Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told
Page 17
[2]. One day in class, I asked my students to write down what they thought Evangelicals meant, and about one-third of them thought it meant something along the lines of evangelists.
[3]. http://off the map.com/live/2008/2008/07/09/only-prostitutes-ranklower-than-evangelicals/.
[4]. http://blindbeggar.org/?p=621.
[5]. http://stevetinning.blogspot.com/2008/07/only-prostitutes-rank-lower-than.html.
[6]. A long line of social research has examined the media’s social construction of the news; for example, Glassner, 2002; Altheide, 2002; and Best, 2001.
[7]. As quoted in Sider, 2005, 23.
[8]. Jenkins, 2003, 165.
[9]. Ibid., 166.
[10]. People’s religion is identified using self-reported religious affiliation. For example, surveys ask “What is your religion?” or “What is your religious preference?”
[11]. Of course, attendance measures are not without controversy, as discussed in chapter 5.
[12]. In the language of social research methodology, correlations can reflect causation, selection, or spurious correlation.
[13]. This paragraph is based on Smith, 2000, 9.
CHAPTER 2
[1]. As discussed later in this chapter, many religiously unaffiliated people have strong, personal religious and spiritual beliefs, so it misstates the case to refer to them as having no religion or as atheists.
[2]. Hout and Fischer, 2002.
[3]. Ibid., 188.
[4]. Noll, 2001, 202.
[5]. McDowell and Bellis, 2006.
[6]. www.christianity.com/Home/Christian%20Living%20Features/11569922/.
[7] Barnes and Lowry, 2006.
[8]. Wicker, 2008, 50.
[9]. Ibid., xiii.
[10]. There is controversy regarding whether Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses should be defined as Christians. I follow the lead of studies that classify them as “other religions.” Some data sets allow for the separate analysis of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Others, however, classify them as Christian or Protestant, and analysis of these data sets is not able to disentangle them. Given the different coding schemes used in various studies, in some tables Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are grouped with Christians, and in others they are not. Given the relatively small size of these religions, this difference in classification shouldn’t meaningfully alter the results presented. My references to “all Christians” can be understood as referring to Protestants and Catholics. I offer no position on whether Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other similar groups are indeed Christian or not.
[11]. Sometimes Protestants are divided into three groups: Liberal, Moderate, and Fundamentalist (e.g., Smith, 1990). Other studies examine self-identification with labels such as Evangelical and Fundamentalist. (e.g., Smith, 2000).
[12]. Steensland et al., 2000.
[13]. This definition is adapted from Kellstedt, et al., 1998.
[14]. This definition is taken from Scherer, 1998.
[15]. Summarized from Steensland et al., 2000.
[16]. To be clear, a Black Protestant in this scheme is anyone who attends a historically Black Protestant church. An African-American person at a mainline church, for example, would be classified as Mainline Protestant.
[17]. With seven different lines on this figure, there are a lot of data, and so to make it easier to look at, I’ve presented smoothed data rather than the raw data. Smoothed data creates a function to describe the underlying trends in data over time.
[18]. Kosmin and Keysar, 2009, 5.
[19]. Smith, 1998, 89–119.
[20]. Greeley and Hout, 2006, 106.
[21]. Kelley, 1972.
[22]. Olsen, 2008, 55–56, 146.
[23]. Johnstone, 2007, 314–319.
[24]. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2008a, 7.
[25]. Ibid., 6.
[26]. Ibid., 52.
[27]. Smith, 2002.
[28]. Princeton Survey Research Associates International/Newsweek poll (June 2008).
[29]. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2008, 52.
[30]. www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/us/27atheist.html.
[31]. This point, that the religiously unaffiliated can be religious, has been made by others. For example, Baylor University’s 2006 American Piety Study Report states that “some traditional forms of faith persist” among the religiously unaffiliated, especially belief in God and prayer.
[32]. Kosmin and Keysar, 2008, 7.
[33]. This analysis uses Census data to estimate the number of American adults alive in each of these years.
[34]. I conducted this analysis by using General Social Survey data to determine how many respondents were in each religion during the decade of their sixteenth birthday. This is divided by the number of Americans alive during that century, as per Census data. Unfortunately, the retrospective religion question in the GSS doesn’t ask about church attendance rates in youth, so I wasn’t able to implement fully Steensland et al.’s coding scheme for nondenominational Christians. I therefore split the nondenominational Christians between Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants based on the proportion of each among respondents who identified their denomination.
[35]. There are various technical concerns regarding the sampling procedures used in the early days by Gallup. See Glenn, 1990.
[36]. Initially, these questions were asked solely by Gallup Polls. More recently other survey organizations have used the same questions. When the wording is identical, I use all the responses that I can find via the Roper Center’s iPoll database.
[37]. Bishop, 1999, 422.
[38]. Smith, 2000, 200.
[39]. They include American Heritage Ministry, Reclaiming America for Christ, and the now defunct Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, founded by Dr. James D. Kennedy.
[40]. www.reclaimamericaforchrist.org.
[41]. Finke and Stark, 1992, 12.
[42]. Ibid., 289.
[43]. Ibid., 22.
[44]. Ibid., 22–53.
[45]. Smith, 2000, 32.
[46]. Mapp Jr., 1992.
[47]. Noll, 2001, chapter 9.
[48]. Citations from Stark, 1999.
[49]. Berger, 1999, 2.
[50]. www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519517,00.html.
[51]. Economist Laurence Iannaccone (1994) describes the benefit of this in terms of the church’s preventing free-riders.
[52]. The corollary to this would be that not all numerical gains are good—something that seems theoretically possible, but an unlikely interpretation given popular church-growth theories.
CHAPTER 3
[1]. McDowell and Bellis, 2006, 13.
[2]. Ibid., 11.
[3]. Tryggestad, 2008.
[4]. “Disengage,” Carey, 2008; “stop attending,” Powell and Kubiak, 2005; “leave the foundations of their faith”; “forsake their faith,” Tse, 2006.
[5]. Smith, 2007.
[6]. Ibid., 2007.
[7]. Testing explanations of age-, cohort-, and period-effects requires extensive data, for ideally the data would follow multiple cohorts over time.
[8]. Wuthnow, 2007, 183.
[9]. Hout and Fischer, 2002, 167.
[10]. For simplicity of presentation, I divided respondents into twenty-year groupings. Other, more in-depth analyses have used ten-and fifteen-year groupings. Also, studies vary in which years they use to divide generations.
[11]. Wuthnow, 2007, 54–5.
[12]. These failed secularization prophesies come from Stark, 1999.
[13]. Cited from Wicker, 2008, xiii.
[14]. Spencer, 2009.
[15]. Olson, 2008, 175.
[16]. Murrow, 2005, 47.
[17]. Skirbekk, Goujon, and Kaufmann, forthcoming.
CHAPTER 4
[1]. Kosmin and Keysar, 2009, 11.
[2]. Walter and Davie, 1998.
[3]. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1998/january12/8t1044.html.
[4]. Mark Chaves, Summary of National Con
gregational Survey. www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/index.html.
[5]. Noll, 2001, 75.
[6]. Michael Weisskopf, Washington Post (February 1, 1993).
[7]. Figure 4.6 presents data about the general population, which includes many Evangelicals. As a result, it might actually understate the negative relationship between education and religiosity among nonevangelicals.
[8]. Smith, 1998.
[9]. This map was produced by the Glenmary Research Center.
[10]. Olsen, 2008, 94.
[11]. Ibid., 62–64.
[12]. Meacham, 2009.
[13]. Noll, 2001, 71.
[14]. Fischer and Hout, 2006, 198.
[15]. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (February 2008): 36.
[16]. Used with permission. Thanks, Mike!
[17]. www.internetmonk.com/archive/michael-bell-how-to-stop-the -hemorrhaging-a-follow-up-to-the-pew-forum-data.
CHAPTER 5
[1]. www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/131-a-biblical -worldview-has-a-radical-effect-on-a-persons-life.
[2] www.barna.org/barna-update/article/18-congregations/103-barnas -annual-tracking-study-shows-americans-stay-spiritually-active-but -biblical-views-wane.
[3]. Barna, 2009, 49.
[4]. www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/260-mostamerican-christians-do-not-believe-that-satan-or-the-holy-spirit-exist.
[5]. www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2009/June/Do-You-Know-Your-Bible-Many-Christians-Dont/.
[6]. The Christian Reformation spurred reading education. The historian James Bowen estimates early-sixteenth-century literacy rates in England to have been less than 1%, but by the start of the seventeenth century, it was closer to 50% (Kendall, 2008).
[7]. Christian Smith (1998) covers similar issues as above, and he finds Evangelicals high on Orthodox beliefs. He characterizes them as “thriving.”
[8]. www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com.
[9]. Barna, 2005, 48–49.
[10]. For a summary of this debate, see Walsh, 1998.
[11]. Hadaway, Marler, and Chaves, 1998.
[12]. Fischer and Hout, 2006, 191.
[13]. Even this assumption is not without question. Studies of time-use diaries suggest the possibility that over-reporting of church attendance is increasing with time. See Walsh, 1998, for a summary of these studies.
[14]. Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 2008.
[15]. Wicker, 2008, 135.
[16]. Smith and Emerson, 2008.
[17]. Ibid., 11.
[18]. Ibid., 57–99.
[19]. McDowell and Bellis, 2006, 19.
[20]. Ibid., 27.
[21]. Ibid., 18.
[22]. Barna, 2005, 7.
[23]. Ibid., 8.
[24]. Ibid., 13.
[25]. Ibid., 20.
[26]. Wuthnow, 2007, 260.
CHAPTER 6
[1]. brewright.blogspot.com/2006/11/statistics-about-christianity.html.
[2]. Certainly Digg.com readers are not representative of the general population. I would guess that they are younger, have more men, and are more computer-savvy. This group is probably less religious than the general population, but not so dramatically as to explain the different response to these stories.
[3]. These data are from the General Social Survey.
[4]. Ellison, Barkowski, and Anderson, 1999; Ellison, 2001.
[5]. I wonder if the reverse is true, for Christians are raised with a tradition of confessing sins, and so they might actually be more, rather than less, likely to admit wrongs.
[6]. In rare cases this might reflect a respondent remarrying soon after a divorce.
[7]. Regnerus, 2007, 181.
[8]. Ibid., 159–160.
[9]. Salmon, 2009.
[10]. Hirschi and Stark, 1969.
[11]. The National Comorbidity study also included a question about prescription drug abuse, asking respondents if they had used prescription drugs such as tranquilizers, stimulants, and painkillers without the recommendation of a health professional. The responses to this question were nearly identical to those of hard drugs.
[12]. This is a good place for me to restate that this book only describes differences between religious affiliations, and it makes no effort to explain these differences. In this analysis, for example, other studies have found that women and older people are both more likely to attend church and less likely to abuse drugs. So these observed differences might simply reflect differences in who attends church. Alternately, churches’ teachings on this issue might be most effective with women and the elderly, in part because they are the least prone to it. Or perhaps churches attract more women and the elderly because churches teach more normative behavior. Finally, church teaching could reduce rates of substance abuse. Testing these mechanisms is possible but complicated, and is beyond the scope of this book.
[13]. Burkett and White, 1974.
[14]. Well, right off the bat, this question illustrates why sociologists use vignette questions, because they allow us to use situations that we couldn’t ethically produce ourselves. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble we get into when we run over pedestrians just to collect data.
CHAPTER 7
[1]. Liberation theology, for example, is a movement in Latin American Catholicism that focuses on empowering people economically; in fact, it holds that one’s very salvation is inseparable from the struggle for economic social justice. Cousineau, 1998.
[2]. The actual question has one as the warmest feelings and eight as the coolest, but I reverse-coded the scale to make it more intuitive.
[3]. There is also a question about marrying a White person, but consistently few of the White respondents opposed it.
[4]. The sample size for Jews and Other Religions were quite small in 2002 and 2004, thus we should use caution in interpreting these four data points.
[5]. I use Wave 2 data here rather than Wave 1, because the older respondents, ages 16–21, are more likely to make their own decisions about charitable involvement.
CHAPTER 8
[1]. Kinnaman and Lyons, 2007, 25.
[2]. Ibid., 26.
[3]. Ibid., 29.
[4]. Ibid., 11.
[5]. Barna, 2009, xii.
[6]. Harrison, 2008, 153–160.
[7]. Kinnaman and Lyons, 2007, 206.
[8]. www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005–10–19-male-college-cover_x.htm.
[9] Hartly and Mintz, 1946.
[10]. Each religious group has some respondents who are not familiar with it, and so they might not express an attitude toward that group. I drop these “don’t know” respondents from my analyses in this chapter.
[11]. Baptists in the Evangelical tradition include the Southern Baptist Convention, Baptist Missionary Association, Free Will Baptists, and the General Association of Regular Baptists. According to the Pew Landscape Study (2008a), 94% of Baptists are either Evangelicals or in Historically Black churches.
[12]. As measured in the 2000 General Social Survey.
[13] The study allows respondents who have heard of the religion to answer that they “can’t rate” it, which I interpret to be a midpoint, neutral response.
[14]. As discussed in chapter 2, religious disaffiliation is not synonymous with atheism.
[15]. As a qualification, it’s worth noting that these survey questions ask about groups of people rather than specific individuals, and so they may be capturing attitudes toward the defining features of those groups, such as their doctrinal beliefs. Possibly Christians might act very differently toward individual group members. Still, having negative attitudes toward any group would work against warm, positive interactions with them.
[16]. Smith, 2000, 37–48.
[17]. These differences are close to statistical significance, but not quite. Since I’m selecting only the non-Christians, the sample size is rather small, leading to diminished statistical power. I replicated the analysis using the larger Social Capital data, and found the same pattern
of findings, with the oldest respondents having significantly less favorable attitudes toward Evangelicals.
[18]. newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/faithfacts/2007/01/religious _affiliation_on_capit.html.
[19]. Hoffman, 1998.
[20]. Sociologists have developed an entire school of thought—Symbolic Interactionism—based on this assumption.
[21]. Smith, 2000, 70.
[22]. An interesting issue is with regard to whether the secular media is actually biased against some religious groups, such as Evangelicals. I couldn’t find any definitive studies, and perhaps the best summary of the literature states that religious leaders think yes and journalists think no (Hill, et al., 2001).
[23]. Tobin and Weinberg, 2007.
[24]. Faculty members’ negative attitudes toward Evangelical Christians were especially pronounced when it came to the topic of politics. Seventyone percent of the faculty respondents agreed that the country would be better off if Christian Fundamentalists kept their religious beliefs out of politics; in contrast, only 38% agreed with the same statement about Muslims.
CHAPTER 9
[1]. This single grade is reminiscent of a story in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It tells of a computer created to “answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” and the answer it came up with was 42. This required building an even bigger machine, Earth, to figure out what the question was. Similarly, Christians too would benefit from thinking more about which questions to ask in evaluating ourselves.
[2]. See Smith, 1998.
[3]. www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519517,00.html.
APPENDIX 1
[1]. See brewright.blogspot.com/2006/11/statistics-about-christianity.html for a discussion of this point.
REFERENCES
Altheide, David L. 2002. Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Barna, George. 2002. “Surprisingly Few Adults Outside of Christianity Have Positive Views of Christians.” www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/86-surprisingly-few-adults-outside-of-christianity-havepositive-views-of-christians.Downloaded 10/22/09.
Barna, George. 2005. Revolution. Wheaton, IL: Barna.
Barna, George. 2009. The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter. Wheaton, IL: Barna.