[gnicholas]

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.