both the genetic fallacy and the ad-hominem fallacy.