7.1 Case Studies Flashcards
Religion and Society
Did You Really Go To Church This Week? Behind the Poll Data
Hadaway and Marler
surveys of religious participation can be questioned
note that US opinion-poll data about religious attendance showed significant differences between the numbers claiming to attend services and those who actually attended.
Their initial study, based on attendance counts in Protestant churches in one Ohio county and Catholic churches in 18 dioceses, indicated a much lower rate of religious participation than the polls report. Instead of 40 percent of Protestants attending church, they found 20 percent. Instead of 50 percent of Catholics attending church, we found 28 percent. In other words, actual church attendance was about half the rate indicated by national public opinion polls.
Many people, and particularly local church pastors, did not seem surprised by our findings. In fact, a story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that “plenty of religious leaders express private doubts about polls that find almost half of American adults say they worship God each week.”
The greatest outcry, however, came from survey organizations who produce the polls, social scientists who utilize poll findings to bolster arguments about the vitality of American religion, and a number of Roman Catholic researchers who argued that we exaggerated the overreporting in their constituency.
We returned to Ashtabula County, Ohio, to add a Roman Catholic attendance count to our previous count of Protestants. Because Catholic parishes did not regularly record attendance, we counted Catholic mass attendance ourselves by attending each scheduled mass at every Catholic parish in the county. We attended a total of 38 masses in 13 parishes over several months, counting attendance at each mass. Our counts showed that 24 percent of Catholics attended mass during an average week. In a poll of Ashtabula county residents, however, 51 percent of Roman Catholic respondents said they attended church during the past week. The gap between what people say and do in this rural county is roughly the same as that found in the original study among Catholics in 18 metropolitan dioceses.
Researchers who study how people answer survey questions have long known that responses to behavioral questions represent more (or less) than “just the facts.” When asked how many times they ate out last week, how frequently they have sex, and whether or not they voted in the last election, most people report what they usually do, what they would like to do or what they think someone like them ought to do. The question that Gallup asks, “Did you, yourself, happen to attend church or synagogue in the last seven days?” provokes similar, often less than factual responses.
Active church members who did not happen to attend church last Saturday or Sunday are expected to say no in response to Gallup’s question. But this creates problems for people who see themselves as committed church members and “weekly attenders.” Many have an internal rule that says, “I am a person who attends church every week.” Saying “No, I did not attend church” violates that internal rule and identifies them, symbolically, as nonchurchgoers. On the other hand, saying, “Yes, I went” is consistent with their internal rule, counts them on the side of active churchgoers, is in line with their usual behavior (including what they hope to do next week) and affirms their support of the church.
The National Secular Society
surveys of religious participation can be questioned
Noted that in the UK ‘people tend to “over-claim” when asked about
good moral (virtuous) behaviour’; Hewitt, for example, reports that around 1.3 million Catholics claimed to attend church services at least once a month, compared with a figure of around 850 000
calculated by Christian research.
The Changing Global Religious Landscape
Pew Research Center 2017
This report is published by an American ‘think-tank’ and applies demographic data to try to see how religions are likely to develop
globally in the near future.
Most of Europe (and especially the UK) and a few other countries such as Japan are very secularised, and have had declines in religious membership, attendance and levels of religiosity. These are also countries with ageing populations – a rising average age and rising proportions of older people, and the number of deaths exceeding the number of births.
Although there are many Christians in other parts of the world, such as Africa, with higher birth rates, the outcome is that Christians have had a relatively large share of the world’s deaths (37%).
The Pew Research projection is that Muslims will be the world’s fastest-growing major religious group in the decades ahead; signs of this rapid growth are already visible. In the period between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31% of all babies born around the world – far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24%). So there is a ‘baby boom’ among Muslims.
However, people who do not identify with any religion are experiencing a very different trend. While religiously unaffiliated people currently make up 16% of the global population, only an estimated 10% of the world’s newborns between 2010 and 2015 were born to religiously unaffiliated mothers.
The Pew projection is that the proportion of the world’s population with no religion will fall. Buddhism is also expected to decline because of low fertility rates and ageing populations in the countries where it has most followers.
Projections like these always need to be treated with caution, for example it will not be the case that all children born to Christian parents will be Christian. The Pew Research Center takes this into account by assuming that there will be some switching between religions.
Believing in Belonging: Religion Returns to Sociology Mainstream
Abby Day
Day’s research provides an insight into the difficulties of defining and measuring religious beliefs. In the 2001 Census, a question was asked for the first time about religious belief. It was expected that, because of secularisation, most people would say they had no religious belief. Yet 71.6% of people completing the Census described themselves as Christian, an unexpectedly high figure. This seemed to lend support to the idea that religion was becoming privatised, that people were ‘believing without
belonging’.
However, Day carried out qualitative research using semi-structured interviews, asking respondents in the north of England what they believed in, in an attempt to find out what was really happening. What she found was that although people often described themselves as Christian, they didn’t often talk about God, Christianity or church when talking about their beliefs.
Day concluded that when people said they were Christian, this was for many of them a way of claiming an ethnic, national or family identity rather than a religious one. Saying that they were Christian was a way of saying they were White English, and a way of marking themselves as different from others such as minority ethnic groups. An apparent identification with religion turned out to not be mainly about religion at all.
Day’s findings contradict the ‘believing without belonging’ and privatised religion ideas, and support the arguments of Bruce and others that secularisation is occurring.
Pew Research Centre
When it comes to the percentage of adults for whom religion is important, the three highest are
- Senegal - 97%
- Nigeria - 92%
- India 92%
The three lowest are:
* Russia - 14%
* Japan - 12%
* France - 11%
2016 YouGov Survey
Revealed that 48% of those in social grades ABC1 described themselves as ‘Atheist’ compared to 42% of those in social grades C2ED.
