By Robert Wuthnow
ISBN-10: 019025890X
ISBN-13: 9780190258900
At the present time, a billion-dollar-a-year polling floods the media with info. Pollsters let us know not just which political applicants will win, yet how we're training our religion. what number american citizens went to church final week? Have they been born back? Is Jesus as renowned as Harry Potter? Polls let us know that forty percentage of american citizens attend spiritual providers each one week. They convey that African american citizens are not any extra spiritual than white american citizens, and that Jews are leaving behind their faith in checklist numbers. in line with major sociologist Robert Wuthnow, none of that's right. Pollsters say that attendance at spiritual companies has been consistent for many years. yet in the course of that point reaction charges in polls have plummeted, robot "push ballot" calls have proliferated, and sampling has develop into more challenging. The accuracy of political polling could be recognized simply because elections truly occur. yet there are not any election effects to teach if the share of people that say they pray on a daily basis or attend companies a week is right. a wide majority of the general public doubts that polls will be relied on, and but evening after evening on television, polls specialists sum up the nation's conduct to an keen viewers of millions.
Inventing American faith offers a provocative new argument in regards to the impact of polls in modern American society. Wuthnow contends that polls and surveys have shaped-and distorted-how faith is known and portrayed within the media and in addition via spiritual leaders, practitioners, and students. He demands a powerful public dialogue approximately American faith that extends way past the knowledge supplied through polls and surveys, and indicates functional steps to facilitate this sort of dialogue, together with adjustments in how the result of polls and surveys are awarded.
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Extra info for Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith
Example text
It trumpets its characterizations of religion so loudly that criticisms can hardly be heard. Despite plummeting response rates and widespread public cynicism, polling companies and the news media keep on doing business as usual—asking the same questions, reporting confidence intervals that are no longer meaningful, and claiming that the latest numbers represent news. The working relationships that once connected pollsters and academic social scientists have become a chasm of distrust. Many of the polls about religion are of such poor quality that academic journals no longer publish articles based on them.
23 Du Bois moved on to other things, playing an important role as one of the nation’s leading African-American public intellectuals, but The Philadelphia Negro established both his reputation and that of systematic sociological research involving house-to-house surveys. ”24 It was true, as the scant interest the study initially received suggested, that Du Bois was underappreciated as a founder of American sociology until later. And yet, for the generations of social scientists who did read it, it set the standard for excellence in scientific investigations of social conditions.
Within a few years, the polls added a standard question about attendance at religious services. The polls began asking questions about Bible reading and belief in God as well. Interest in what the public believed about religion increased after World War II. In contrast with Western Europe and the Soviet Union, America became a nation of believers—not an assemblage of diverse traditions who taught distinctive beliefs and whose members varied in the intensity and content of their convictions, but a nation seemingly unified in a common, simple, easily measured faith.
Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith by Robert Wuthnow
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