Christine Wicker, in her book The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, summarized the study as follows: “When asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated Evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes rated lower” (143). She did not even cite the original study, instead presenting it as an unambiguous fact reflecting high “anti-evangelical sentiment.”
From Wicker’s book, a Christian organization named Off the Map picked up the statistic and featured it on their Web site as evidence that Christianity is losing its influence in America.[3] On the same Web page, they also advertised registration for their conferences that teach attendees how to reverse this trend.
From the Off the Map Web site, several bloggers found the statistic and put their own spin on it. One Web site, “A Blind Beggar” (subtitled “Devoted to the Journey of Christianity”), summarized it as “Only prostitutes rank lower than evangelicals in terms of respect in the mind of the public.”[4] Notice that now Evangelicals are disrespected by society as a whole, not just non-Christians. Another Web site recast the statistic as “Only prostitutes rank lower than Evangelicals.” [5] Forget respect, Evangelicals are lower in everything. The Barna Group’s statistic was not particularly well-constructed to begin with, but it got substantially less accurate and more dire with each retelling.
The Social Forces That Shape Christian Statistics
The thesis of this book is that Christians are exposed to many inaccurate statistics about our faith. To understand why this happens, we should look at how these statistics are produced and how they spread through the public. Thousands of statistics are generated each year, but we only hear a few of them. Why do we hear these particular ones?[6]
You might think that only the most accurate and important statistics see the light of day, and so we can trust what we hear. Ah, wouldn’t that be nice. In fact, if you believe this, I should probably also tell you that politicians don’t always keep their promises, television advertisements exaggerate their products, and investment opportunities in spam e-mails are rip-offs. (The Easter Bunny may not be real either—I’m still looking into that one.)
The fact is, statistical research is an inherently messy and thoroughly human activity. Research findings reflect insight, error, and self-interest. People make statistics, and like everything else that people make, the results are mixed. Some statistics are good, some are bad, and a lot are in between.
Let’s start with the person who makes the statistic. Some statistics about Christianity come from academic researchers such as university professors. We (and I am one of them) hopefully use rigorous research methods, and we have peers anonymously review our work as a form of quality control. Unfortunately, we usually write in highly technical language, and we publish in obscure academic journals. Also, we tend to choose topics that have little relevance to the day-to-day workings of Christianity, so we’re often irrelevant to the church. Furthermore, most academics are liberal and relatively few are Christians, so an antireligious, or at least irreligious, bias can permeate academic research on religion.
Other sources of statistics include Christian research organizations such as the Barna Group, LifeWay Research, Reveal, and Open Tomb, as well as denominational research groups. These organizations do practical research for Christians—exploring issues that really matter to the church. They are headed by believers, so they share the worldview of Christian readers. They also do a good job presenting their findings in an accessible manner. Unfortunately, the quality of their work varies widely. Some of the researchers are not formally trained in social research, and they almost never submit their work to a peer-review process, so there’s no external quality check. These groups are usually self-funded, so they may produce research with an eye on the bottom line. This may provide a hard-to-resist incentive to highlight “provocative” findings that will increase sales of reports and books and services. Unfortunately, these provocative findings are often those that cast Christianity in a negative light.
Still other research comes from in-house studies by various Christian groups. A church might study its members, or a magazine may survey its readers. Here the research is highly relevant to the group collecting it, but its quality is usually unknown. It is also difficult to know whether the findings from these in-house studies apply to anybody outside that particular group.
Also, sometimes Christian leaders will express their opinions and experiences in statistical terms, and these become accepted as facts. For example, a well-known Christian apologist has been quoted as saying that in his observation, evangelical youth are only about 10% less likely to engage in premarital sex than non-Evangelicals.[7] We trust these numbers because we trust the person, but in reality the numbers are probably made up.
In addition to academic and Christian sources, Christian leaders get statistical information from as wide a variety of sources as anyone else in society. These include the U.S. Census, government reports, and survey organizations such as Gallup, media surveys, and political think tanks. Some of these sources, such as think tanks, will have their own biases. Media studies are often done quickly, to catch the latest news cycle, and so they may suffer in quality. Others, such as the better-known survey organizations, go to great lengths to accurately describe the population, but they still have an incentive to highlight the more provocative findings. Their surveys are often funded by other organizations, so their survey topics and questions might reflect the interests of the funding organization.
While many, many statistics are created about Christianity, most slip quietly into the numeric afterlife and nobody ever hears of them. Some, however, receive wide exposure in both the Christian church and the media, and both the church and the media tend to select and pass along statistics that reflect bad news about Christianity. It probably doesn’t surprise you that the media may want to emphasize the negative, but why would Christian leaders and teachers do the same? Wouldn’t they want to make Christianity look as good as possible?
Christian pastors, teachers, and other leaders often use statistics to highlight the severity of a problem, either with society as a whole or with Christians in particular. For example, if an author is writing a book on sexual purity for Christians, he will probably start with statistics about how impure Christians are, thus demonstrating the need for his book. Or if a pastor is teaching on the importance of tithing, she might first look for statistics highlighting how few Christians tithe, and then use these numbers to motivate her listeners to give more. With the best of intentions, Christians sometimes pick statistics for their usefulness rather than for accuracy, and the most useful statistics are often those that cast the church in a negative light.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media favors statistics that are newsworthy. Newsworthiness to the media usually means “unexpected” or “ironic” or “tragic.” For example, one airplane crashing is headline news, but the thousands that land safely each day are not. When it comes to religion in general, and Christianity in particular, newsworthy stories are often those that highlight religious people not living up to their moral code, and so frequently we hear of Christians’ moral failings. In a city with hundreds of pastors, for instance, suppose that almost every single one lives a holy life of loving and serving others, but one is found passed out in a shopping cart in front of a strip club. Guess which pastor will be on the front page? It’s not that the media is necessarily biased against Christianity (the evidence on that is mixed). Rather, it wants to sell newspapers and airtime, and so it selects stories and facts to this end. For Christianity, this means a lot of negative stories.
Perhaps nowhere is the selective representation of Christians more apparent than with Catholic priests. Historian Phillip Jenkins reviews common portrayals of clergy in film and television, and, well, if you see a priest on screen, you know that something bad is going to happen. Among the plotlines reviewed by Jenkins: priests living sexually promiscuous lifestyles, priests systematically raping children, Ca
tholic organizations condoning murder, and a satanic cardinal. Jenkins summarizes: “Somewhere in the 1980s, Hollywood decided that senior Catholic clerics made reliable stock villains, as predictably evil as corporate executives or drug kingpins.”[8] He makes the case that other social groups receive far better treatment. “No studio would contemplate making a film that would be deemed offensive by (for example) Blacks or Native Americans,” but “Catholics (and perhaps Evangelicals)” are not afforded this dignity.[9]
Once a statistic is introduced to the Christian church, another dynamic comes into play. As people tell the statistic to others, they sometimes misquote or misremember. The statistics described above about Evangelicals and prostitutes demonstrate how this works. This process is akin to the telephone game that elementary schoolteachers use to teach the dangers of gossip. As kids sit in a circle, the teacher gives a message to the first student, who then whispers it to the next student, and so on until the message has gone full-circle. Invariably the message is quite different in the end. What starts off as “Have a nice day” can end up as “Free Paraguay now!” Paradoxically, with each retelling, not only does a statistic move toward less accuracy, it also becomes more believable because more people have heard it. If we hear a fact from enough different sources, then of course we believe it, and even inaccurate facts can become enshrined as cultural myths.
The High Cost of Negative Statistics
I write this not to criticize researchers, teachers, and the media as doing wrong, per se, for they are simply being influenced by incentives and opportunities. Rather, I want to highlight the problems caused for the church by the continuing emphasis on negatively slanted statistics. It can be demoralizing for Christians to constantly read and hear about how the church is failing, and this in turn can undercut the church’s efforts to mobilize its followers. Why should Christians give their all to God’s work in churches if churches are failures? The effect is similar to that of stories about plane crashes. Just as the media’s emphasis on plane accidents rather than plane safety can make some people afraid to fly, constant bad news about Christianity can lessen our desire and efforts to participate in it.
This bad news might also diminish evangelism. If Christians think ill of their faith, why would they want to invite their nonbelieving friends to participate in it? We invite our friends to good restaurants, not bad ones; interesting movies, not boring ones; so why would we want to bring others into a church that is portrayed as ineffective and sinful? Furthermore, non-Christians, as they too hear the bad news about Christianity, understandably would be less inclined to take it seriously.
Another problem of hearing so much inaccurate bad news is that it can distract from what really is bad news. If too many books and articles and sermons seek to motivate Christians with bad news, we can become immune to it. Then when real bad news comes along, we might not respond appropriately. Imagine a boy in a fairy tale who constantly cites statistics about the increased rates of wolves in an area even when they aren’t true. Then when the wolf rates actually increase, who would believe him?
Finally, one last problem I want to highlight is in regard to the nature of fear as motivation. This is a question perhaps best answered by psychologists or theologians, but it seems to me that fear is not a suitable, long-lasting motivator for doing the right thing. I can’t imagine that it has enduring, beneficial effects. Not only does fear wear off rather quickly, but it can result in self-protection and anxiety rather than in reaching out to others. I’m not arguing that we ignore legitimate bad news. Rather, I’m saying that routinely using fear to motivate, while it may be a relatively easy approach, may not be particularly effective.
There is no shortage of irony here. Christian teachers and leaders might focus on the failures of the church to motivate their members to do better; but in taking a negative approach, they might actually hinder the success of the church. These well-intentioned efforts might do more harm than good. Just imagine if we used this kind of fear appeal in our everyday lives. Let’s say that you didn’t like your wife’s cooking. You could say, “Honey, tonight you served us jarringly inedible tofu, again, and if this continues, we will cease to function as a family unit. However, I have truly good news, for I have prepared a series of menus centered on steak and pork chops.”
How do we recognize fear appeals? They often have three components: a strong adjective (or adverb), a dire prediction, and an upbeat remedy. Some of the adjectives that I’ve read include startling, sobering, jarring, alarming, and dangerous. The dire predictions include “the coming crisis,” “an epidemic,” “this will be the last generation,” “the church in crisis,” “the coming collapse of Christianity,” and “the deterioration of our faith.” The proposed remedies are often introduced with language like “optimistic,” “provides hope,” “we can correct and rebuild,” “follow our biblical blueprint,” and “rebuild and restore the church.”
In writing this, I realize that I may have made a strategic error in discussing why I have written this book: I have neglected to add a fear appeal. So maybe no one will read it. But it’s not too late, so here it goes. You should read this book because “there is a deeply disturbing trend of bad statistics that is sabotaging American Christianity and destroying the American way of life, and if you ignore it your entire body will soon be covered with boils. The good news, however, is that if you buy this book and read it carefully, you will avoid this calamity; plus you’ll live longer, have fresh breath, and your kitchen knives will always stay sharp.”
Getting It Right
This book is not about ignoring bad news to focus solely on good news. Overemphasizing the good news has its own problems, and the church would do best by looking at itself honestly. It is also not a refutation of the value of statistics to the church. The fact that statistics are socially influenced simply means that we need to understand how they come to be, not reject them outright. I’m a card-carrying quantitative sociologist, and I really like statistics. If nothing else, it’s probably much easier to lie without statistics than to lie with them.
The purpose of this book is rather simple. Using the best available data, I will describe how Christians are doing in six areas: church growth, what we believe, our participation in church activities, family and sexual issues, how we treat others, and how others see us. In each of these areas, there are various myths floating around about American Christianity, and I want to examine if these myths are true. In a sense, this book is like the popular television show Myth-Busters, on which they test everyday assumptions about how things work. Unfortunately, I don’t get to blow things up—a mainstay on the show—but I do get to present a lot of data.
My goal is not to show the church in a particular light but rather to let the data speak for themselves. Having said that, the answers provided here provide some surprisingly good news for Christians.
This book focuses on Evangelical Christians because as an Evangelical Christian myself, this is my vantage point in looking at these issues. As such, I am aware of the many myths perpetrated about Evangelicals. But the analyses include Mainline Protestants and Catholics as well, and so many of the ideas in this book apply to American Christianity more generally.
My Analytic Strategy
I’m not sure that all Christian commentators have carefully thought out the best way to evaluate Christians. In using data to judge how Christians are doing, what standards should we use?
Many analyses of Christianity use one of two standards, both of which are problematic. The first standard is perfection. Any deviation of Christianity from the ideal is a cause for alarm. Certainly perfection is our goal, but it’s an unattainable goal, and while we can use it for motivation, it’s a poor standard for evaluation because no one will ever meet it. Using this standard, we should be alarmed about every single aspect of Christianity. Furthermore, with this standard, we don’t need to collect any data about Christians because, by assumption, we’ve fallen short. I once heard Chuck Colson say
that God makes Christians better, not necessarily good. By this he meant that many Christians start off in bad places, and even significant improvement leaves them short sometimes. As such, Christianity can make a substantial difference in peoples’ lives, but they can still be far from perfect.
A second commonly used standard is a variation of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment about pornography—that he can’t define it but he knows it when he sees it. Here, commentators do not have any a priori standards of evaluation, and instead they use their own judgment in identifying where Christians fall short. The problem here is that we each have our own biases and values with which we evaluate data, and so this approach often tells us more about the person making the evaluations than the group being evaluated.
Rather than using standards of perfection or idiosyncratic judgments, this book makes three other types of comparisons. First, Christians are compared to members of other religions as well as those who have no religious affiliation at all.[10] Breaking it down further, when data allow, I also compare Protestants to Catholics, and among Protestants, Evangelicals to Mainline Protestants and to members of historically Black denominations. This type of comparison allows us to see how Christians are doing compared to other groups, and also to see which Christian groups are doing the best on any given issue.
To illustrate the value of such a comparison, what if I told you that an athlete was successful at doing something 4 out of 10 times, and then I asked you if this meant that she was good? Before answering, you would probably want to know how other players do at it. If the “something” is hitting a baseball, 4 hits in 10 at bats makes the player among the world’s best. If it’s shooting free throws, the player is pretty bad. A simple way to evaluate people is to compare them with others.
Also, I compare Christians who attend church frequently to those who attend less frequently. The logic here is that if being a Christian makes a difference in people’s lives, we would expect to see more difference among those people who are more involved in it. I use attendance as a measure of involvement since it is commonly collected in many data sets, and it’s a relatively straightforward question for respondents to answer.[11]
Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told Page 2
