In the 2007 comedy-drama Dan in Real Life, newspaper columnist Dan Burns (played by Steve Carrell) muses, “Most of the time, our plans don’t work out as we’d hoped. So instead of asking our young people what are your plans . . . maybe we should tell them this: plan to be surprised.”
Burns’s final phrase, “plan to be surprised,” may apply to several recent popular sociologies of American religion, including Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace, Bradley Wright’s Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…And Other Lies You’ve Been Told, and Rodney Stark’s edited What Americans Really Believe. This post reviews Stark, for whom Gallup provided the fieldwork.
Perhaps future generations will be less astonished, but I was amazed at the findings that diverge from prevailing sentiments commonly and passionately purveyed by professionals, professors, and pastors who pontificate about church controversies and American religion, or the lack thereof.
In Part 1, “Congregations,” Stark avers that in contrast to stereotypes of religious people as less educated, one’s education level has “no effect at all” on churchgoing. Those with post-graduate training are as likely to attend as those whose education ended at high school or sooner. Ditto for income brackets under $150,000 per anum. Conservative, traditional, and “more demanding” churches currently attract more members, volunteers, and attendees than “liberal” or comparatively secular congregations.
Moreover, “(while) it is widely believed that to be close to God, one should worship in a small, intimate congregation, surrounded by fellow worshippers who have a proper awareness that faith must recognize sin, not just happy returns” (p. 45), the data comparing small churches (usual weekly attendance under 100) and mega-churches (attendance over 1,000) reflects that mega-church attendees are more likely than small church attendees to tithe (46% vs. 36%), to have more friends in their congregation, and to volunteer more both within their church body and outside of their congregation.
Stark presents smaller churches as more “liberal” with “significantly older” attendees, but it is not clear whether his data considered age a factor when accounting for church participation. Even so, “In the sense of having friends in the congregation, the megachurch is the more intimate community. . . . Contrary to the widespread conviction among their critics that the megachurches grow mainly through their ability to gain publicity, their growth appears instead mainly to be the result of their members’ outreach” (p. 49).
Stark then becomes less dispassionate sociologist and more exasperated (and insensitive?) exhorter: “Indeed, among the things that are lost is the uninspired sound of hymns sung by a few dozen reluctant voices, as compared to the ‘joyful noise’ of thousands of voices, of large and talented choirs, and . . . professional orchestras that provide the music in the leading megachurches. Also lost is the perception that the band of faithful is old, small, and getting smaller…(and) reluctance to spread the Good Tidings to others” (51).
Part 2, “Beliefs and Practices” contains, among other statistics, charts on recounted mystical or miraculous experiences, and beliefs about who is (and who is not) going to heaven. Americans of all stripes who believe in heaven also believe that adherents of many religions, even some non-religious people will be in heaven. Only 21% who believe in heaven also believe that no “non-religious” people will enter paradise. Only 16% of Americans who believe in heaven think that no Muslims or no Buddhists will go to heaven, and only 6% believed no Jews will go there.
Part 3, “Atheism and Irreligion,” reveals that the percentage of Americans who said they did not believe in God (4%) was equal in 1944 and 2007. Furthermore, “irreligion is not effectively transmitted from parents to children…the majority of children born into an irreligious home end up joining a religious group – most often a conservative denomination” (pp. 117, 205; cf. p. 7). Even many who assert no religion say they still pray, and the majority are not “atheist,” just unaffiliated (p. 141; cf. pp. 117, 142, 205).
Perhaps most strikingly, self-identified irreligious people are “almost three times as likely” to place “great value” in Tarot, seances, psychic healing; and also to believe in “real” UFOs (p. 125). With regard to occult and paranormal belief, “it is not religion in general that suppresses such beliefs, but conservative religion. . . . Traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in the occult and paranormal” (pp. 130-31; cf. p. 145).
Part 4, “The Public Square,” looks at American political activism and finds that in spite of bestselling books fearing a theocratic takeover by the Religious Right, Evangelical Christians are actually slightly less politically active than other Americans, but like other Americans, “are about evenly split on increased funding for the military” (p. 156). Stark further finds that contrary to an assumed taboo on discussing politics and religion, a majority of Americans are “very comfortable” or “somewhat comfortable” talking about religion with family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers (pp. 163-64).
In his final chapter, Stark asks, “What happens when mom and dad take their kids to church” (pp. 183-89)? Generally, church attendance correlates with young people being “better behaved and more well-adjusted at home and at school” (p. 184) ,with lower future divorce rates, less smoking, less sexual activity at a young age, and with higher than average education. The numbers are particularly significant for girls and for women, for when a child’s father is a churchgoer, and for when both parents attend church together (pp. 184-85)…To read my conclusion in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, click here.
Great post. Although I have questions about the “Baylor Studies.” I would recommend this article on the Baylor Studies:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/greg-paul-baylor.pdf
Just something else to throw into the mix.
Best,
Thanks for the comment, Kile. I perused the article you posted, and look forward to reading it more carefully. My impression, however, is that the authors distrust Stark and the Baylor studies by berating the authors of the study as biased Baptists, but it seems to me that one could turn this criticism around and say that the authors of the article you posted don’t like the results because they sometimes may reflect negatively on secular humanists and atheists. Your thoughts?
I looked at some of the questions asked in the survey and they were specifically framed in a way that “begs the question” with a bias toward religious belief. Since the institution responsible for creating the survey was a religious institution, I don’t think they could make an impartial study.. Although, I’ve rarely seen a survey as biased as the Baylor survey except ones on the Fox News website….
If we take this study and contrast it against some of the other studies that are either unbiased or have their bias swinging in the other direction, then the truth is likely somewhere in between.
Ben,
I am not sure if it an ideological conflict here. I think Greg Paul points out empirical mistakes made in the Baylor analysis, not simply ideological differences. Regardless of whether its a Baptist of Secular Humanist study, scholars should at least get the polls, numbers, and studies right.
Best,
Sorry for the grammatical mistakes, I was in a hurry.
From a purely scientific perspective, a sample of 1,648 people in a country of 311,256,295 (at this writing) is minute. The ‘random selection’ would leave so much room for error and bias that the whole study is questionable in my opinion. Unimpressive science, in other words. Unless you were desperate, would you take a drug that had been tested on only 1,648 people without being nervous? Would you fly in an aircraft as confidently if it had been flown by just 1,648 people?
According to your article, the authors add flourish by saying they asked 350 carefully crafted questions. This raises another flag for me. Who but the religious would agree to sit and fill out a 350-question survey about religion? I would say the questionnaire itself was carefully crafted to eliminate any less avidly religious people from the minute 1,648 people they sampled.
This Kool-Aid is not for everybody. It seems to be a booster for the megachurch industry and Right-Wing ammunition to demoralize the irreligious. For me, this illustrates the need of secularists to pay much less attention to religion and the religious altogether in favor of building alternative, non-religious communities, not congregations who are consumers of an industry, constructed to exploit them.
Well-said Paul!
I would also suggest that the vast majority of people in pews in liberal churches in Mass. and N.Y. (the two states I have experience with) don’t “really” believe in god, but just show up on Sunday because it is the thing they’re supposed to do. I should know, because I used to do this.
Paul,
What part of the study, findings, or interpretation do you find demoralizing to the irreligious? Just curious as a fellow irreligious person who didn’t find himself demoralized.
Happy to hear you didn’t find yourself demoralized, Conrad. I was thinking specifically of what Stark documents regarding atheists being more likely to believe in the paranormal, psychics, etc., what some would consider to be superstitious beliefs. Also, if the percentage of atheists is similar to 1944, this contravenes the assertions of some people, both religious and irreligious that America is fast (or slowly) becoming more and more atheistic.
And what is your response to the serious methodological critique raised by the article linked by Kile? It’s an extremely important set of questions that go to the heart of the accuracy and intellectual integrity of the work you were reviewing…
An excellent question. Alas, end of the semester responsibilities are too demanding for me to go through Kile’s source more carefully for the time being. Though I agree with you that I should look at the article more carefully, and that it merits my later attention.
For now I have to limit myself to slightly extending what I say above. Some of the Stark study critiques I read previously seem more generally ticked off about the results and the Baptist-ness of the researchers, and seem to project a mirror image of what seems to be their own ideological motivations on Stark & Co.
This is especially true since some anti-theist reviewers appear to view Stark as a turncoat, since some of his earlier research was apparently more friendly to secularist and anti-religious ideals. Ergo, in addition to me just not having enough time to spare for the moment to give the article the attention it deserves, I also have to fight against my skepticism that secularist critiques of Stark I haven’t yet read carefully suffer from the same problems as critiques I’ve already read or heard (caveat: I wrote the original version of this review maybe ten months ago, so it’s been awhile since I consulted the critiques).
I will say that there are always ways to improve such surveys (e.g. one can always have a larger sample size, at least until everyone in existence has been surveyed meticulously), but given Stark’s status as an accomplished sociologist and his team of researchers, and without immediately perceiving errors in his work, I incline to give him benefit of the doubt.
P.S. A quick 15 minute revisiting of the article Kile provides does seem in my somewhat (for now) hurried perception to continue in the anti-religious trend of bashing the Baptists. The article does mention an alternate point of view on the number of “doubters” in the existence of God vs. convinced atheists, and points out historical eras Stark apparently did not address thoroughly (such as the 1960s?), but as Presbyterian Minister Frederick Buechner observed in his Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, “An agnostic is someone who is not sure whether there is a God. That is some of us all of the time, and all of us some of the time.” Within this principle, it may be that both Stark and others like Harris treat the data with integrity, but emphasize different aspects.
However, beyond ad hominem bashing the Baptists for being Baptist and for supposedly finding results to bolster Baylor’s “conservative” constituency (one wonders how the thousands of Baptists not attending mega-churches feel about Stark’s comments about their smaller churches) and the article providing an alternate study by Harris on the number of doubters / believers in God, I didn’t discern substantial critiques in this article. If you see something specific beyond the Harris studies, feel free to call readers’ attention to it. I’ll comment as I can!
I recognize you must be busy, Ben, and it’s very late (at least here it’s late), but this response rather disturbs me. Paul offers a detailed and well-evidenced account of the misuse of data that plagues the Stark work you have reviewed.
He ignores several decades of data entirely – decades for which the data was freely available – and presents other data in a highly misleading fashion.
There is no “ad-hominem bashing” that I can see (the word “Baptist” only appears 4 times in the 23-page main text, and nowhere in relation to any sort of ad hominem), merely a systematic rebuttal of the very foundation of the Baylor Study’s argument that the number of nonbelievers has remained steady. Here’s a section which sums up the case:
“By ignoring all but a small fraction of the large set of available surveys, Baylor effectively selected the few datasets that served the story they are trying to sell: namely, that skepticism regarding the existence of supernatural deities occurs among Americans at persistently low levels. Quite the contrary, the actual results indicate a strong growth in disbelief, particularly
since the 1990s. This is in tune with the agreement of all major survey organizations that the nonreligious – those who report their religious preference as “none” – have doubled in number since the early 1990s.”
As a matter of intellectual honesty I would expect a reviewer to scrupulously investigate the statistical methods of a researcher before publishing a review of a work. I took GREAT pains to investigate the statistical underpinnings of American Grace before submitting my review for publication, for example, including contacting the researchers and reading first-hand interview protocols etc.
It seems in this case there are very serious basic flaws in statistical methodology which, if they came from a student in a class of mine, would merit a fail if not serious questions of academic dishonesty. To try to brush this off as anti-Baptist bigotry is outrageous.
It seems the core point of contention here is Stark’s assertion regarding the number of nonbelievers and what constitutes a non-believer. Stark asserts the number of atheists / convinced atheists is the same at the time of his surveys as it was in 1944. I attempt epistemological humility by saying this may/might be the case, as Stark’s data indicates. This holds true even if the number of convinced atheists fluctuated between 1944 and 2007, and perhaps Stark could or should have noted this better.
Eh, submitted the above before finishing my thought. To clarify, what holds true according to Stark’s data is the 4% in both 1944 and 2007, even if the percentages varied at times during the years between these dates.
This is not at all the “core point of contention”. The “core point of contention” here is that Stark seems to have cherry-picked his data to prove his point. Here’s the main problems as indicated in the Paul report:
1. They leave out the 50s entirely, for no good reason whatsoever. This is at best incompetence, at worst deception.
2. Instead of using the percentage of people who answered “no” to the question “Do you believe in God, or a universal spirit?”, they instead take the percentage who answered “yes” and subtract that from 100%. The resulting figure includes both people who answered “no” AND people who refused to answer, many of whom are almost certainly believers in God. Since the percentage who answered “no” was available in the data, there can be no other conclusion that the Baylor group used this odd procedure to artificially inflate the number of “atheists” at that point. This can only be deception, or enormous incompetence.
3. As well as ignoring the 50s entirely, the Baylor group also ignores Gallup poll results for 1965, 1967, 1978, 1988 and 1994. They also leave out answers to relevant questions regarding belief in God from 1999, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008. Why?
This to me seems ample evidence of serious malfeasance on behalf of the researchers. It is simply wrong to ignore huge swathes of data in order to make a point you have decided on in the first place.
Can you explain these numerous methodological flaws, or are you happy to be hoodwinked?