Saturday, October 7, 2006

Analyzing the Data for Social Trends in Christianity

I receive emails from a few different freethought/skeptic/atheist organizations. Thus, I was tipped off early (a few hours after publication) to this article in the NYT about the supposed fear of Evangelicals at the stunning trend of losing their youth from the fold. The following post is long, but the subject matter is serious and requires a lot of sourcing -- I want to examine social trends in Christianity.

The major subject of the NYT article was Ron Luce, whose Teen Mania ministries, and especially their Battlecry, I (and others) worried about explicitly a few months back. Battlecry posts a video on their website where they lament the ever-increasing apostasy among youth.

Where is their fear coming from? Barna did a study which declared only 4% of American adults held a "biblical worldview" in late 2003.

However, this was, according to the NYT article, not the source of the data, but instead from
“The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old.
Let's grant that polls are in fact saying this.

What bothers me about these numbers, and makes me highly suspect, is that Barna then published in July '04, "How 'Christianized' Do Americans Want Their Country to Be?", a study polling questions such as, "Should we remove 'In God We Trust' from the money? 'Under God' from the pledge? The 10 Commandments from courthouses?" Somewhat surprisingly, Barna's results reflected that a huge number of persons want a friggin' theocracy, some even calling for a constitutional amendment declaring America "A Christian Nation".
(18%) supports “removing signs that list the Ten Commandments from government buildings.” In contrast, 79% of all adults rejected this policy – including 60% of adults who were “strongly opposed” to removing the Commandments...

The only faith group among which a majority gave its support was atheists and agnostics: 55% said this was a good idea...

A recent call to remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from the nation’s currency also has very limited public support, even from people who are not Christian in orientation. Overall, only 13% favored eliminating the phrase from currency, while 84% oppose the idea. Nearly three-quarters of the public (72%) are “strongly opposed” to making this change...

When asked to describe their reaction to the possibility of “removing the phrase ‘one nation, under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance,” this proposal also was widely rejected. Only 15% of adults said they would support the change, compared to 84% who dismissed it...

The survey shows that most Americans are dismayed by that point-of-view [evolution]. About six out of every ten adults (59%) favor teaching creationism while less than four out of ten (38%) do not want it added to the public school curriculum content...

Americans are opposed to “a constitutional amendment to establish Christianity as the official religion of the United States” by a two-to-one margin (66% oppose, 32% in favor). People with a college degree were only half as likely to support this idea as were those who do not have a college degree (19% vs. 37%, respectively).

In fact, the only population segment that was generally supportive of this proposal was evangelicals, who were twice as likely as other adults to support the idea (66%). A slim majority of non-evangelical born again adults (53%) rejected this idea, while large majorities of notional Christians (72%), people of other faiths (77%) and atheists and agnostics (91%) opposed such an amendment.
So, supposedly, eight times the number of people with a "biblical worldview" wanted Christianity Constitutionally-defined as America's official religion!! How much times must have changed in those few months, eh? So what gives? How could only 4% of adults hold a biblical worldview, but 32% want a theocracy?

Well, I wrote about it a few months back, and have some new perspectives. I think the major factor to consider here is Barna (and others') treatment and qualification of terms like "biblical worldview". In this article, we have the phrase defined:
Barna's definition of a biblical worldview included a belief that absolutes exist and a belief that the Bible defines them. Additionally, the definition stipulated a belief that: Christ lived a sinless life; God is the "all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it today"; salvation is by grace and not by works; Satan is a real being; Christians have a responsibility to witness; and the Bible is "accurate in all of its teachings."

The research found that those who attended college were more likely to have a biblical worldview than those who did not (6 percent versus 2 percent). Married adults also were more likely to have such a worldview (5 percent for married people versus 2 percent for singles). Also, 10 percent of Republicans but only 2 percent of independents and 1 percent of Democrats had a biblical worldview.
Aha! Perhaps now we see what the determining factor is in these polls, and why they seem so out of touch with reality -- it's all in how you define "a biblical worldview". Basically, by making a specific form of Christianity the criterion of the poll, you can eliminate a huge number of persons who do call themselves Christian from being considered.

First, the numbers for the rise and fall of Christianity's numbers are all over the map, but two cited trends are ubiquitous: i) the rise of fundamentalist sects, and ii) the demise of "liberal" and Catholic sects in the modern world. While the latter seems logical enough, the former is a bit suspect to me. According to Mission Frontiers, Christianity is growing on the global scale at approximately 2.6% per year, while the population growth (globally) is around 1.6%. That means that at best, Christianity is enjoying a worldwide 1% increase. What we find with all these numbers, though, is a huge upsurge in the population of fundie/charismatic believers in 3rd world countries -- the Catholics' previous stronghold is being assaulted by Evangelical missionaries. How much of the net 1% increase is only in 3rd world countries? Well, if you believe the numbers cited for the growth of Christianity in those countries, a lot! Jerry Jenkins writes:
"Back in 1900, there were about 10 million Christians in Africa, representing about 10 percent of the population. Today there are 360 million, representing just under half the population. That is one of the most important changes in religious history, and I think most of us didn't notice it," he said.
I think he's right, and I think I know what it means: Christianity is generally on the wane in modern countries, and generally on the rise in poor, uneducated nations. Also, the stronghold of Catholicism in Africa and South America is being broken by the efforts of Evangelicals over the last 200 years. What does the data look like for America?
It is hard to believe that as recently as 1960, members of mainline churches — Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and the like — accounted for 40% of all American Protestants. Today, it's more like 12% (17 million out of 135 million). Some of the precipitous decline is due to lower birthrates among the generally blue-state mainliners, but it also is clear that millions of mainline adherents (and especially their children) have simply walked out of the pews never to return. According to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research, in 1965, there were 3.4 million Episcopalians; now, there are 2.3 million. The number of Presbyterians fell from 4.3 million in 1965 to 2.5 million today. Compare that with 16 million members reported by the Southern Baptists. (LA Times)
Also:
The Presbyterian Church USA has experienced a decline of 11.6 percent over the past 10 years, the United Methodist Church has lost 6.7 percent of its membership and the Episcopal Church 5.3 percent of its parishioners.

“Americans are vacating progressive pews and flocking to churches that offer more traditional versions of Christianity,” Shiflett asserts. (author of Exodus: Why Americans are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity, Dave Shiflett)
Now, let's grant for a moment that this transition is occurring -- that people are leaving one sect for another. This is obviously not "net Christian growth". This is just translocation. And this same phenomenon is likely what we see with the "megachurch movement" -- lots of people who are already in church being drawn to what they see as a bigger and better one. Rick Warren explicitly admits this in his book, The Purpose-Driven Church (I own a copy):
Some large churches have grown at the expense of smaller churches, but that certainly is not true in Saddleback's case [Saddleback is Warren's church]...80 percent of our members found Christ and were baptized at Saddleback. We have not grown at the expense of other churches...not by transferring Christians from other churches. (p.50)
What Warren is admitting here, though, is that 1,000 of his 5,000 adult members came to his church from other churches. And Rick says that he purposely asks people not to join his church if they are members of other churches, unless they are willing to serve and minister (rather than "just attend services")!! (p. 39) So if he does this at every membership class, as he claims, and he still gets 20% of other churches' members...imagine how things must be at other megachurches, where such an explicit commitment not to do this is not held. Warren has admitted that other megachurches have the opposite commitment -- to growth, without conditions:
Really there are two kinds of mega-churches. They don't grow the same way. Some grow by transferred growth and some grow by conversion. And anytime you see a mega-church that grows instantly – it just kind of explodes – and all of a sudden they go from zero to 5,000, that's a church that's growing by transfer growth, which means they've just become the hot act in town and everybody goes, "Let's just all go over there. That's the place to go so we'll all go." And as a pastor, I don't consider that legitimate growth. Jesus said, "I'll make you fishers of men." This is like swapping fish in the aquarium. It's like we pop them from one place to another, and they grow at the expense of other churches.
The "reshuffling of the deck" among churches is a phenomenon that sociologists of religion have noted before:

While they make up only a tiny percentage of the total number of churches, the new breed of megachurches, typically found in suburbia, accounts for perhaps 7 percent of weekly church attendance, according to Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at the Hartford [Conn.] Institute for Religion Research. The churches are often unaffiliated with particular denominations, and they span a broad range of beliefs and practices. Taken as a whole, however, their memberships add up to perhaps 7 million people or more—the equivalent of the third-largest religious group in the country, says Thumma, trailing only Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists (with whom their membership overlaps somewhat).

What's more, the megachurches are growing at the expense of other churches. "Overall church attendance is not going up. People are going to megachurches from other churches," Chaves says. One factor driving growth, he adds, is cost. "You may have to go to a larger church to get quality, such as a youth minister and more programs, or better facilities."
Bishop Noel Jones of the City of Refuge Church of LA agrees:
Because unless I take the mystical and apply it to your everyday life, then of course, you’re just sitting there in another debate, in another philosophical situation. So it’s got to go psychological today, that’s why mega churches are mega churches. Not because they meet, they grab a lot of people off the street. Because mega-churches grow from, at the expense of, smaller churches who don’t have the technique.
So, let us compare real growth in Christianity with real growth in irreligion. Let us compare this sort of trend to that of godlessness/irreligion, as I've wrote before. The SUNY ARIS survey (the largest self-reporting religious survey ever published) rather conclusively showed that the number of people who went from any religion to no religion increased by 23% over the years studied (1990-2001). In their words, the researchers note:
The top three "gainers" in America's vast religious market place appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion. Looking at patterns of religious change from this perspective, the evidence points as much to the rejection of faith as to the seeking of faith among American adults. Indeed, among those who previously had no religion, just 5% report current identification with one or another of the major religions.
The raw number of "no religion" folks swamps the Evangelicals by about 30-fold and non-denoms by about 14-fold. In numerical form, the "no religion" switch from some prior religion increased by approx. 6.6 million persons, and those "switching out" were approx. 1.1 million persons = approx. 5.5 million net deconverts.

Do the math on this, and you'll see that no other category even comes close. Not one. The next highest number of net converts is 1.4 million for "Christian" (fourfold less) and then 600,000 for "Pentecostal". So, you may want to start checking the data before baldly asserting that "godlessness" is somehow waning, or that fundamentalism is waxing. On the contrary, the former is waxing full, and the latter is pitiful in comparison, given its net base.

See this data, in which Zuckerman estimates, and most sociologists agree, a minimum of 7% of Americans are either agnostic or atheist. This is different than "no religion", but these sorts of things are very vague. Consider, for instance, that a great number of those who answer “Christian” are only nominal in their faith -- they say that because they identify with the group via familial ties or infant baptism, but they have no relationship to a church and subscribe to little or no doctrines. Thus, when we add together all of the religious categories, we should keep this fact in mind, and realize that it is skewed a bit high by these factors. Alternatively, we expect the opposite sort of effect on the godless: When you consider the stigma against atheists, it certainly isn’t surprising that a lot of people aren’t “open” and are “closeted” atheists. The study proves my point — that those who claim godlessness is on the wane are not supported by evidence. And, those who claim that Christianity is on the rise in America are wrong, but on the rise globally (esp in poor, uneducated countries), they are right.

If I was a Christian, I'd think long and hard about that.
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