Recent Threads

[Newsom Michael]

I think that the Baylor Study rests on a different set of survey
questions.  My sense, although it is only intuitive, is that the Baylor
Study methodology is entirely sound, and probably better than the
methodology of most of the other surveys of the religious views of the
American people.   

 

More to the point, I had forgotten to mention the fuller discussion of
what it means to be "unaffiliated" in the context of the study, a
discussion that supports my interpretation of the 10.8% figure.  Of the
10.8%, 37.1% don't believe in God or some higher power but 62.9% believe
in God or some higher power.  Furthermore, given the careful treatment
of the theology of God, the Baylor Study would lead one to conclude that
"some higher power" might resemble strongly one of the four conceptions
of God that the Study analyzed.

 

Another way to look at this is to consider the possibility that
rationalistic or liberal religion can take on a secular focus in which
there is little to no room for God.  Remember that the Deists taught
that God was essentially a beneficent watchmaker who, after creating the
universe, removed Himself to the far side of the clouds to tend to his
knitting, leaving the world to run in accordance with the laws that He
had instituted and put in place.  It does not take much to move from
this view of God to a view of God as merely a "higher power."  If that
is the case, and I believe that it is, then only 4% of Americans could
be said not to believe in "God/higher power-perhaps-of the-Deist-sort."

 

Again, given the sound methodology of the Study, I just don't see a
surge.  Doug, take a look at the Study.  You can find it on-line, I
think, I just don't happen to have the web address.  But go to the
Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion website.    

________________________________

From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
[mailto:religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Douglas Laycock
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2007 6:58 PM
To: religionlaw at lists.ucla.edu
Subject: RE: Recent Threads

 

Michael Hout and Claude Fischer at Berkely report a number of studies
with similar results, showing that people reporting no religious
preference doubled from 7% to 14% in the 90s.  Why More Americans Have
No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations, 67 Am. Soc. Rev. 165
(2002).  Tweaking the data, they find that some of the difference is a
difference between the young adult generation and the recently deceased
generation, and that part of the difference is people with weak
religious affiliations now reporting none. This second group is entirely
confined to political liberals and moderates; these appear to be people
who do not want to report themselves as religious because to them,
conservative Christians have given all religion a bad name.

The Baylor study may have picked up a small reversal of trend, or it may
have asked a slightly different question.  

Quoting Newsom Michael <mnewsom at law.howard.edu>:

> I wonder if there is a "surge" of people reporting no religion.  The
> Baylor study -- an extraordinary piece of social science work -- that
> came out a year ago shows that 89.2% of Americans have a religious
> affiliation, and of the remaining 10.8%, the study characterizes them
as
> "persons without a religious preference, denomination, or place of
> worship."  One cannot fairly say that the unaffiliated necessarily
have
> no religion, for it is possible to be an unaffiliated Christian, and
> even if one could say that the unaffiliated have no religion, how is
> 10.8% a "surge?"  It would seem to me that to be a "surge" one would
> have to have good data that showed, for example, that 25 years ago,
the
> "unaffiliated" constituted something under 5 or 6% of the American
> people.
>
> I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the "unaffiliated" have been
> around for a long time in the United States, and in numbers not that
far
> removed from 10.8%.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
> [mailto:religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Douglas
Laycock
> Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 11:05 AM
> To: religionlaw at lists.ucla.edu
> Subject: Recent Threads
>
> Some Christians proselytize; some don't.  Same with atheists.
>
> There is clearly a hostile secular reaction to evangelical activism
and
> political influence; it is visible in our politics and in some of the
> resistance to free exercise claims, and it shows up statistically in a
> surge of people reporting no religion in surveys about religious
> belief.  It's not a reaction to the Christian Reconstructionists, who
> are numerically trivial.  But many of the folks having the reaction
> can't tell the difference between the conservative values voters and
> the Christian Reconstructionists.
>
> The mission is a central religious experience in Mormonism. What Fred
> Gedicks described is the social understanding of the faith.  The
> reality of any religion lies not in formal doctrine but in the social
> understanding, practices, and lived experience of its faithful.  That
> smart people on this list can doubt whether the Mormon mission is
> religious dramatically illustrates what is wrong with the
> compelled/motivated distinction.
>
> I agree -- and have testified -- that the religious motivation must be
> substantial or primary and not just lurking in the background
> somewhere.  That means the resulting line is one of degree and not a
> bright line.  But to say the Mormon mission is not distinguishable
from
> any other reason for taking a year off is like saying that because 1
> isn't much different from 2, and 2 isn't much different from 3, and so
> on -- that 1 is indistinguishable from 100 or a hundred trillion or
any
> other number.
>
> Douglas Laycock
> Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law
> University of Michigan Law School
> 625 S. State St.
> Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1215
>  734-647-9713
>
> _______________________________________________
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> _______________________________________________
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> Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as 
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>


Douglas Laycock
Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law School
625 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1215
  734-647-9713

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