Dogma Bites Man by George H. Gallup, Jr.
Dogma Bites Man
On the New & Biased Research Linking Faith & Social Ills
by George H. Gallup, Jr.
The message to those who claim in any sense to be pro-life is unequivocal,” declared
one columnist in the influential English newspaper The Guardian. “If
you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that
God does not exist.”
He was referring to a survey of data from eighteen nations recently published
in the Journal of Religion and Society, in which a writer named Gregory
S. Paul asserted (or at least strongly implied) that because the United States
has a high level of religiosity and at the same time a high level of social
dysfunction (murders, abortions, sexual promiscuity, suicide, and other social
disorders), religious belief contributes to such problems, and can even cause
them.
His assertion, made in a paper titled “Cross-National Correlations
of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in
the Prosperous Democracies,” should be challenged forthrightly, because
the casual, non-research-minded reader might easily accept his conclusion that
religion is a destructive force in American society. To this reader, the correlation
of high religiosity with high levels of social problems can look like a convincing
argument for the destructive effect of religion.
Certainly, secularist journalists and bloggers leapt upon the report as confirmation
of their views. “When it comes to ‘values,’ if you look at
facts rather than mere rhetoric, the substantially more secular blue states
routinely leave the Bible Belt red states in the dust,” claimed one writer
in the Los Angeles Times. Her conclusion: “We shouldn’t
shy away from the possibility that too much religiosity may be socially dangerous.”
Religion in Depth
To draw accurate conclusions about the effects of religious belief on America,
it is vital to look beneath the surface manifestations of religion—which
can be defined as broad belief in a God or higher power, and loose attachment
to religious traditions and institutions—and examine religious and spiritual
belief and practice in depth.
But before doing so, it is necessary to challenge Paul’s analysis of
the data collected from the international survey. My research associate, D.
Michael Lindsay, an expert in the department of sociology at Princeton University,
writes that Paul’s analysis does not pass scholarly muster. He makes
two points:
• Paul claims that he did not employ the standard sociological
tools of regression and multivariate analyses because “causal factors
for rates of societal function are complex,” and because the countries
were similar enough to study without using control variables. Can he identify
a single other study published in a major social scientific journal comparing
results across countries that did not employ multivariate analysis to control
for differences among nations? No, because multivariate analysis is required
for cross-national comparisons of this sort.
• For the author’s bold claims against religious
commitment contributing to society to hold true, he would have to refute
the hundreds of volumes that have proven otherwise. From parenting and fatherhood,
to mental and physical health, the weight of empirical evidence is against
Paul’s assertions: religious commitment has notably positive effects
on the individual and collective levels of human society.
I will discuss the second point in more detail, but let us look at the first
point more closely. What is the problem with Paul’s failure to use the
basic sociological tools? As the Canadian statistician Scott Gilbreath has
written:
There are many socio-economic data series that vary widely across the eighteen
countries and that plausibly have a significant impact on social conditions,
e.g., income distribution, proportion of GDP spent through government, social
and cultural cohesion, fertility and mortality rates, age structure of the
population, etc., etc. Failure to look at these and other exogenous data would
introduce bias into the results.
In other words, Paul has made strong claims about the effect of religion
upon society without examining all the other factors that might explain the
phenomena he wrote about.
The Committed
What about the second point? In attempting to assess the impact of religion
on the American populace, one must, of course, immediately acknowledge the
fact that a great deal of evil in the world has been perpetrated in the name
of religion by fanatics and persons with distorted agendas.
On the whole, however, survey findings based on carefully designed scales
and penetrating questions show that spiritual commitment serves both as a brake
on anti-social activities and a powerful impetus to pro-social, even sacrificial,
behavior and attitudes. And the deeper the spiritual commitment, the more pronounced
the effects.
Indeed, a mountain of survey data from the Gallup and other survey organizations
shows that when educational background and other variables are held constant,
persons who are “highly spiritually committed” are far less likely
to engage in antisocial behavior than those less committed. They have lower
rates of crime, excessive alcohol use, and drug addiction than other groups.
On the other hand, the “highly spiritually committed” are more
hopeful about the future and experience greater joy in life. They contribute
more time helping people who are burdened with physical and emotional needs.
They are less likely to be racist, and are more giving and forgiving.
They have bucked the trend of many in society toward narcissism and hedonism.
Teens with deep spiritual commitment are not only far less likely to get into
trouble, but are more likely than their counterparts to be happy, be goal-oriented,
be hopeful about the future, see a reason for their existence, succeed better
academically, and serve others.
It has been well established by surveys for the non-profit group Independent
Sector that religious convictions have spurred much of the volunteerism in
our nation. Remarkably, one American in two gives two or three hours of each
week to some volunteer cause. Often the cause is church-related or church-sponsored,
with many believing that God has called them personally to it. One could say
that if it were not for the church’s role in dealing with many of our
social ills, the tax burden on the populace would be crushing.
A Troubling Gap
While religious beliefs have a decidedly positive impact on society in many
ways, there nevertheless remains a gap between our overall level of professed
faith and the way we live our lives. It has been rightly noted that religion
in America is “3,000 miles wide and 3 inches deep.” It is this
gap that allowed Paul to find the correlations he found and to draw the conclusions
(false but plausible conclusions) he drew.
A large majority of Americans believe there is a moral decline in the nation,
and survey statistics support their concern. A majority of teenagers, for example,
admit to having cheated on a test or tests, and two-thirds indicate that they
would lie to achieve a business objective.
How does one account for these troubling findings in the face of high levels
of religiosity? There are many explanations. Large numbers of Americans (of
the 80 percent who place themselves in the Christian tradition) could be considered “biblical
illiterates,” and lack awareness and understanding of their own religious
heritage and the central doctrines of their faith. We want the fruits of faith,
but few of the obligations. Asked to rank nine social values, the public puts “following
God’s will” far down the list, behind patience, hard work, and
five others.
In sum, religious beliefs are important in the lives of most Americans, but
they do not have primacy. As Paul noted, a huge majority of Americans attest
to a belief in God or a higher power, but he did not ask the key question in
understanding the effect of religion on American life: How deep is this belief?
The percentage of persons who currently could be described as deeply spiritually
committed is small according to certain measurements, perhaps only one
tenth of the populace. This group, however, has a transforming faith, manifested
in measurable attitudinal and behavioral ways.
A national survey conducted in 2002 gives powerful evidence of how depth
of belief in God relates closely to positive outcomes in terms of social well-being.
The study was developed by Randy Frazee, Senior Pastor of Patego Bible Church
in Fort Worth, Texas, in consultation with religious leaders and scholars,
such as Bob Buford, Larry Crabbe, George Barna, Gerald McDermott, and Dallas
Willard.
In the survey, self-identified Christians were asked to respond to fifteen
questions relating to “love of God” and fifteen related to “love
of neighbor.” (These questions were included in a broader study conducted
for the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Society at the University
of Pennsylvania by the Gallup Organization and the George H. Gallup International
Institute.)
Although those who measure high on the “love of God” scale represent
only about one-tenth of the total of Christians interviewed, those in this
category are far more likely than those on the lower end of the scale:
•
To be involved in the lives of the poor and suffering;
•
To give time to serve and help others in their communities;
•
To believe that Christians should live a sacrificial life, not driven by pursuit
of material things; and
•
To believe all people are loved by God and that, therefore, we should love
them, regardless of race, creed, wealth, or place in life.
These findings, and others from this survey, clearly reveal a close connection
between a deeper love of God and a more active and practical love of others.
The survey also points to the huge social impact that clergy, religious
educators, and others can have if they are able to move people to deeper commitment
to God.
Paul’s study can be found at http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html.
Gilbreath’s analysis can be found on his weblog “Magic Statistics” at http://magicstatistics.blogspot.com/2005/09/from-our-bulging-how-not-to-do.html.
Mr. Paul's Kitchen
In his study, Gregory Paul proposes to correlate measures of religious faith
with data on the occurrence of such social problems as homicide, suicide, sexually
transmitted disease, and abortion, gathering and comparing data for eighteen
countries he refers to variously as “prosperous developed democracies” and “developing
democracies.”
He never defines these terms and seems to assume we’ll all know exactly
which countries he’s referring to. Among those omitted without clear
explanation are: Italy, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, and Belgium. Why are these
left out? He mentions in passing that “the especially low rates [of homicide]
in the more Catholic European states are statistical noise due to yearly fluctuations
incidental to this sample,” but offers no statistical evidence corroborating
this assertion.
India would seem to be a “developing democracy.” Why
was it excluded? Not prosperous enough? Don’t know; Paul doesn’t
say. Why were Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the rest of the new
eastern European democracies excluded? Don’t
know; same reason.
Obviously, in a sample of only eighteen observations, the inclusion or exclusion
of only one or two can make a big difference in the results.
Another problem is that the time frame of the observations
is ambiguous. He says that “Data is [ sic] from the 1990s,
most from the middle and latter half of the decade, or the early 2000s.” Nowhere does he list
which year pertains to each data observation. It sounds like he uses different
reference years for different countries. At best, this is very sloppy statistical
practice. If one were suspicious, one might point out that this makes cooking
the results child’s play.
Paul’s sample appears arbitrary in the selection
of the countries studied and at best sloppy in the data selected for comparison.
In my professional
judgment as a statistician, for these and other reasons, the statistical and
scientific validity of Mr. Paul’s study cannot be accepted.
— Scott Gilbreath
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George H. Gallup, Jr. , has been in the polling field for fifty years, most recently as the chairman of the non-profit George H. Gallup International Institute. He and his wife Kinny have three children and attend St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Pennington, New Jersey. |
