Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Why Do We Hear
So Much Bad News
About Christianity?
Some statistics are born bad—they aren’t much good from the
start because they are based on nothing more than guesses or
dubious data. Other statistics mutate.
—Joel Best, Sociologist
Crying, “The sky is falling!” might sell books, but it never solves
problems.
—Ed Stetzer, LifeWay Research
You may have heard the bad news about Christianity in America:
The church is shrinking; Christians get divorced more than anyone
else; non-Christians have a very low opinion of Christians; and on
and on it goes. This disheartening news is often given to us in the
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doesn’t), the picture it paints isn’t all that bad. Less than 1 in 4 (23%)
of the non-Christian respondents held unfavorable opinions about
Evangelicals. The rest were either positive, of no opinion, or didn’t
know. This seems to be a reasonably low number, given that none
of the respondents embraced the tenets of Christianity.
My take on these data is that they certainly should be viewed
with caution, and they may even demonstrate a positive view of
Christians. If a student turned this in for a class assignment, I would
tell him that he has an interesting research question, but he should
redo his analyses and presentation. However, the Barna Group’s
findings and conclusion were catchy, so they were picked up by the
media. The Atlantic magazine (July 2003) summarized this study
with the title “Evangelicals and Prostitutes.” They wrote that “Non-
Christians, it turns out, have a low regard for evangelical Christians,
whom they view less favorably than all the above-mentioned groups
except one: prostitutes.”
Christine Wicker, in her book The Fall of the Evangelical Nation:
The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, summarized the study as
follows: “When asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-
Christians rated Evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes rated lower”
(143). She did not even cite the original study, instead presenting it as
an unambiguous fact reflecting high “anti-evangelical sentiment.”
From Wicker’s book, a Christian organization named Off the
Map picked up the statistic and featured it on their Web site as evi-
dence that Christianity is losing its influence in America.3 On the
same Web page, they also advertised registration for their confer-
ences that teach attendees how to reverse this trend.
From the Off the Map Web site, several bloggers found the
statistic and put their own spin on it. One Web site, “A Blind Beg-
gar” (subtitled “Devoted to the Journey of Christianity”), summa-
rized it as “Only prostitutes rank lower than evangelicals in terms of
respect in the mind of the public.”4 Notice that now Evangelicals are
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pick statistics for their usefulness rather than for accuracy, and the
most useful statistics are often those that cast the church in a nega-
tive light.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media favors statistics that are news-
worthy. Newsworthiness to the media usually means “unexpected”
or “ironic” or “tragic.” For example, one airplane crashing is headline
news, but the thousands that land safely each day are not. When it
comes to religion in general, and Christianity in particular, news-
worthy stories are often those that highlight religious people not
living up to their moral code, and so frequently we hear of Chris-
tians’ moral failings. In a city with hundreds of pastors, for instance,
suppose that almost every single one lives a holy life of loving and
serving others, but one is found passed out in a shopping cart in
front of a strip club. Guess which pastor will be on the front page?
It’s not that the media is necessarily biased against Christianity (the
evidence on that is mixed). Rather, it wants to sell newspapers and
airtime, and so it selects stories and facts to this end. For Christianity,
this means a lot of negative stories.
Perhaps nowhere is the selective representation of Christians
more apparent than with Catholic priests. Historian Phillip Jenkins
reviews common portrayals of clergy in film and television, and,
well, if you see a priest on screen, you know that something bad is
going to happen. Among the plotlines reviewed by Jenkins: priests
living sexually promiscuous lifestyles, priests systematically raping
children, Catholic organizations condoning murder, and a satanic
cardinal. Jenkins summarizes: “Somewhere in the 1980s, Hollywood
decided that senior Catholic clerics made reliable stock villains, as
predictably evil as corporate executives or drug kingpins.”8 He makes
the case that other social groups receive far better treatment. “No
studio would contemplate making a film that would be deemed
offensive by (for example) Blacks or Native Americans,” but “Catho-
lics (and perhaps Evangelicals)” are not afforded this dignity.9
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function as a family unit. However, I have truly good news, for I have
prepared a series of menus centered on steak and pork chops.”
How do we recognize fear appeals? They often have three com-
ponents: a strong adjective (or adverb), a dire prediction, and an
upbeat remedy. Some of the adjectives that I’ve read include startling,
sobering, jarring, alarming, and dangerous. The dire predictions
include “the coming crisis,” “an epidemic,” “this will be the last gen-
eration,” “the church in crisis,” “the coming collapse of Christianity,”
and “the deterioration of our faith.” The proposed remedies are
often introduced with language like “optimistic,” “provides hope,”
“we can correct and rebuild,” “follow our biblical blueprint,” and
“rebuild and restore the church.”
In writing this, I realize that I may have made a strategic error
in discussing why I have written this book: I have neglected to add
a fear appeal. So maybe no one will read it. But it’s not too late, so
here it goes. You should read this book because “there is a deeply
disturbing trend of bad statistics that is sabotaging American Chris-
tianity and destroying the American way of life, and if you ignore
it your entire body will soon be covered with boils. The good news,
however, is that if you buy this book and read it carefully, you will
avoid this calamity; plus you’ll live longer, have fresh breath, and
your kitchen knives will always stay sharp.”
Getting It Right
This book is not about ignoring bad news to focus solely on
good news. Overemphasizing the good news has its own problems,
and the church would do best by looking at itself honestly. It is also
not a refutation of the value of statistics to the church. The fact
that statistics are socially influenced simply means that we need to
understand how they come to be, not reject them outright. I’m a
card-carrying quantitative sociologist, and I really like statistics. If
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nothing else, it’s probably much easier to lie without statistics than
to lie with them.
The purpose of this book is rather simple. Using the best avail-
able data, I will describe how Christians are doing in six areas: church
growth, what we believe, our participation in church activities, family
and sexual issues, how we treat others, and how others see us. In
each of these areas, there are various myths floating around about
American Christianity, and I want to examine if these myths are
true. In a sense, this book is like the popular television show Myth-
Busters, on which they test everyday assumptions about how things
work. Unfortunately, I don’t get to blow things up—a mainstay on
the show—but I do get to present a lot of data.
My goal is not to show the church in a particular light but
rather to let the data speak for themselves. Having said that, the
answers provided here provide some surprisingly good news for
Christians.
This book focuses on Evangelical Christians because as an
Evangelical Christian myself, this is my vantage point in looking
at these issues. As such, I am aware of the many myths perpetrated
about Evangelicals. But the analyses include Mainline Protestants
and Catholics as well, and so many of the ideas in this book apply
to American Christianity more generally.
My Analytic Strategy
I’m not sure that all Christian commentators have carefully
thought out the best way to evaluate Christians. In using data to
judge how Christians are doing, what standards should we use?
Many analyses of Christianity use one of two standards, both of
which are problematic. The first standard is perfection. Any devia-
tion of Christianity from the ideal is a cause for alarm. Certainly
perfection is our goal, but it’s an unattainable goal, and while we
can use it for motivation, it’s a poor standard for evaluation because
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no one will ever meet it. Using this standard, we should be alarmed
about every single aspect of Christianity. Furthermore, with this
standard, we don’t need to collect any data about Christians because,
by assumption, we’ve fallen short. I once heard Chuck Colson say
that God makes Christians better, not necessarily good. By this he
meant that many Christians start off in bad places, and even sig-
nificant improvement leaves them short sometimes. As such, Chris-
tianity can make a substantial difference in peoples’ lives, but they
can still be far from perfect.
A second commonly used standard is a variation of Supreme
Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment about pornogra-
phy—that he can’t define it but he knows it when he sees it. Here,
commentators do not have any a priori standards of evaluation, and
instead they use their own judgment in identifying where Christians
fall short. The problem here is that we each have our own biases and
values with which we evaluate data, and so this approach often tells
us more about the person making the evaluations than the group
being evaluated.
Rather than using standards of perfection or idiosyncratic judg-
ments, this book makes three other types of comparisons. First,
Christians are compared to members of other religions as well as
those who have no religious affiliation at all.10 Breaking it down
further, when data allow, I also compare Protestants to Catholics,
and among Protestants, Evangelicals to Mainline Protestants and
to members of historically Black denominations. This type of com-
parison allows us to see how Christians are doing compared to other
groups, and also to see which Christian groups are doing the best
on any given issue.
To illustrate the value of such a comparison, what if I told you
that an athlete was successful at doing something 4 out of 10 times,
and then I asked you if this meant that she was good? Before answer-
ing, you would probably want to know how other players do at it.
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Cautions
At this point I would like to issue several cautions in interpret-
ing the analyses of this book. My goal is to simply describe religious
differences with no attempt to explain what causes them. Actually
developing and testing explanations for these differences becomes
enormously complex, and it usually takes us—at least with survey
data—to the land of “multivariate analysis,” a place where research-
ers live but few others dare to visit. In fact, trying to explain the
findings presented in any one figure in this book would probably
require a separate article, if not a whole book in and of itself. Rather,
this book simply describes religious differences. But given the many
misconceptions about these differences, this is a needed exercise.
On a related point, each religious difference reported in this
book is open to multiple causal interpretations.12 For example, later
in this book you’ll read that Christians are significantly less likely
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