If, and that is a very big, "if" you are going to take its results as a picture of reality, several things in it are very interesting. Look at the chart on page 6 of the report. One is that it is fairly consistent among the various breakdowns in the identity of respondents that Jews rank as the religious group most consistently regarded positively by those asked, across groupings. Jews received the highest "mean thermometer rating" of 67° . I was surprised that Catholics came in second with 66° followed by Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Christian, Buddhist, Hindus, Mormons, Atheists and, the only group that comes in below 50°, Muslims at 48°. Atheists achieve 50°. I wouldn't be surprised by the lowest rankings, Muslims certainly being the religious group which is most consistently presented negatively in the media, by politicians, by talking heads. Nor am I particularly surprised by the rating of Atheists for reasons of my experience that the survey would support, if I took it seriously.
Other charts in the Pew breakdowns can be looked at to come up with some interesting ideas. I was surprised by some of them and unsurprised by others. Since the person who brought it up to me was an atheist whining about the low rating of atheists in that generalized breakdown, I can point to the chart of the report in which people who identified themselves as being members of different religious affiliations ranked other groups in terms of positive feelings toward them.
I was, on the whole happy to see that there were a lot more positive feelings expressed for people in other groups. Media and online presentations of it in all or nothing terms leads to the feeling that people hate a lot more than they seem to. Though, in what I think is probably the most credible finding in it, wasn't surprised that people tended to rank their own group most positively.
I was curious to see how Jews and Muslims rated their groups, what with the heightened possibility of animosity being exacerbated by Middle Eastern politics but Pew didn't give breakdowns for Muslims on that, Muslims, along with Buddhists, Hindus and Mormons weren't large enough samples in their survey to yield what they considered data of significance on that point. I was surprised that the Jewish respondents gave Muslims a 51° ranking, If I'd guessed I'd have guessed it would be lower. Jews seem to be, according to the report, about the most consistently friendly to others, perhaps why they're well liked, in return.
I did note that the lowest score given by any group for any other in the survey, 29° was that given by Atheists to Evangelical Christians, matched by the slightly warmer 33° given by Evangelicals to Atheists, the second lowest "temperature" Evangelicals attitudes towards Muslims was given as 37°, the next lowest figure.
Atheists in the survey consistently gave the coldest feelings in the survey, but to Christian groups all below 50°, non-Christian religious groups ranked higher, except Muslims. They gave themselves the third warmest ranking in that chart, 82°. Jews giving themselves the highest of 91°. I don't know if the Pew survey distinguished between religious Jews and Jews who were non-religious or atheists (or who had family or friends who were), so I don't know how that might have impinged on that ranking. Also in that, I note that Atheists gave Buddhists a 68° reading, I wonder if that doesn't reflect the often repeated assertion that Buddhism is "an atheist" religion (it's most generally accurate to say it's "non-theistic" not atheistic).
I will note that, though people tended to give their own group high ranking, none of the strictly religious identities except Catholics (83°) and White Evangelicals (81°) seems to be that far gone on their own group.
What's to be made of this? Beats me. I don't think it's of any knowable reliability. I can see all kinds of problems with it. The classifications mix in different ways. Some of the given classes in the report mix different groups together. As I mentioned someone can be considered to be Jewish if they're religious or if they're an atheist or an agnostic or "Nothing in particular". There are different groupings of religious Jews, everything from the most inclusive to Orthodox groups that don't recognize other Jews as Jews. There are different denominations of most of the religious groupings while Catholics and Mormons are pretty much defined by membership in one church. I don't see that Pew controlled for those very real things that could skew their results. Considering the size of their sample,
One of the things I wonder about this kind of thing is the extent to which sociology has created artificial categories for people to think about, pretending such categories of people mean something and then do things like ranking them. In that the practice would seem to exacerbate some of the worst tendencies in people, to consider people in terms of identity, assigning them preexisting prejudices, negative as well as positive, instead of considering people as individuals. That is something entirely different from people identifying THEMSELVES with a group of people who they then see as individuals. I will note even among those groupings which ranked their group highest, none of them gave that group a 100% positive ranking. I'd like to know how many individuals so surveyed did that, if any.
If someone asked me to do such a survey I'd have to tell them that I couldn't give them an honest answer. Other than certain self-adopted identities, Nazis, Republicans c. 2018, certain other political parties and members of some political groups, I couldn't tell you how I felt in general about them. And, I'll note, I could only do that if I regarded membership in such a group as definitely negative. Any of the groupings in this survey I'd have to refuse because I don't have a general feeling about them. There are Catholics I admire and there are Catholics in significant number who I definitely don't. There are Mormon politicians I despise and would never vote for if they were candidates, and those I would vote for. While I could often give you an answer about a specific public figure I certainly couldn't for the group they might belong to. And there are all kinds of those I know who fall in the middle AND I WOULD NEVER PRESUME TO JUDGE THOSE I DIDN'T KNOW. I think asking for people to make such group assignments is far from morally neutral, I think it's generally a bad thing to do.
I thought the interesting part was the difference across age groups. The kids are all right, harboring less bias than the older cohorts. What isn't shown and would be intriguing is to see differences within denominations by age. This age differnece habs beenon my mind this week. After almost two and a half years our ELCA congregation finally called a new pastor after our previous of 25 years retired. We had a faled call a year ago, a painful year of regrouping and now success. The first call failed in good part because older members could not accept a woman pastor. The second succeeded, with a woman pastor no less, but in the intervening year some older members left and frankly some died or entered nursing homes. The final vote was 109 for, 4 against. That 4 were the remnent that can't accept a woman. At least in main line protestanP churches, the younger members seem to be be more liberal and thoughtful of social ministry. Hai now gone to a number of synod annual meetings, the clergy seem even more so. Hidden in all these religious survey numbers are age differences that really show not that denominations are shifting, but old views are dieing off and new ones are becoming the dominant.
ReplyDeleteThat would be interesting to see. I'm generally skeptical of this kind of poll because of the reasons I've stated in this piece as well as others. A lot of it is that the conclusions drawn from their data, drawn from what turn into very small subsets of the universal set of respondents aren't of any knowable relationship to the larger population. They could fix that by focusing on samples of smaller groups instead of trying to come up with something alleged to cover the entire population. As can be seen in their responses, it doesn't work. Muslims, as a part of the U.S. population 1.1% were about as large a percent as 5some of the other groups they got responses for, Jews 1.4%, Mormons 2%. Catholics are a large percent of the population,22%, you have to wonder how well it could be represented by their sample.
DeleteBut it does show something, the problem is what it shows. I think the conclusion I drew, that people aren't as sharply divided into two camps as the online and media babble would lead people to believe they are is probably more reliable than some of the other things presented in the Pew report. That's something I found very encouraging.
To be perfectly blunt, I'm glad you have "young" members. In my limited experience, that's becoming a rarity.
Delete