Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nations Faith by Robert Wuthnow

Author:Robert Wuthnow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-09-01T06:00:00+00:00

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By the turn of the millennium, then, anyone casually familiar with polls about religion would have known at least three indisputable facts. First, evangelicals, more so than mainline Protestants or Catholics, were the most dynamic and interesting sector of American religion. Second, they composed anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of the population. And third, they were solidly active on conservative social issues and reliably in the Republicans’ camp.

The way a casual observer would have known this is that polls overwhelmingly, consistently, and repeatedly said so. Evangelicals were dynamic and interesting because poll after poll featured them, and those polls indicated that their numbers were growing. They made up 25 to 40 percent of the public because polls agreed on those numbers—25 percent if evangelicals were counted on the basis of denominational affiliation, and up to 40 percent if everyone was included who said they were when asked if they were born again or evangelical. And what was mostly known was that evangelicals considered it important to be involved in politics, wanted their churches to speak out, were adamantly opposed to abortion and homosexuality, and voted Republican. Those were the prevailing characterizations of American public religion.

If anything demonstrated the power of polls to define reality, this was it. Evangelicals were no longer a hodgepodge of congregations and denominations with distinctive worship styles and organizations and histories. They were now a unified voting bloc, recognizable as a well-defined category in polls in the same way that African Americans or women or Hispanics or Republicans were. Pollsters could report confidently that this or that many evangelicals existed and that these evangelicals believed such and such. Journalists and political operatives could take that information to the bank. Or so it seemed.

The things that are real in daily life fairly often seem that way because it is more convenient to agree and to take them for granted than to quibble. Americans agree to measure distance in inches and feet rather than in centimeters and meters. We agree to set our clocks backward or forward each fall and spring. It would be inconvenient to contest these agreements.

Polls create reality by evoking agreement as well. When the true test is their ability to predict an election, there is a collective sense of confidence in polling if most of the polls come within a few percentage points of offering a correct prediction. When there is no external reference number of that kind, confidence that the polls are producing a true representation of reality hinges mostly on whether they agree with one another. If they mostly agree that evangelicals make up a quarter of the public and generally vote Republican, that agreement buttresses the view that pollsters’ way of thinking about evangelicals is correct. The same could be said about pollsters’ representation of Catholics and Jews or of other groups.

But evangelicals were a particularly interesting test case of pollsters’ ability to define reality. Evangelicalism certainly became a well-defined category in the polling community’s language about religion. And yet,

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