The UCC Wisconsin Conference recently made some demographic information available to its congregations through Link2Lead.com, a branch of a Barna-style survey group. It's not perfect, but it's helpful, and interesting.

Finding demographics (or any other information) for a place like Wayne can be tough. We're split between three ZIP codes, which makes it difficult to bring things into the proper focus. This, for example, is actually from Campbellsport, which is down the road a little bit. But it at least approximates reality:

According to the site, we should be doing programming for families, divorced people, and folks in need of 12-step programs. We might want to stay away from theological discussion groups and arts and music programs. Not bad ideas, but of course, you always have to interpret the data for your local context.

By why no mention of polka music?

The Pew Forum put on an event on religious progressives the other day, featuring John Green talking to Laura Olson of Clemson University, Jennifer Butler of Faith in Public Life, and Chris Korzen of Catholics United.

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't get too much out of the panel discussion. All three of the guests are smart young players on the political scene; I'm regularly in touch with the last two, and Laura Olson, if you're reading this, I'd love to talk to you, too. Perhaps I'm just too close to the subject material to be objective, but I didn't hear much that I didn't already know, and there were a couple of places where I just plain disagreed with what was being said. You don't know how much it pains me to say that.

And it's not that there was nothing of value in the discussion. They spent a good while talking about the developing infrastructure of the religious left, and Olson provided a handy list of lefty religious groups out there. So that's good.

But perhaps the best thing I spotted was Jennifer Butler's off-hand mention of The Quiet Hand of God, a sociological anthology edited by Robert Wuthnow and John Evans. If the first chapter is any indication, I may have to read the whole thing.

By all accounts, American religion should have suffered a serious decline during the last third of the twentieth century. Alternatives to organized religion—from cults and encounter groups to therapies and advice columnists—flourished. More people than ever were exposed to the influences of higher education so often presumed to erode traditional religious beliefs. Scientific research was funded at record levels. Longer life expectancies permitted people to focus on the here and now instead of the hereafter. Millions of baby boomers, reared on television rather than the Ten Commandments, came of age. Even the much publicized moral crusades of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson drew more negative reactions than public support.

...

Yet the striking feature of American religion during the last decades of the twentieth century was its remarkable stability. Large numbers of people continued to affiliate with churches and synagogues and to overwhelmingly express belief in God. Their proclivity to participate in religious services was undiminished. The religious voice in public life continued to be heard, and faith communities played a large role in the nation's philanthropic and service efforts. In a marked turnaround of scholarly and journalistic thought, virtually every observer of American religion became more impressed by its persistence than by signs of its erosion or impending collapse.

Religious statistics provide a ready indication of this persistence. Each year tens of thousands of respondents in Gallup Polls are asked whether they attended religious services in the past seven days. Although it is suspected that some people say they have attended when in fact they have not, there is no reason to think that prevarication of this kind has become worse in recent years. The fact that the questions are always asked in the same way, and that they are asked of such large numbers of people, gives added meaning to the results. In 1970, approximately four Americans in ten said they had attended religious services in the past seven days; in 1980, the proportions ranged between 40 and 41 percent; in 1990, the figure was 40 percent; and in 2000, it was still virtually the same (41 percent).

The pattern in General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, is similar to the Gallup findings but shows a small decline in frequent religious service attendance in the closing years of the twentieth century. Making special efforts to achieve high response rates, and using the same sampling procedures since 1973, the General Social Surveys recorded 36 percent of the adult population claiming to attend religious services at least "nearly every week" in 1973, 35 percent doing so in 1983, the same percentage doing so in 1993, 32 percent doing so in 1998, and 30 percent doing so in 2000. After thorough examination of these and other measures, sociologists Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley conclude that there is no evidence to support the notion that church attendance rates in the United States were falling. Reviewing the same evidence, political scientist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone argues that religious participation did decline slightly, but emphasizes that this decline was much smaller than for virtually all other kinds of civic involvement, including membership in fraternal organizations and service clubs, voter turnout, and participation in community-wide political events.

The authors have some very interesting things to say about why the shifts in American religion - some perceived, some real - shook out the way they did. I'll come back to those in another post.

At the moment, I just want to flag the idea that participation in American religion may not have changed very much in the past forty years. In fact, as Wuthnow and Evans note, it may be that the question isn't at all why religion in the US is on its way out but why it has persisted so well while all other kinds of social organizations were falling to pieces around it.

And if that's true, many of the assumptions we make about religion and its place in the public square could be in fact dead wrong. Again, stay tuned.

One other thing to notice here: this data is not at all inconsistent with other studies showing that the "secular" and "unaffiliated" segments of society continue to grow. The categories are not mutually exclusive, for one thing. I'm sure there are plenty of apathetic or non-believers who continue to go to church for Mom's sake, or for the kids.

But for another, there's a good deal of social pressure on Americans to identify themselves as faithful people. That could explain at least some of the difference between the high numbers of people who say they believe in God and the more modest number who say they take part in formal religious activities. As the social pressure wears off, it becomes more acceptable to simply say, "I don't really believe in much of anything," without affecting the participation rates.

Srsly:

In fact, when evangelicals and non-evangelical born again Christians are combined into an aggregate class of born again adults, their divorce figure is statistically identical to that of non-born again adults: 32% versus 33%, respectively.

Thirty percent of atheists and agnostics had been married and subsequently divorced. However, the three-point difference from the national average was within the range of sampling error, suggesting that their likelihood of experiencing a dissolved marriage is the same as that of the population at-large. A representative from Barna also pointed out the atheists and agnostics have lower rates of marriage and a higher likelihood of cohabitation, a combination of behaviors that distort comparisons with other segments.

I'm no demographer - and I just said the other day that Barna has a very good reputation - but it seems to me that when your samples look like this:

something's a little goofy. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.

But even if I am, what the hell? That Evangelical Christians have a modestly better chance of staying married than atheists proves what, exactly? The proper comparison is to long-term relationships, since as Barna points out, atheists and agnostics tend not to marry as often in the first place. And even so, so what?

Seriously.

I keep trying to think of something funny to say about this, but I just can't:

Today's young people, ages 16-29, have a more critical view of Christians than previous generations. Specifically, they think Christians are judgmental, anti-homosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered. And that's not just a minority viewpoint--it's an overwhelming majority who say Christians are ...

   * Anti-homosexual: 91%
   * Judgmental: 87%
   * Hypocritical: 85%
   * Old-fashioned: 78%
   * Too involved in politics: 75%

And those negative perceptions aren't simply perceptions:

"Going into this three-year project, I assumed that people’s perceptions were generally soft, based on misinformation, and would gradually morph into more traditional views. But then, as we probed why young people had come to such conclusions, I was surprised how much their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches." -David Kinnaman

So what does this mean for churches?

I'll tell you what it means for churches: you're in deep doo-doo.

This is of course based on the Barna report UnChristian, which came out last year, and to which most liberal observers responded, This is news how? I at least already knew that these attitudes were widespread, although it is eye-opening to be reminded of just how widespread they really are.

But I'll say what I think I said when the report first came out: there's a reason the UCC came up with the "God is still speaking" ad campaign. And if the reactions at Big Orange to the whole Jeremiah Wright thing are any indication, there are many many people who are grateful they did.

Reading Alan Wolfe and Walter Russell Mead's excellent articles in the latest Atlantic Monthly (along with last week's release of the NCC denominational data) has got me thinking again about what happened to the mainline churches over the past forty years or so. A major Pew study on religious adherence in the US is due out today, so there will be even more data to pore over soon.

Every time I read a column by Jeff Sharlet, I slap my forehead and say, "why didn't I think of that?"

So it is with his inaugural piece at Religion Dispatches, which you should run right over and read immediately. I'll wait.

...

Okay, now for those of you too lazy go read, Jeff talks about trying to write a column on the Next Big Religious Demographic. For a split second, he's tempted to tell the messy truth:

The editor would have none of that. “I am looking,” he wrote, “for someone to say: this is the religious vote of the future.” (If there is someone out there willing to say that, contact me and I’ll send your name along. Let’s get your career jump-started!)

My own dreams of punditry went no further than my next reply. The most I could say on my assigned topic, I wrote, was that Christian conservatism is neither dead, as widely reported by the secular press, nor becoming more “moderate.” Rather, many strands of Christian conservative thinking are broadening to encompass concerns long relegated to the back burner. This broadening makes the vision no less conservative, but rather differently conservative. It is, however, less predictable, less partisan, and in the terms of discussion allowed by establishment media, that makes it less influential. That may well be true according to the narratives of campaign strategists, but the loss of influence at the ballot box could easily translate into a greater influence on what evangelical intellectuals are fond of calling “the culture,” by which they mean a concept of the public sphere from which they feel excluded. They recognize that any American sphere that doesn't include them is a rather small bubble, indeed. The bullies among them want to muscle in and take it over. The most interesting activists among them want to pop it.

Actually, I did think of this. It's just that I'm not nearly as good at saying it as Sharlet. This is what any number of us have been saying for a while now: religion in America is a complicated business. Those who'd like to convert religious demographics into neat political ones are off on a fool's errand.

But of course shrugging your shoulders and saying "I dunno" doesn't get you very far in the prognosticator biz. Even a third-rate blogger like me gets paid (such as it is) to help people make sense of the messy real world. Doesn't mean we can't enjoy the mess, even if we are tempted to tidy things up a bit to move a little product.

Jeff obviously enjoys the loose ends, which is why I'm looking forward to reading his columns, and why you should, too.

Via Connexion, I see that the NCC has its annual Yearbook stats out. Here's the top 25 American churches and what's been happening in the past year:

We've talked about this before, but it's worth pointing out again: the vast majority of these denominations are growing or shrinking within a very small range. Jehovah's Witnesses are growing, the ELCA, PCUSA, Episcopalians and American Baptists are shrinking. Everybody else is more or less where they were last year.

I suppose it's true that the more liberal denominations are the ones shrinking the most, though I have a hard time thinking of any of the churches named above as being liberal in the same sense the UCC is. And anyway, the flux is so small that it's hard to see it as anything other than demographic. The mainliners simply aren't having enough babies to keep up.

How surprising is it to find that the UCC has the smallest decline of any of the mainline churches? We've been hammered hard in the past couple of years, but it looks like we've taken most of the hits already (i.e., everybody who was going to leave has done so already). I can't help thinking that sooner or later, that negative number is going to turn to zero, then creep into positive territory. How long it takes to get there, and how big an increase, we'll just have to see.

Also, a couple of caveats: this is a list of NCC member denominations only. You won't find the Church of God here (COGIC is a different denomination), nor will you find the non-denominational churches. They're a fast-growing part of the religious ecology, but even tougher to measure than denominational churches. Take all of these numbers with a grain of salt: measuring butts in the pew is a notoriously difficult business. See all those "0.00%"'s? That's where they had to estimate, because the numbers provided by the church itself weren't reliable enough to do anything else.

Update: a lurker writes in to tell me that this list does indeed contain denominations that are not members of the NCC. Sorry.

Turns out Mormons aren't immune to the same pressures faced by formerly established churches in other states. As people move into Utah, their dominance declines. They current make up a little less than 2/3's of the population in the Beehive State, and by 2030, they'll lose their majority.

All of which may explain this.

Pam Spaulding links to new Census data on the most popular last names in America:

1. Smith (881 occurrences per 100K people)

2. Johnson (688)

3. Williams (569)

4. Brown (512)

5. Jones (505)

6. Miller (418)

7. Davis (398)

8. Garcia (318)

9. Rodrigues (298)

10. Wilson (290)

She says that the addition of "Garcia" and "Rodrigues" is going to drive conservatives around the bend. I don't know. There's a long list of things making their lives miserable these days.

The New York Times has an interactive feature that allows you to search the Census data. Scroll through the top twenty-five to see just how many of them turn out to be Spanish in origin. The accompanying article points out that beyond the Hispanic surnames, many of the "traditional" names are in fact mostly held by racial minorities.

But the most telling detail, I think, is the rate of occurrence. Even "Smith," the most popular surname, belongs to only .8% of the population. Pretty diverse pool, I'd say.

"Schultz," by the way, is the 315th most popular name on the list, up 54 places from 1990. I suspect they missed Milwaukee that year.

*See the comments for why this is an imperfect term.

Pastor Bob Cornwall at Faithfully Liberal quotes David Kinnaman, President of the Barna Group in the new book UnChristian:

In a section about younger adult perceptions of the overly politicized nature of American Christians (read Evangelicals), the author suggests that Younger Americans are “more skeptical than any previous generation of the role of the Bible in public life.” I say, okay, that may very well be. But then read what follows:

In one study conducted by the Pew Research Center, young Americans were the least likely age group to say tha the Bible ought to be the most significant influence on the laws of the country, instead favoring the “will of the people” as the best way to determine legal boundaries. This preference for majority rule stems from not knowing the Bible’s content, questioning its truth and preferring feelings and expediency to absolutes. Of course, just because the is the perception does not mean that we abandon the idea that the Bible should help us determine the laws of the nation. But we must realize this is an increasingly rare sentiment among the nation’s younger population. (David Kinnaman, UnChristian, Baker, 2007, pp. 163-64).

Ponder with me this statement. Younger Americans are less prone than earlier generations to see the Bible as the primary influence on American law, and they do so because they don’t know the content of the Bible. That is, they do not have a “Biblical Worldview” as defined by the Barna Group.

Pastor Bob gets this almost, but not quite, correct. He's certainly right to point out the hypocrisy of wanting a secular regime in a place like Iran while working to convince young voters against the idea at home.

He need not have gone that far afield. Though Kinnaman's paragraph is nicely dressed up as an attempt to understand the changing mores of a new generation,* it actually reflects a thorough contempt for them and their beliefs.

Here's why. Though 18-to-29-year-olds are indeed the least likely age group to uphold the primacy of the Bible, they are not the least likely demographic to do so.

If you look at the original study, you'll see that for young people, the spread between "the Bible" and "the Will of the People" is 52 points (22/74). But look at the other groups showing a bigger divide:

• College grads, 55 points (20/75)
• Liberal Democrats, 58 points (19/77)
• White mainline Protestants, 62 points (16/78)
• White Catholics, 54 points (21/75)
• Secular, 84 points, (7/91)
• Those who attend church seldom or never, 72 points, (12/84)
• Those who take the Bible seriously but not literally, 55 points, (20/75)
• Those who do not accept it as the Word of God, 92 points, (3/95)

You might think I'm cherry picking results here. Truth is, to varying degrees, nearly all demographics believe the people's will should be more important than the Bible in charting the course of our laws. The only ones who think the reverse are the most conservative elements of American religion.

Which is not to say Kinnaman and his conservative evangelical friends should simply roll over on their positions because they're outvoted. But the relevant question here is why the youngest demographic should be singled out?

The reason seems transparently obvious, at least to me. Unlike the other slices of the population, young people's ignorance ("not knowing the Bible’s content") and supposed lack of moral formation ("questioning its truth and preferring feelings and expediency to absolutes") can be easily blamed for their rejection of the preferred doctrine. The other groups, by contrast, might have the education, political and religious perspective to have carefully considered the question.

And it's a lot easier to face up to a bunch of dumb, misguided kids you can shape and form than adults who have thought about your position and turned it down flat. After all, you can always say they just don't get it instead of having to wonder if you might be wrong.

Okay, I admit it. I'm a bit of a geek. I like maps, especially demographic maps. So I was immediately intrigued when I saw this from a Chris Bowers post at Open Left:

As Chris points out,

There appears to be two correlations here: red states are more obese than blue states, and Mountain West states are less obese than non-Mountain West states. The Mountain West connection makes sense, as higher altitude and lower population density should result in both more frequent and more strenuous physical activity. However, outside the Mountain West, the almost perfect correlation between obesity and red states vs. blue states is very surprising.

It really is very striking, and well worth checking out further. I tried to find some kind of correlation with religious data, I really did, but this is the best I could come up with - Rates of Religious Adherence by 1000 Population (adjusted for racial demographics):

I expected to be able to make some wisecrack about church suppers or some such. It lines up a bit, but not as much as one might think. The basic problem is Mississippi, as usual. It and its neighboring states turn out not to be at the top of the list in total adherents, total congregations or rate of adherence. They'd like to think they're ultra-religious, in other words, but it's places like California, Florida and Texas that put them to shame. Even the Dakotas come in higher by some measures.

All is not lost, however. I did discover a bunch of interesting measures the ARDA site. Did you know you could compare gallons of beer consumed to the number of astrology studios?

Yeah, there's not much correlation there, either. Though Wisconsin and Oregon come in suspiciously high on both scales...

Terry Mattingly writes a typically obtuse post over at GetReligion, looking at Obama's recent speech to the UCC. I half suspect that Mattingly read my post about Michael Gerson's column on this speech, since he's dubious about the possibility of compromise on the abortion for roughly the same reasons I am.

Well, for the mirror image of my reasons, anyway:

[I]t is one thing to talk about the “legal, safe and rare” option on abortion policy, but that is not going to help Democrats reach out to young evangelicals who want actual compromise on public policies about when abortion is and is not legal. Once again, the issue here is whether Obama and other Democrats can afford to compromise to reach the middle.

I don't think compromise on the abortion issue is going to result in much movement among conservatives. Mattingly doesn't think it can be sold within the Democratic party.

We both might turn out to be right, actually.