Over on Religion Dispatches, co-editor Gary Laderman, chair of the Emory religion department and an old acquaintance, takes the ARIS survey (and its ilk) to task for missing the boat--not providing an adequate account of religion in America. Or, as he puts it:
On the one hand we can thank God for polls and surveys that monitor how Americans identify their religious preferences and identities. But on the other, who really needs God to be religious anyway? And do these polls really capture the spiritual landscape in all of its complex, contradictory, and confounding realities? It would be neat and easy if a simple question, like "Do you believe in God?" had the ability to get to the heart of religious life for most Americans. But in fact the spiritual realities are simply not reducible to these narrow questions and a facile, multiple-choice perspective.
Here's an open letter in response.
Dear Gary,
Of course, a telephone survey of 54,000 adults, conducted by non-specialists at $1 per short-answer question per respondent--cannot hope to capture all the complexities of American religion. And no one should expect it to. What such a survey does is provide a bird's eye view of how Americans identify themselves religiously and something of what they believe, and of how those identifications and beliefs match up with various other demographic characteristics of the population.
The results can point researchers such as yourself to
conduct more in-depth--anthropological, if you will--inquiries. I notice, for example,
that you claim that "the sacred" is a force "that now more than ever is
free-floating and disconnected from conventional anchors, like specific texts
such as the Qur'an or particular institutions like the church." How do you know
that this force is more disconnected than once upon a time? ARIS provides some statistical
evidence to undergird such a claim--showing not only that twice as many adult Americans
claim no religious identity as did in 1990 but also that 27 percent do not expect
to have a religious burial. Presumably, the more people there are floating free
of traditional religious institutions, the greater likelihood of a more
free-floating sense of the sacred.
In this regard, it seems somewhat perverse for you to criticize us for "facile" questioning about God. Previous surveys have simply asked people whether or not they believe in God--and come up with affirmative answers in the neighborhood of 90 percent. By probing further, we have for the first time discovered that less than 70 percent of Americans embrace the conventional Judeo-Christian idea of a personal God.
At a deeper level, however, you want to call into question the idea the religion is limited to the institutions and identities on which surveys such as ours focus:
Today more than ever we have become aware of an important fact: religion can no longer be understood as a separate sphere of social life, neatly compartmentalized and privatized, set apart from economics, entertainment, education, or politics.
More than in the Middle Ages? More than during the Renaissance? More than in Victorian America? I'd argue that the interpenetration of sacred and secular is pretty much the norm for Western society. That does not mean, however, that Americans don't think they know the difference between the one and the other. Suppose we go ahead and, as you suggest, ask all respondents, "What is most sacred in your life?" And suppose the vast majority gives conventional religious answers. I'm quite sure that you would not revise your views on the vast and varied reach of "the sacred" in contemporary American life. So what if Americans don't recognize as sacred "science and the pursuit of truth; music and the social ecstasy of concerts; violence and the glorification of warfare; celebrity worship," etc. ? M. Jourdain didn't know he was speaking prose until his tutor so informed him. In your religious studies world, all of the above counts as sacred--and so be it. But survey data are not likely to shed much light on such sacrality.
The vox populi may or may not be the vox dei, but it does provide a window onto how ordinary people understand themselves, religiously and otherwise. The great virtue of the ARIS surveys is that they have let respondents identify themselves religiously, in contrast to other surveys, which pre-determine the religious categories. As a result, we have, for example, been able to trace a dramatic decline in "Protestants" and a dramatic increase in "Non-denominational Christians." One of these days, after taking enough religious studies courses, some of them may identify "football" or "rock concerts" or "celebrity worship" as their religion. And we'll duly note it.
Best, Mark
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