Report Card for Evangelical Christianity in the United States
Subject
Grade
Comments
Church Growth
Growth in American history
A
Considerable growth since the American Revolution
Growth since 1970s
B
Strong growth in absolute numbers, steady in terms of percentages
Holding on to the young
B-
Fewer young people believe, but that’s the case in every generation. Possible worry about reaching those who never marry.
Retaining members
B
Lose mainly to non-affiliated, but draw from them as well
Growth by region
B
Percentages staying steady or growing in major regions, except the South
Demographics
Gender equality
C
Christianity still a majority of women, except in leadership
Racial integration
B-
Church still predominately White, but it’s been getting more diversified in recent decades.
Effect of education
A-
Beliefs and practices get stronger with more education.
Beliefs and Practices
Orthodox beliefs
B
High levels, steady or increasing over time, perhaps due to marginal Evangelicals leaving
Practices
A-
Prayer, Bible reading, evangelism are up.
Giving
C+
Lower than we might expect. Percentage of giving has remained stable over past two decades.
Experiencing God
B+
Many experience God regularly, but some other religious groups are a bit higher.
Beliefs of young Evangelicals
B
Belief about God, Bible, and heaven remaining stable
Practices of young Evangelicals
A-
Prayer, evangelism, and probably church attendance are up in recent decades.
Sinning
Divorce and living together
B
Relatively low rates, and less among frequent attendees, but increasing over time christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites . . . and Other Lies You’ve Been told
Sex
A-
Relatively low rates of adultery, premarital sex, porn; these decrease with attendance.
Drugs
A
Low rates; decreases considerably with attendance
Everyday honesty
B
Low rates, but no consistent changes with attendance. Need better data.
Youth’s behavior
B
Doing well in areas of sex, drugs, and stealing. Need to watch the fighting. Could do better with everyday honesty.
Loving Others
Interacting with neighbors
A-
Relatively high levels, goes up with attendance
Loving attitudes
A
Selfless, empathetic toward others
Loving behaviors
C+
Could act more charitably to others, but this does increase with attendance.
Attitudes toward Blacks
D
Um, being Black is not a sin. Gets worse with attendance, but improving over time.
Attitudes toward gays
D
Not loving gays; gets worse with attendance, but improving over time
Attitudes Toward Us
Non-Christians’ attitudes toward us
B
Mixed feelings, but getting more positive over time. May not interfere much with mission.
Our attitudes toward non-Christians
C-
We like them less than they like us, yet we’re called to love.
Self-concept
D+
We seem strangely ready to believe the worst about ourselves.
You know, I’m kind of enjoying this oversimplification, so let’s take it a step further. That’s right, after about a year of reading the scholarly literature and analyzing scores of data sets, I am distilling my evaluation of Evangelical Christianity to a single grade. I give American Evangelical Christianity a B. In other words, I would say that the church is doing well overall on the issues covered in this book. It’s not excellent, because many things could be improved, but it’s not average or worse, because in many ways the church is doing quite well. So there you have it: a B.[1]
What This Means for the Church
The material presented in this book has various implications. It appears that in many ways, here in America, Evangelical Christianity in particular, and Christianity as a whole, is doing a pretty good job of being the church. Well done. This is something that we American Christians can feel good about. Celebrate. Go buy yourself a dish of ice cream or give a high-five to the person sitting next to you in church next Sunday.
This positive message is very different from what we often hear from Christian leaders, teachers, and researchers. Their message can go something like this: American Christianity is rapidly dying, and Christians are immoral, disliked, and not very good at being Christians, so . . . go invite your friends to join us. Frankly, if after two millennia on Earth and several centuries in this country, Christianity is as messed up as people like to describe it, we should probably just give up. No book or conference or magazine article is going to save it now. Thankfully, this appears not to be the case, and many things are going well. When we invite others to join us in our faith, we are not asking them to jump onto a sinking ship; rather, it’s a ship going at maybe three-quarters speed in mostly the right direction.
An overall positive assessment of American Christianity also means that we don’t need to feel badly about being Christians. It’s difficult to feel good about our faith when we are bombarded with negative messages about it. This idea struck home for me when I finished the first draft of this manuscript. I told my good friend John about what I had found, and how my findings differed from conventional wisdom. When I was done, he paused for awhile and said, somewhat cheerfully, “Oh, I guess I don’t have to be embarrassed about being a Christian.”
Being Honest About the Bad
Having offered a positive assessment of Evangelical Christianity, allow me now to qualify it. Another cost of the consistently negative messages that we hear about American Christianity is that we’re more likely to miss the real problems when they come up. When I began this book, I didn’t know what I’d find, and over the years I have been surprised, contradicted, and generally disagreed with by data so many times that I’ve stopped predicting how analyses will turn out. Going into chapter 6, I was feeling good about most of the analyses, and then I got to the research about Christians’ attitudes toward minorities, and I was utterly dismayed. How can we love the world if we don’t like the people who are different from us? These negative feelings are a real problem, and Evangelical Christianity in the United States cannot fulfill its mission if we don’t like people of different races, sexualities, or belief systems. To be clear, many Evangelicals hold loving, favorable attitudes toward all others, but on average, we can do better.
I would guess that these negative attitudes toward other groups are an unintended consequence of one of Evangelical Christianity’s strengths: We have forged a strong in-group identity that has allowed us not only to survive but actually to thrive in today’s world.[2] Unfortunately, this Christian identity may have led us to feel less favorable toward those not in the group. So how should we change things? Beats me—I’m just a sociologist, and if you have to depend on sociology for moral guidance, you are in deep trouble. However, there are a lot of smart Christians out there who have thought a lot about these issues, and they can guide us into doing a better job of loving those who are different from us. Let’s find these people and listen to them.
/> My opinion of the Christian church is similar to Winston Churchill’s famous statement about democracy: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” Sure the church has had its problems, but in many ways, both now and throughout history, it’s been a smashing success, a great benefit for humanity. Perhaps we should say that the Christian church is the most problematic institution on Earth except for all the others that have been tried.
Will Popular Beliefs About Christianity Change? The Power of Paradigms and Incentives
Now that I’ve written this book, I can expect things to change, right? After all, I used the most accurate data I could find, and I tried to set aside my own personal opinions in order to present the data as simply and accurately as I could. Therefore, shouldn’t I expect that if enough people read this book it will result in a more accurate, less negative public discussion of Christianity? Maybe, but maybe not. The message of this book faces an uphill battle for two reasons: paradigms and incentives.
To explain the power of paradigms, let’s turn to science. A naïve view of science is that scientists base their beliefs on the best available data at any given time. Instead, what really happens, as described by Thomas Kuhn in his classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that people form paradigms. A paradigm is a collection of ideas and theories about a given topic. Basically, it’s somebody’s view of how the world works. Paradigms have remarkable staying power because they can persist long after they have been disproved. Certainly paradigms can change—something Kuhn calls a paradigm shift—but it often takes an abundance of countering evidence, and even that may not be enough. There are countless examples of scientific paradigms that have overstayed their welcome. Classically, people believed that the sun revolved around the earth even after conclusive evidence proved otherwise. More recently, two Australian medical researchers discovered that some forms of ulcers are caused by bacteria rather than stress and anxiety, as had been previously believed. It took years and considerable energy to get people to believe them; in fact, one of them even had to drink the bacteria and give himself an ulcer.
In this book I examine paradigms about American Christianity. These paradigms include: American Christianity is rapidly declining in size; young people are leaving the church; Christians misbehave just as much as—if not more than—everyone else; Christians don’t love others; and non-Christians really dislike Christians. Even if these paradigms are factually incorrect, which I think most of them are, they will have staying power because, well, they are paradigms. It will take a lot of opposing evidence to reverse them.
Let me tell you a story as an illustration. My wife and I host a weekly dinner and Bible study at our house. (She leads. I vacuum and make coffee.) About a year ago, several members started talking very animatedly about how much non-Christians hate Christians—especially Evangelical Christians. I had recently done some research on the issue (along the lines of what I’ve presented here in chapter 8), and so I explained to them that non-Christians’ attitudes toward Christians were more charitable than we might think, and these attitudes seem to be getting more positive over time. The Bible study members found this interesting and thanked me for the information. I went into the kitchen to get some more pasta, and I ended up chatting with someone else for about twenty minutes. When I returned to the family room, the same people were saying the same things about how much non-Christians hate Christians. I looked at my hands to see if perhaps I was invisible, and I wasn’t. I cleared my throat to see if I was making noise when I spoke, and I was. So why had the group—all well-educated friends—completely ignored what I had said? Paradigms don’t change easily—even in the face of countering evidence. At that point I realized that nothing I could say, no matter how factual, would change their minds, so I went back to my food. With regard to this book, I hope it will change people’s minds about American Christianity, but I realize that in the meantime I might spend a lot of time eating pasta.
This doesn’t mean that we should not speak up when people are getting their facts wrong about Christianity. It might take a while for us to be heard, but we shouldn’t give up, because paradigms can shift over time.
Another reason why we’ll probably continue to hear overly negative portrayals of American Christianity is the incentives these portrayals offer. Christian authors, speakers, and leaders will sometimes pass along inaccurate, negative information in their effort to help the church. Suppose that you had a great idea for the church, and you wanted to share it with others. The first thing you would want to do is explain why people need your idea. An easy way to do that is to say that the church has been doing badly in that area so far; therefore, you’re offering a remedy to a problem. For instance, do you have a new discipleship program for young people? Tell their parents about the dangers faced by their children. Do you want to get your church members to tithe more? Find some statistics about how little Christians tithe. We scare people to get them to listen to us, but the problem with this approach is that it creates scared people.
It’s not just Christians who do this. The media, who want to sell more newspapers and books and commercials, attract people’s attention by offering the unexpected and the ironic. With religion, this often means stories of religious people gone bad. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the media is inherently biased against religion; rather, its desire for novelty leads it to sensationalize whatever it covers. Front-page stories describe planes crashing, not planes that land safely. Lead news stories tell of politicians in scandal, not those making sensible laws. Magazine covers describe corrupt businesses going bankrupt, not those making steady profits and treating their employees well. Likewise, when it comes to religion, bad news sells, and so we’ll keep on reading it, seeing it, and hearing it.
Just last week a newspaper reporter interviewed me for a story about the religiously unaffiliated in New England. The reporter e-mailed me a series of questions, and I answered them with a four-page document complete with figures and graphs. The article was about the growth of religious unaffiliation in New England, and I made clear that much of the growth nationwide, and in New England, happened in the 1990s, and it has since slowed down considerably. This, however, wasn’t the story that the reporter was looking for, so the article ran with quotations from others about this recent, dramatic change in the religious landscape. I have no reason to think that this reporter is biased against Christianity; rather, the reporter wanted an article that would get people’s attention. This isn’t always done by emphasizing accuracy.
A Call for Christians to Retract Unconditional Love
What does all this mean for you the reader? Well, if nothing else, I hope you realize the need to be more skeptical when it comes to statistics about Christianity. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, statistics hold a strange power over people. Someone who is otherwise a clear thinker will readily accept something not true when it is presented as a statistic. (This is especially true for statistics presented in written form.) Statistics somehow can bypass the critical-thinking part of the brain and go straight to the “oh, that must be right” part.
Guess what? You don’t have to believe all statistics! The Bible commands us to love others unconditionally, but this applies to people, not statistics. With statistics, we should be everything we shouldn’t be with people—cranky, skeptical, and critical. With statistics, acceptance should be earned, not freely given.
I routinely irritate friends and family by not believing the statistics that they tell me if the statistics don’t sound right. When I disagree, they sometimes respond by repeating the statistic, in case I somehow missed that it’s a statistic (and therefore to be accepted at face value). I still choose not to believe it, and their reaction is often one of disbelief, as if I’m breaking some unwritten rule.
Once over a late dinner at a restaurant, I was talking with a friend, and he told me a statistic that he claimed was true that didn’t sound right to me, so I to
ld him that I didn’t believe it. After repeating the statistic several times, he added the clincher: that he had read it somewhere. Now, that’s the double-dog-dare of statistical presentation because, after all, who can counter it? Still, I didn’t believe it, and he grew increasingly frustrated. To make a point, I borrowed the waitress’ pen and wrote on the paper place mat: “The statistic is wrong.” I handed it to my friend and explained that now he’s “read” that the statistic is wrong, so he doesn’t have to believe it. He understood my point (but he still didn’t talk to me for several days).
You don’t have to be a sociologist to critically evaluate data. As I described in chapter 2, Newsweek magazine had a cover story about the increase of religious “nones” (i.e., the unaffiliated) in the United States, and it asked provocatively whether Christian America is at an end.[3] Mark Driscoll, a well-known and often controversial pastor in Seattle, responded to the Newsweek story not with gloom-and-doom but with a reinterpretation. Driscoll made the case that an increased number of religiously unaffiliated Americans is not so much bad as it is clarifying. Driscoll surmises that the irreligious now face less social stigma than they have in the past, and that people who have rejected religion can now accurately identify their religious status. This, according to Driscoll, actually helps the church by reclassifying marginal, uncommitted Christians. Now, regardless of whether Driscoll is right or wrong (and I personally think he’s more right than wrong), his reaction to this story illustrates that we don’t have to take statistics about Christianity at face value.
We have a lot of reasons to be suspicious of social statistics. For one thing, social researchers vary in their ability, and just because someone has a PhD doesn’t mean they have done the analyses correctly. When I read books or articles about Christianity that cite statistics, I routinely find basic methodological errors or other shortcomings. Maybe the sample is problematic or the survey questions are ambiguous. Sometimes the researchers misinterpret their own data. Of course, I’ve studied sociology and its methods for twenty years, so I see these problems pretty quickly, but that doesn’t mean you need graduate training to evaluate social research. Just use your common sense. If a statistic doesn’t seem right or doesn’t fit with your experience, there’s nothing wrong with rejecting it.
Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told Page 15
