Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites . . . and Other Lies You’ve Been Told
Copyright © 2010
Bradley R. E. Wright
Cover design by Eric Walljasper
Ebook edition created 2012
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ISBN 978-1-4412-1210-8
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“Buy this book and read it carefully. Then buy one more and give it to your best friend and ask that person to do the same thing. I hope this book goes viral because it shows that there’s lots of good news when it comes to the condition of the church in the West.”
Scot McKnight
Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies,
North Park University
“Amid the widespread distorted, alarmist, and erroneous claims about American Christianity, it is always good to learn some basic reliable facts. Brad Wright pulls together a lot of good ones in these pages to reconnect people to reality. Let us hope that the misinformed critics and alarmists pay attention.”
Christian Smith
Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame
“This is an extremely needed book that is a delight to read.”
Rodney Stark
Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences, Baylor University
“Brad Wright’s book is well-written and intelligent, and does a fine job of challenging received wisdom on a wide variety of topics. I hope the book finds the audience it deserves.”
Philip Jenkins
Penn State University and Baylor University
“A welcome, calming voice to the cacophony of data interpreters of American evangelicalism. Using insider sensitivity combined with a nose for objective data sources, Wright has offered evangelical Christians a real gift with this book. I hope they recognize it.”
Mark Regnerus
Associate Professor of Sociology,
University of Texas at Austin
Author, Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion
in the Lives of American Teenagers
To Cathryn
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have many people to thank for supporting me in writing this book. Various sociologists and other researchers have kindly answered my queries when I was looking for information and data. These include Scott Thumma, Mike Hamilton, Roger Finke, Michael Hout, Eric Kauffman, Arnold Dashefsky, Mark Regnerus, and Alex Piquero. My thinking about this project, and just about any other that I do, has been strongly influenced by countless conversations with my friend and colleague David Weakliem.
The process leading to this book began when I started blogging, and I have Scot McKnight, Ben Dubow, and Chris Uggen to thank for that.
This book originally started off as a very different project, one that I worked on with my dear friend and fellow sociologist Mark Edwards. I appreciated and enjoyed working with him on it.
Various organizations were invaluable in providing data, including the Roper Center, the Gallup Organization, the Association of Religion Data Archives, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the University of Connecticut Population Center, and the Pew Foundation.
This book liberally borrows the ideas and data from prominent sociologists of religion and other researchers including Michael Hout, Robert Wuthnow, Mark Chaves, Mark Noll, David Olson, Michael Bell, Eric Kauffman, Mark Regnerus, and, especially, Christian Smith and Rodney Stark. I thank them for bringing light to our understanding of religion in America.
Chip MacGregor has taken good care of me as my agent, and Andy McGuire, editor at Bethany House, pulled me out of the academic wilderness and pointed to many of the ideas in this book. He has encouraged and guided me through writing my first book, and he is clearly a better editor than I am an author.
I thank my friends and family for their personal support, including Vince Grier, Marc Fey, Ryan Bolger, Caragh O’Brien, Susie Carozza, John Wright, Freeman Wright, and members of my Bible study. I also thank my friends from high school. After all these years, you are still my reference group. (Though I should mention that my high school friends thought this book would be more interesting if it were about pirates).
Most of all, I thank my wife, Cathy, and my sons, Joshua and Gabriel. I don’t know where I would be without you; I just know that I wouldn’t want to be there.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Endorsements
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword
CHAPTER 1:
Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News About Christianity?
CHAPTER 2:
Is American Christianity on the Brink of Extinction?
CHAPTER 3:
Are We Losing Our Young People? What Will Happen in the Future?
CHAPTER 4:
Are Evangelicals All Poor, Uneducated, Southern Whites?
CHAPTER 5:
Do Christians Think and Do Christian Things?
CHAPTER 6:
Have Christians Gone Wild?
CHAPTER 7:
Do Christians Love Others?
CHAPTER 8:
What Do Non-Christians Think of Us?
CHAPTER 9:
What Do We Make of It All?
APPENDIX 1:
Identifying Evangelical Christians
APPENDIX 2:
Data Sets
APPENDIX 3:
Bivariate vs. Multivariate Analysis
APPENDIX 4:
Statistical Significance
Notes
References
Afterword
About the Author
FOREWORD
“Why do you evangelicals love to make up and say such bad things about yourselves?” The question seemed quite off-topic. I was at the Washington Post building in DC to address a room filled with reporters with the Religion Newswriters Association. I was to give my thoughts on the differences between good research and bad research. But the question that came out of what felt like left field was actually quite appropriate.
For some reason, today’s American Christians communicate a certain amount of angst about their circumstances. I wish this angst were self-focused criticism, based more on humility or self-deprecating humor. Everywhere I turn, it seems the sky is falling, and believers talk about the church like it’s barely worth mentioning. While knowing our culture is wary of the church, we seem to, at times, take that doubt to extremes, far beyond what the real research shows.
To answer the question at the Washington Post, I gave a reasonable answer. Hopefully, it was a winsome defense of the church and the Christian’s desire for humility. If asked the question today, my response might be a short “I don’t know.”
Each year, a new soul-seizing factoid that has no basis in truth circulates through the church and then through the c
ulture at large.
“Christianity will die out in this generation unless we do something now.”
“Only 4 percent of this generation is Christian.”
“Ninety-four percent of teenagers drop out of church, never to return again.”
As Christians, we need to care about our reputation. Scripture teaches we will be known by our love. Throughout the centuries, the church has often stayed in the places others have fled, caring for the widow, the orphan, the hungry, the sick and suffering, earning a reputation of doing good and standing up for what is right.
In our modern day, the church answers the call after natural disasters, digs wells in Africa, and delivers the message of redemption across the globe. Those belonging to Christ should have the best reputation of any people in history. God’s glory should be reflected in us, not the world’s angst. We all know our reputation may be tarnished, but perhaps not as much as we might think.
Brad Wright calls us to leave behind the sensational, tabloid rhetoric. Let’s hear and answer the call to ministry and missions that motivates the church to deliver the message of transformation to society. We need to reflect the values of God’s kingdom every day—not wait for some impending day when we can finally show our “true colors.”
I deal with statistics almost every day. What I’ve learned is that 68 percent of stats are made up on the spot. (I’m joking, in case you were wondering.) Seriously, I believe facts are our friends. But a misrepresentation of facts—even for the purpose of motivation—is damaging to our cause.
Rather than wallow in thoughts that we are despised, we should rejoice in the fact that we are given the ministry of reconciliation. When we live as those who have hope to distribute, we will witness the work of Christ transforming both the culture that puzzles us and the church we love.
It’s true that some people don’t like us, but probably not as many as you might have heard. Yes, there are some struggles, but not as many as you might have been led to believe. Either way, we need to get to work—armed with right information and biblical motivation. Brad Wright provides us with helpful direction to be well informed and to be about kingdom work.
Ed Stetzer, PhD
President, LifeWay Research
CHAPTER 1
Why Do We Hear
So Much Bad News
About Christianity?
Statistics are no substitute for judgment.
—Henry Clay, Senator
Some statistics are born bad—they aren’t much good from the start because they are based on nothing more than guesses or dubious data. Other statistics mutate.
—Joel Best, Sociologist
Crying, “The sky is falling!” might sell books, but it never solves problems.
—Ed Stetzer, LifeWay Research
You may have heard the bad news about Christianity in America: The church is shrinking; Christians get divorced more than anyone else; non-Christians have a very low opinion of Christians; and on and on it goes. This disheartening news is often given to us in the form of statistics, which we seem to encounter everywhere. We find them in sermons, articles, books, and day-to-day conversation; and these numbers, based in research, seem official and trustworthy.
But there is a hitch.
Many of the statistics currently bandied about regarding the Christian faith in the United States are incomplete, inaccurate, and otherwise prone to emphasize the negative. Bad news has pushed aside the good news about the Good News.
A Questionable Statistic Mutates[1]
Let me give an example. I was browsing a Web site when I read a provocative headline: “Only prostitutes rank lower than evangelicals in terms of respect in the mind of the public.” This didn’t sound right to me, so I did some detective work to figure out where this statistic came from. Now, when I think of detective work, I think of the television show CSI, with flashlight beams in dark rooms, dramatic music, and maybe a bulletproof vest; but, alas, for me as a sociologist it’s just sitting at my computer looking up data. Still, I found an interesting story about Christian statistics.
In 2002, the Barna Group conducted a survey of 270 non-Christians. They asked these non-Christians their impressions of eleven different groups in society, including born-again Christians, ministers, and Evangelicals. (I’ve summarized their findings in Figure 1.) The Barna Group found that born-again Christians and ministers scored high in respect, but Evangelicals scored rather low.
Figure 1: Non-Christians’ Impressions of Various Social Groups
Social group Favorable In-Between Unfavorable Don’t Know
* * *
Military officers 56% 32% 6% 6%
* * *
Ministers 44% 40% 9% 7%
* * *
Born-again Christians 32% 41% 17% 10%
* * *
Democrats 32% 47% 12% 9%
* * *
Real estate agents 30% 51% 11% 8%
* * *
Movie & TV actors 25% 54% 14% 7%
* * *
Lawyers 24% 53% 18% 5%
* * *
Republicans 23% 47% 22% 8%
* * *
Lesbians 23% 38% 30% 11%
* * *
Evangelicals 23% 33% 22% 23%
* * *
Prostitutes 5% 29% 55% 11%
* * *
Source: The Barna Group, 2002
Based on these data, the Barna Group concluded that non-Christians are “dismissive” of Evangelicals. According to the article, this negative opinion has consequences: “One reason why evangelical churches across the nation are not growing is due to the image that non-Christian adults have of evangelical individuals.” Wow, if this is true, it gives us a key to church growth—changing non-Christians’ negative impressions of Christians.
But frankly, I’m not sure how much credence we should give to the Barna Group’s conclusion, for several reasons. I’m going to go into a bit of detail about this statistic, not necessarily because it is so important in its own right, but rather to illustrate that we can’t always believe every statistic we hear.
To start with, I wonder if there was some confusion among the respondents. Notice the unusually high number who were unsure of their response to Evangelicals, answering with a “don’t know.” This number was twice as high as it was for any other category. The reason for this confusion may have been that the question appears to have been worded peculiarly, for it asked about Evangelicals, not evangelical Christians. Perhaps some respondents thought the survey was asking about evangelists—the people who knock at your door when you’re just sitting down for dinner.[2]
When the Barna Group asked specifically about born-again Christians, the respondents were much more favorable, ranking them third highest overall. How many of us, Christian or otherwise, could describe the difference between a born-again Christian and an Evangelical? Some surveys have even used the terms interchangeably, so the fact that the Barna Group’s study found such different results for these two groups raises a red flag.
The second reason I’m skeptical of the Barna Group’s conclusion has to do with math, so bear with me for a moment. The Barna Group’s discussion of this statistic focuses on the fact that only 23% of respondents had a favorable impression of Evangelicals. This number, however, includes the respondents who “don’t know” in the denominator. In other words, if you asked the question “Twenty-three percent of what?” the answer would be “Twenty-three percent of the 270 people who took the survey.” But this isn’t quite fair. It would make more sense to answer the question “How many people have a favorable impression among those who have heard of Evangelicals in the first place?” After all, if you don’t know what an Evangelical is, there’s no chance of having a good impression of them. Dropping the “don’t know” respondents from the denominator bumps the number of favorable ratings of Evangelicals to 28% (23/23+33+22). This puts Evangelicals in the middle of Figure 1 (even when you do the same to the other groups).
There is also a probl
em related to the sample size of only 270 survey participants. There is nothing wrong with smaller studies, per se, but the smaller size just means that we can only detect big differences between groups, and not small ones, such as those found in Figure 1. Looking at the data, my guess is that there is no meaningful (i.e., statistically significant) difference between actors, lawyers, Republicans, lesbians, and Evangelicals, for they each have 23 to 25% favorable ratings. With this small sample size, the study gives no evidence that these groups are statistically different (in terms of favorability) in the general population.
Finally, even if we accept that this statistic accurately reflects public opinion (which, as will be discussed in chapter 8, it probably doesn’t), the picture it paints isn’t all that bad. Less than 1 in 4 (23%) of the non-Christian respondents held unfavorable opinions about Evangelicals. The rest were either positive, of no opinion, or didn’t know. This seems to be a reasonably low number, given that none of the respondents embraced the tenets of Christianity.
My take on these data is that they certainly should be viewed with caution, and they may even demonstrate a positive view of Christians. If a student turned this in for a class assignment, I would tell him that he has an interesting research question, but he should redo his analyses and presentation. However, the Barna Group’s findings and conclusion were catchy, so they were picked up by the media. The Atlantic magazine (July 2003) summarized this study with the title “Evangelicals and Prostitutes.” They wrote that “Non-Christians, it turns out, have a low regard for evangelical Christians, whom they view less favorably than all the above-mentioned groups except one: prostitutes.”
Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told Page 1