Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

I received an email from Michael Paulson, a religion reporter for The Boston Globe, yesterday asking me if I had time to talk about a new study coming out today.  The study is the latest wave of the American Religious Identification Survey.  Having worked with the principal investigators – Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar – on the original design of the survey and some of the analysis once the data was collected, I can say that I’m quite familiar with the survey.  So, I agreed to chat with him last night.  He called and we talked for about 20 minutes.  He mainly wanted to know whether I thought the survey was accurate and well-done (it is) and what I thought was most interesting about it.  I mentioned the significant losses of Catholics to non-religion in New England as the most interesting finding.  He was very nice and quite knowledgeable.

Anyway, I ended up in The Boston Globe today.  I’ve been interviewed by three reporters in the last week – one an independent journalist and one for my school’s newspaper (on unrelated topics).  But The Boston Globe!!  That’s pretty cool!

For additional coverage, see USA Today’s site.  The videos are pretty groovy too.

An article I co-authored with Michael Nielsen just came out in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. It takes a look at some claims made by the LDS Church concerning the coverage of the FLDS raid in Texas last year.  If you’re interested in more details, let me know.

TimMinchin.com (courtesy of the SGU)

Title:
Zuckerman, Phil. 2008. Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. NYU Press.

Rating:
9/10

Review:
The correlation between societal secularism and societal health is an issue that has not received much attention in the sociology of religion. Paul (2005) asserted that societal secularism leads to healthier societies (i.e., one in which poverty is not widespread, crime rates are low, and there is a social safety net of government programs that prevent serious hardship). Norris and Inglehart (2004) show quite convincingly that a sense of existential security, which is derived primarily from living in healthy societies, leads to decreases in religiosity. Thus, some scholars suggest secularism leads to societal health while other suggest the opposite, societal health leads to secularism. Which is it?

• societal health ? existential security ? secularism
• secularism ? existential security ? societal health

The problem here is an issue of causality. Of course, it is possible that we are dealing with a non-recursive relationship: as one increases, it causes the other to increase and vice versa. That may not be the case as not all secular countries have high levels of societal health (though for generally obvious reasons like religion was forcibly removed, e.g., communist countries). But this is a legitimate question that has not been carefully explored in the sociological literature.

In light of the above problem of causality between secularism and societal health, I approached Zuckerman’s book with some hesitation. I thought Zuckerman might try to suggest secularism leads to healthy societies given the subtitle of the book “What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment.” As it turns out, Zuckerman carefully sidesteps my concerns and the causal quandary and instead focuses on a slightly different issue: Is it possible that people can be secular and happy? This question is related to a question that has come up regularly in the sociology of religion and is therefore a topic of interest to sociologists: Are there some people who do not turn to religion when facing death?

Why is this of interest? Stark and Finke’s (2001) formulation of rational choice theory takes as its starting point the assumption that all people have a need for “supernatural compensators” in order to deal with the mystery of death. This formulation of rational choice theory is not alone in asserting this fundamental need for religion. Andrew Greeley has argued that religious needs are “inherent in the human condition” and Christian Smith has suggested that humans are simply driven to faith in religious ideas (p. 55). If it can be shown that not all people need religion to compensate for the mystery of death and that not all people feel a “need” for religion, this foundational assumption is unsound. Theories that rely on it are, therefore, also unsound. Thus, Zuckerman, smartly tackles a less problematic issue than that of causality. Intentionally avoiding the bigger question (p. 29), Zuckerman’s topic is actually quite foundational considering its role in so many prominent theories of religion.

So, how does Zuckerman propose to test this assumption? Zuckerman moved to a secular country, Denmark, for a year with his family (p. 3). During that year, he formally interviewed close to 150 Danes and Swedes and informally spoke with hundreds more. He observed and read extensively about the countries. His interviews and research allowed him to paint a picture of Danish religiosity and social life.

Denmark is, of course, one of the most secular countries on the planet, though what that means has to be qualified. Most Danes consider themselves Christian, many are members of the state church of Denmark (which is Lutheran), and many pay 1% of their income in taxes to the state church. That would seem to make them religious. But not many Danes actually believe in god (less than 30%). What’s more, most of them don’t believe in Jesus, let alone that he atoned for sins (only 21% even believe in sin). Danes are unlikely to believe in heaven (18% do) or hell (10% do). Only 7% of Danes believe the Bible to be inerrant. And most Danes never go to church (only 12% go once a month or more). In fact, those who do believe in god in Denmark are kind of like those who don’t in America – they are the oddballs and deviants (p. 12). So, what do Danes mean when they say they are “Christian”? Two things: (1) it is part of Danish culture to be so and (2) they find it important to treat others as they would like to be treated. Thus, Danes are only religious in a cultural sense: it’s part of their culture to belong to the state church and say you’re Christian (p. 150), but they don’t believe in the supernatural aspects of religion and almost never go to church (the exception being cultural rituals like weddings).

So, Denmark is secular. What about societal health? Well, there is virtually no poverty, crime rates are relatively low, social safety nets are secure (i.e., universal health care and employment benefits are generous), the economy is healthy, and the people are the happiest on the planet (literally, they are ranked #1). This clearly illustrates that religion is not a pre-requisite of societal health or general levels of happiness. But it doesn’t directly address the question of interest: Do Danes draw on religion when it comes to death? And what about meaning in life? Do Danes derive meaning for their lives from religion?

Zuckerman deals with these questions directly by asking many of the 150 people he interviewed how they deal with death and whether they consider meaning in life. Generally he found that death was not something Danes considered on a regular basis, but even when they did, they were not afraid of it (p. 65). In fact, one interviewee, a hospice nurse, suggested that it was religious Danes who had the hardest time dealing with death as they were worried about their eternal fate (pp. 4-5). Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, believed it was the end and didn’t worry themselves about it. On the specific question of whether religion is required to deal with death, Zuckerman’s data suggests the answer is a resounding NO! This finding, in my opinion, is the primary contribution of Zuckerman’s book. It should lead social scientists who study religion to rethink their theories and assumptions. No longer can a scholar claim that religion is an innate need or a fundamental drive. It is not. People do not need and, in fact, live quite happily without it. People are religious for social and cultural reasons. There is no biological imperative toward religiosity. End of debate.

In addition to finding that Danes do not require religion to deal with death, Zuckerman also finds that most Danes don’t think too much about the meaning of life, and when they do, they do not draw upon religion (p. 73). Once again, a classic argument of many scholars that religion fulfills an innate need to understand the meaning of life is rebuffed. Religion may serve this function for some, but it is not required. End of debate.

An additional contribution of this book is the overall picture of (ir-)religiosity in Denmark and Sweden. Zuckerman actually struggles with how to study the “absence of something” (p. 76), that something being religion. What he finds is that Danes and Swedes just don’t give much thought to religion. It’s not important to them, which is what secularization theorists suggest is the end result of secularization. To be an atheist you have to care about religion. Not many Danes are atheists; they simply don’t think about these issues because they are irrelevant to them. For most Scandinavians, religion and god are things you toy with when you are young, then you forget about them when you get older and move on with your life (p. 94). Religion is a non-issue in Denmark and Sweden not because it is a private issue but because people simply don’t care about religion (p. 102).

A final issue Zuckerman addresses in the book is why some countries are religious and others are not. Zuckerman doesn’t really break new ground theoretically on this front. Instead, he draws on multiple theories and offers those as explanations. For the low levels of religiosity in Denmark, Zuckerman suggests: (1) the lack of competition (due to lazy monopoly state churches), (2) the high levels of existential security, and (3) the gender egalitarianism. All of these are probably part of the explanation. As for the higher levels of religiosity in the US, Zuckerman suggests the opposites are all true (competition leading to marketable religions, lower levels of security, and higher levels of gender inequality) plus: (1) the US was settled by religious Europeans (after the Native Americans, of course); (2) we are a nation of immigrants and immigrants tend to cling to their cultural traditions, which include religion; and (3) we are diverse, which makes religion useful as a tool of identity formation – it makes you part of a group. What’s novel about this approach is that Zuckerman doesn’t argue for one theory over another but instead suggests that many theories help explain higher and lower levels of religiosity. He is probably right.

Lest you think there are no problems with the book, I will point out two. First, the sampling method is not random. Zuckerman admits this. He uses a snowball sampling technique – he met someone, interviewed him, then asked him for references and so on. This is a legitimate problem, but a relatively minor one considering that the findings from the interviews align quite well with the large scale surveys of Danes and Swedes he draws upon. That doesn’t completely overcome the problem of representativeness, but it does suggest that his interview data is useful for answering the questions he asks.

The second problem is also minor: Zuckerman is biased. As a secular Jew, Zuckerman describes living in Denmark as a “breath of secular fresh air” (p. 8). This may be exactly what Zuckerman hoped to find. But there is no indication that what Zuckerman hoped to find influenced what he actually did find. Thus, despite the bias of the author, the book’s findings hold.

Overall, this modest book undermines many of the widely accepted theories in the sociology of religion today by illustrating that the assumption of an innate need for religion is unsound. People do not need religion. In fact, many of those who are not religious get along quite well without it. Zuckerman skirts the causality issue between secularism and societal health, but he compellingly illustrates that you can be happy and not religious. This is a must read for anyone who thinks religion is required for people to be happy.

Bonus Quotes:
p. 30 “It is a great socio-religious irony-for lack of a better term-that when we consider the fundamental values and moral imperatives contained within the world’s great religions, such as caring for the sick, the infirm, the elderly, the poor, the orphaned, the vulnerable; practicing mercy, charity, and goodwill toward one’s fellow human beings; and fostering generosity, humility, honesty, and communal concern over individual egotism-these traditionally religious values are most successfully established, institutionalized, and put into practice at the societal level in the most irreligious nations in the world today.”

p. 32 “The United States is arguably the most religious Western democracy. Denmark and Sweden are arguably the least religious Western democracies. Isn’t it strange and rather noteworthy, then, that it is in proudly religious America that guns are plentiful (especially handguns and semiautomatic assault weapons), the penal system is harsh and punitive, the death penalty is meted out on a weekly basis, drug addicts are treated like criminals, millions of children and pregnant mothers lack basic health insurance, millions of elderly people go without proper care, social workers are underpaid and overworked, people suffering from mental illness are left festering on city streets, and the highest levels of poverty of all the industrialized democracies is here. But in relatively irreligious Denmark and Sweden-two nations that most Americans would consider fairly “godless”-guns are nowhere to be found; the penal system is admirably humane, merciful, and rehabilitative; the death penalty has long been abolished; drug addicts are treated as human beings in need of medical and/or psychological treatment; every man, woman, and child has access to excellent health care; the elderly receive the finest care; social workers are well-paid and given manageable case loads; people suffering from mental illness are given first-class treatment; and the country boasts the lowest levels of poverty of all the industrialized democracies. I wondered how and why this is so.”

Title:
McKnight, Scot, and Hauna Ondrey. 2008. Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy. Baylor University Press.

Rating:
1/10

Review:
I was asked to review this book by one of the academic organizations to which I belong. I’m not sure they understood what the book was when they sent it out for review. Had they known, it is unlikely it ever would have been sent out for review for this particular organization.

The basic premise of Finding Faith, Losing Faith is that the authors have realized there are patterns to conversion stories Yet, it’s not like they have noticed this on their own. Instead, they simply steal Lewis R. Rambo’s understanding of conversion (Rambo is a professor of psychology and religion at the Graduate Theological Union) and apply it to four groups: individuals who leave Christianity and become religious independents (i.e., no affiliation), Jews who become Messianic Jews (i.e., they believe Jesus is their savior but they remain Jewish in identity and practice), Roman Catholics who convert to evangelical Christianity, and evangelical Christians who convert to Roman Catholicism. They then analyze a bunch of stories of people who have followed these paths for patterns, finding reasons why people leave one group for another.

The book doesn’t actually add anything theoretically, making it pretty useless for sociologists. Instead, it takes what is already known about conversion and applies it to these cases. As a result, you get four repetitions of: (1) people start in a specific context, (2) they have a crisis of faith, (3) they seek out a resolution, (4) they find something or someone to resolve their crisis, (5) they adopt a new identity, and (6) become somewhat critical of their previous identity in the process. This understanding of conversion was outlined by numerous scholars in the 1980s (e.g., Wright and Ebaugh both come to mind), but it is not all that different from the outlines of conversion from much earlier (e.g., William James).

So, what do the authors have to contribute? Substantively, nothing. The reason why is because their methodology is flawed. To analyze these conversion paths, the authors search around on the internet for peoples’ stories and combine those with published biographies of people who have experienced these identity changes. They then analyze this non-random sample for patterns. There is no clear sampling frame for choosing specific stories and no attempt to gather a representative sample of conversion stories. In fact, the methodology is only loosely described, but is basically, “We found a bunch of stories here and there and are going to analyze them as though we have a representative sample.” You might be saying that I’m not really being fair to the authors. After all, did they really say that they had a representative sample? No. They did not. But they generalize from their sample to the respective populations as though they do, which is a lethal flaw. For instance, the authors claim that the “most common” reason people “abandon” Christianity is because of “scientific evidence” (p. 27). In order to claim that this is the “most common” reason, you would need a representative sample of novel independents, which the authors don’t have. They cannot actually claim any frequencies in the respective populations based on what they find in their sample. If they had limited their frequency claims to their sample, that would have been fine, but they do not. Here’s another example from the conversions of Roman Catholics to evangelical Christianity, “Once at college, campus-based ministries abound… and are frequently the context in which RCEs first encounter evangelicalism and through it the Bible. The high occurrence of college RCE conversions causes Shea to refer to college Campuses as the “trenches of the proselytizing wars” between Evangelicals and Catholics” (pp. 148-149). This pattern of generalizing beyond what their data can tell them is repeated often. For instance, they claim: the majority of Jews who become Messianic Jews do so because of psychological and pathological problems (p. 89), that most Messianic Jews have some mystical experience that facilitates conversion (p. 92), and most evangelical Christians convert to Roman Catholicism because of a “special relationship” with someone and not because of the theology (p. 200). In short, while the authors have some interesting data, they don’t have the data they need to make the claims they do.

The reason I was asked to review the book was because it deals with people leaving religions, which is my area of expertise. I was initially hopeful that the authors were on to something when they said, “Theoretically speaking, all conversions are apostasies and all apostasies are therefore conversions” (p. 7). This was the one potential contribution of the book, to recognize that people who leave religion are experiencing a conversion just as much as those who are joining a religion. Claiming these are distinct reflects a bias in the sociological literature, favoring those who join religions over those who leave. But my hope was short-lived, as they immediately revert back to calling religious exiters “apostates,” singling them out as a distinct class of conversion, and suggesting that they convert for different reasons than other people. This is just one of many places (see below) where the authors begin revealing their biases by latching on to the fact that many religious independents love their new found freedom outside the confines of religion. This freedom is transformed into ‘they are sinners’ (usually sexual sin) and ‘they couldn’t cut it inside Christianity’ (not exact quotes; p. 11). “Guilt drove Christine Wicker, a journalist who covers the religious scene in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the faith” (p. 10). The authors also latch onto John Loftus, a famed religious exiter who is critical of religion. Turns out, according to McKnight and Ondrey, the primary reason Loftus left Christianity wasn’t because the Christian claim that we need a savior is absurd or there is no evidence for a god, both things he specifically mentions, but because he was seduced by a former stripper and had an affair (p. 13). The authors go so far as to say that, despite the fact most of the conversion stories of exiters don’t mention sin, they know it is there, “My own intuition, and I did not find anyone speak in this way, is that the demand put on one’s life by Jesus, by the orthodox faith and by a local church’s expectations can provoke a crisis on the part of the person who wants to go her or his own way. I am suggesting that behind some of the stories is a desire to live as one wants, to break certain moral codes that are experienced as confining, and that were either forgotten when telling the story or were an un-acknowledged dimension of the experience” (pp. 45-46). So, even though exiters don’t usually claim sin as the cause, the authors know better: religious exiters are just sinners and can’t live righteously, so they leave!

Religious exiters are also different, according to the authors, because they are not characterized by what they are gaining but what they are leaving, “Conversions to the Christian faith are nearly always shaped by what one is gaining-forgiveness, heaven, moral transformation, meaning, peace, a new community, or joy. Conversions from the Christian faith are nearly always shaped by what one is leaving instead of what one is gaining” (pp. 46-47). So, secular humanists, who embrace a worldview that values humans and the human experience, are really just bitter losers who have given up all that is good in life, even though none of the accounts analyzed indicated as much. Additionally, while there is no discussion of Messianic Jews turning back to Judaism or Roman Catholic converts returning to evangelical Christianity or evangelical converts returning to Catholicism, the author has to mention that some who leave religions return, “It would be unfair to the evidence to suggest that all who walk away from the faith flourish in the land” (p. 61). According to the authors, secular individuals can’t be happy, so they end up turning back to religion quite frequently (remember, they don’t have the data to indicate frequencies), despite the fact none of the accounts they analyzed indicated as much.

In case you haven’t quite gotten the point that religious exiters just aren’t as good of people as are converts to religion and that, despite what the authors claimed at the beginning of the book that all conversions are apostasies and vice versa, the authors go out of their way to make sure you understand that “apostates” are different from “converts,” “Christian conversion is a spiritual phenomenon, and so the sacred stories of converts must be handled with the gloves of reverence. Ultimately, conversion is what happens between a whole person and the whole God. As such, conversion to Jesus is best defined as the transformation of identity in Christ, the conversion of a person in his deepest being; conversion means the transformation of an “I am who I am” to an “I am who I am in Christ” identity” (pp. 73-74). The implicit message here: “conversion” to religious independent doesn’t warrant treatment with reverence and it isn’t a “deepest being” conversion. It’s superficial and easily reversed.

This leads to another major problem with the book, in case you have already noticed it: Bias! I have to applaud the authors for at least trying to be understanding of people who don’t share their liberal evangelical Christian views (they don’t mention they are evangelical Christians explicitly until the last chapter, but it’s pretty obvious early on), “If mapping conversion theory shows anything… it shows the need for grace, humility, and openness to one another as we listen to and learn from one another’s stories. The sincerity of each converts’ (often opposite) experience underscores the need to learn from one another’s experience rather than denounce the other’s experience. Listening to the critique of those who leave our faith teaches us about our faith. Both converts and apostates shed light on faith” (p. 236). The authors try to be open-minded and objective, but that is clearly beyond their level of tolerance. Throughout the book the authors use parentheticals and short barbs to rail against everyone who is not a liberal evangelical Christian. They call the writings of atheists “tirades against the Christian faith” (p. 14), but don’t label similar criticisms of other religions tirades. They also call atheists “fundamentalists,” (p. 23), which is simply name calling without warrant. They dismiss creationism as a dogma (p. 21), illustrating their liberal tendencies and suggesting their doctrinal superiority. They claim evangelical churches are “saturated with former Roman Catholics” (p. 123), which does have some merit, but they overstate the case. According to recent Pew data, 10% of American adults are former Catholics, but 2.6% of the American population has converted to Roman Catholicism, including many evangelical Christians. The authors also claim Roman Catholicism doesn’t really teach doctrine or allow people to “know” Jesus (p. 139), which I’m sure Roman Catholics will find appealing. They even level their vitriol at the World Council of Churches, claiming it is seeking “unity at the expense of theological articulation” (p. 214). Basically, if you aren’t a liberal evangelical Christian who thinks exactly how the authors do, this book will find a way to criticize you. But it’s done with an ecumenical spirit, so don’t take offense.

It isn’t until the very end of the book that the authors admit they have an aim other than objective scientific research: advocacy, “We believe that pastors and church workers, to apply this to our own context of faith, need to become much more aware of conversion theory for this reason alone: conversions occur for a variety of reasons and, until ministers are aware of the amazing variety of those reasons, they will be unable to minister adequately to those with contexts and stories unlike the typical context and story at work in their own location of ministry” (pp. 234-235). In short, the authors want pastors and church leaders to be the go-to resources for people who are doubting (pp. 22-23). They wrote this book to serve as a resource for such people so they can help their acolytes stay evangelical Christians. In a sense, this is commendable: the authors are criticizing their own community by noting that among evangelical Christians, “Doubts cannot often be nursed in public without censure and without questions about one’s integrity” (p.54). In short, the book is designed to inform pastors of why people might leave religions with the hope that the pastors will be more understanding and hopefully be able to stop them.

From a social scientific standpoint, the book really has nothing to offer. The methodology is flawed, there are no contributions to theory (in fact, I don’t think the authors really understand what theory is; see p. 231), the book is in no way objective, and the ultimate goal is to keep people religious. If you are in a position to try to keep evangelical Christians part of the fold, you might find this book useful in that it will help you understand why some people want to leave. But I can’t think of another context where this book would be useful.