Here’s an article by Cathy Lynn Grossman in USA Today about how we pad the statistics when reporting on our own church attendance. Save this article to read soon – maybe this Sunday morning if you’re free.
God knows, we lie about going to church
Comments
5 responses to “God knows, we lie about going to church”
-
As sad as the article is, the discussion going on in the comments section is even more distressing.
-
Fulfilling the words of the Lost Gospel of Matthew Who Failed Algebra: “Where two or three are gathered in My Name, there will be trouble.”
-
-
This is a part of the “religious congruence fallacy” that Mark Chaves elaborated in his 2010 SSSR Presidential Address called “Rain Dances in the Dry Season: Overcoming the Religious Congruence Fallacy”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01489.x/pdf
Religious congruence (according to Chaves) refers to three things (examples my own):
1) consistency among an individual’s religious beliefs and attitudes (e.g. that Catholicism, or Catholic liberalism or Catholic traditionalism all neatly fits together so that anyone who adopts a part of it adopts all of it).
2) consistency between religious ideas and behavior (e.g. the idea that I go to Mass regularly means that I went last Sunday or will go next Sunday)
3) and religious ideas, identities, or schemas that are chronically salient and accessible to individuals across contexts and situations.(e.g. before deciding what to do about anything and everything, people ask how and whether this fits into their Catholicism, etc).
As Chaves says “Decades of anthropological, sociological, and psychological research establish that religious congruence is rare, but much thinking about religion presumes that it is common. The religious congruence fallacy occurs when interpretations or explanations unjustifiably presume religious congruence.”
Chaves is not saying that people ought to be religiously congruent. He is criticizing social scientists for treating people as if they are always behaving congruently when in fact they rarely behave congruently.
When church attendance is correlated with support for Republican candidates, it is really people who report they go to church and report they vote Republican. Those reports are in fact imperfectly correlated with real behavior. Moreover real attendance itself is imperfectly correlated with real voting, since Black Protestants vote Democratic.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
-
I just played a Funeral today and the 20 minute eulogy in which the son stated that “his dad loved God.” If that is true, why did he never come to church with his wife????? She was there every week in the pew – without him. LOL. Whatever!
-
There used to be a “well known” phenomenon in public opinion research, called I believe the “interviewer effect”. The gist of it was that certain ways of phrasing questions tend to invite the respondent to say what the interviewer wants to hear. The parade example dealt with elections. When researchers asked “Did you vote in the last election?” and compared the results with the actual voting tally, they knew the respondents weren’t giving “straight” answers.
I noticed that Robert Putnam and James Hunter seemed not to be aware of this phenomenon in their Faith Matters survey as reported in American Grace. But they did comment that church attendance as an indicator of practice was down in recent years.
by
Tags:
Please leave a reply.