Which is Better: Conducting the Survey Online or Over the Phone?

A recent article at Religion News Service describes a new study of survey responses for the General Social Survey (GSS).  This study finds that the move from conducting the GSS via phone calls to conducting surveys online has led to a change in the set of people to agree to participate in the survey, and that this can lead to mistakes in how we interpret trends in the data.  In particular, the study finds that highly religious individuals are less likely to participate in the online surveys, and that this skews the survey results so that the surveys overstate the decline in religiosity.

There is a counterargument, however, that is also mentioned in the RNS article, namely, that the phone interviews were already overstating American religiosity so the move to online survey is producing more representative data.

This debate illustrates how, even when two people agree on what the data literally report, they may still disagree on the best way to interpret what the data actually mean.

The Church Like Me

Last week, Christianity Today published an article titled "More Americans Want Their Church to Share Their Politics."  The "more" in the title refers to a finding that the percent of U.S. Protestant churchgoers who want their fellow churchgoers to share their political views has increased.

The figure below is from that article.  According to the blue bars, compared to 2017, more people now somewhat agree or strongly agree with the statement "I prefer to attend a church where people share my political views."  According to the red bars, there has also been a similar shift in people's perceptions of whether their fellow churchgoers' views match their own.

This trend is not a new one in the American religious marketplace.  In their 2010 book American Grace, Putnam and Campbell show that this trend has been in place for decades.  Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into religious groups of people who are more like themselves.

This sorting a natural consequence of a vibrant religious marketplace in which people are able to switch religious groups at relatively low cost, thereby increasing the chance that they find a religious group that better matches their tastes.  Though it is fair to ask about the consequences of this trend.  Of course, the main one is that this sorting further reduces the diversity in the already someone homogenous churches.  Overcoming this homogeneity is difficult, an issue that is discussed in Section 11.5 of the book.

Read this article and Section 11.5 of the book to better understand the challenges with creating and fostering a diverse church.

The Religious Value of Trunk or Treats

 A "trunk or treat" is a Halloween activity held in a parking lot or large open field in which adults decorate their automobile trunks with Halloween decorations and hand out candy to children who walk from car to car in their Halloween costumes.

This article at RNS discusses how churches have become suppliers of trunk or treats.  Read the entire article and ask yourself why churches have become suppliers of trunk or treats.  Who attends the trunk or treat?  Why can a trunk or treats be an effective religious activity?  What religious purposes can a trunk or treat serve?

The Market for Communion Wafers

A recent article titled "How Nuns Got Squeezed out of the Communion Wafer Business" tells the story of the market for Catholic communion wafers.  Groups of nuns began producing communion wafers for churches over a hundred years ago.  There was an intensity to the work as, during the first half of the 20th Century, the nuns would cut each wafer individually.  We are talking about millions of wafers, so this was in part a labor of love.  Then a priest asked a man named John Cavanagh to build a machine that would cut the wafers at a larger scale.  Cavanagh not only built the machine for the nuns to use; he also entered the market himself. The company he founded is now the dominant supplier of wafers in the U.S., producing about three-fourths of the wafers used in Catholic churches.  But in becoming the dominant supplier of wafers, Cavanagh's company has also driven out of the market many of the nuns who had been suppliers.

The main plot of this story is the non-profit nuns competing -- and ultimately losing out to -- the for-profit Cavanagh.  That alone makes the account worth reading.

Yet there are other elements that add color to the account and should not be overlooked.  For example:

• An increase in the demand for wafers in the middle of the 20th Century as many Catholics began to partake in communion weekly instead of monthly meant that new supply needed to be provided, and Cavanagh provided that supply.
• There was a recent, sharp decline in the demand for wafers during the Covid pandemic
• There have been several innovations in the ingredients and designs of new wafers -- both by Cavanagh's company and by the nuns.
• In recent decades, the changes in this market have occurred simultaneously with an overall decline in the number of nuns.

The article conveys a sadness about the loss of nuns as suppliers of communion wafers, but there is an underlying ambivalence.  The nuns were prescient entrepreneurs in this market over a hundred years ago, and that is an impressive feat.  But where the nuns showed the way, others soon followed and perhaps even did better.  Cavanagh's company is the largest supplier in this market now, but you never know if a future competitor will emerge and ultimately push out Cavanagh.

The Costs and Benefits for Different Kinds of Religiosity

Chapter 4.2 of the book of the text discusses the relative importance or "nature" and "nurture."  According to studies, both nature and nurture influence religiosity, but the relative importance of each differs by the type of religiosity.  In particular, religious affiliation tends to be more stable and influenced by one's parents throughout one's life than church attendance.

Consider one way this pattern is manifested. Suppose an individual grows up in a religious household, takes upon themselves the religious identification of their parents, and is a regular participant in the activities of their parents' religious group throughout their childhood.  As they advance through adulthood, their interest in religion declines.  Although they continue to maintain their identification with the same religious group. they rarely participate in church activities.  That is, they originally inherited the "belonging" and "behaving" of their parents as a child but now have an adult have only retained the "belonging."

Why would this pattern come to realization?  Some simple cost-benefit analysis of an example can provide a clue.

First consider the affiliation decision.  There are probably some benefits to an individual to retaining their religious affiliation, while there is little benefit to switching.  By keeping their identification, they keep their parents happy to an extent.  They can also attend church with their parents on major holidays, thereby maintaining some family cohesion.  But it is also the case that keeping the religious identification does not involve any costly action.  Although it will differ across individuals, retaining their identification can involve as little as periodic verbal acknowledgement of their affiliation in conversation.  So even if there are relatively few benefits for retaining the affiliation, having a little cost to retaining the affiliation means that a person can retain their inherited affiliation for a long period of time without much pressure to change.

The church-attendance decision is quite different.  Attending in any given week involves clear costs because the time spent at church can be spent on so many other activities -- sleeping, exercising, studying, earning money, practicing a hobby, enjoying time with friends, streaming a movie online, and so on.  Time-allocation decisions are frequent and regular with pretty clear costs.  So even though the decision to attend any particular week might seem to be a less significant decision than the decision of one's religious affiliation, the fact that there are clear and obvious costs to attending church means that the decline in religious participation may occur more steadily with a decline in religious demand and long before a change -- if any -- in religious affiliation.

This simple analysis illustrates one of the reasons why religiosity is complex, namely, that the costs and benefits of different types of religiosity can change in different ways, and this can result in different trends in those different types of religiosity even for the same individual.

The U.S. Catholic Church's Internal Self-evaluation

In October 2021, Pope Francis asked the worldwide membership of the Catholic Church to reflect on the church, its mission, and their membership.  As part of a two-year "Synod of Synodality" (you can see the Vatican's web site for the Synod here), leaders of local congregations (parishes) and local collections of congregations (dioceses) were to engage in dialogues with their members to gather information about their members' experiences and perspectives.  In the U.S., the local reports from this process were then to be sent to the national U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who would then create a summary for Catholicism as a whole in the U.S.  This summary -- called the National Synthesis -- was completed and sent to the Vatican in August 2022 and can be found here in pdf format.

This document provides an excellent look at the key issues and concerns of American Catholics who remain the largest religious denomination in the U.S.  So this study is worth a look.  It intends to reflect contributions from about 700,000 persons, so this was a large collective effort.

Several key issues are identified in the report as being of extreme importance to the study participants, and I will mention just a few of them.

The first issue mentioned is the sexual abuse within the Church.  The report states: "The sin and crime of sexual abuse has eroded not only trust in the hierarchy and the moral integrity of the Church, but also created a culture of fear that keeps people from entering into relationship with one another and thus from experiencing the sense of belonging and connections for which they yearn" (p. 5).

Another issue was "to be a more welcoming Church where all members of the People of God can find accompaniment on the journey. ...  People want the Church to be a home for the wounded and broken, not an institution for the perfect" (p. 7).  LGTBQ+, divorced, and those with special needs (e.g., deaf) members were identified as particularly in need of this welcoming, and there was a desire for women to have more leadership roles.

A third issue, called "co-responsibility" in the report (p. 11), is to find a better balance of the religious work between the clergy (the appointed religious leaders) and the laity (the member volunteers).  There was an expression that the laity can do more than they have been doing.

Yet other issues are mentioned so you can see the report for more details.  Of course, this report reflects the concerns of American Catholics who participated, and the concerns of Catholics in other countries can and will differ.  Nonetheless, a lesson for our class is that religious groups -- even ones as old and established as the Catholic Church -- must continue to adapt and innovate when confronting changing circumstances and challenges.  Only by doing this can they keep up in an ever changing religious marketplace.

Burkinis in the Public Swimming Pool

In June of this year, an administrative court in France upheld a ruling that women are not allowed to wear burkini swimwear in public swimming pools in the city of Grenoble.  The burkini is a head-to-ankle swimsuit that covers the woman's entire body except for her face.  Responding to vocal locals, city leaders had previously determined the burkinis would be allowed, but then a higher-ranking government official (the prefect) stopped this decision.  The administrative court upheld the prefect's decision that burkinis not be allowed.

See this article.  The primary direct effect of this ruling is that many Muslim women will no longer be swimming in the pool because they would only swim there if they could wear burkinis.

Some other French cities do allow burkinis in their public pools, so it might seem strange to not allow them in Grenoble's pools.  The court's reasoning behind not allowing them in Grenoble is not that burkinis should be prohibited in general but rather that the Grenoble city leaders whose decision -- later overturned -- to allow women to wear burkinis in public pools made their decision based in part of religious reasons, which violates a principle of separation of church and state.  Those cities that allow burkinis in public pools made their decisions to allow burkinis as part of general loosening of swimwear restrictions and not specifically to satisfy a particular religious demand.

The article does not make any prediction about what will happen next, however the ruling does seem to leave open a path for burkinis to be allowed in Grenoble in the future.  The key is for the burkini proponents to advocate for a more general loosening of swimwear restrictions rather than a specific burkini privilege.  Whatever happens, this case demonstrates the intricate interplay between religious persons and government officials that leads to the religious rules and regulations that we observe in the real world.

The Future of American Religion

The Pew Research Center published a new report titled Modeling the Future of Religion in America (full pdf here).  The main idea is to make projections of religious affiliation rates going forward fifty years.  Making projections is a tricky sort of business because it is all about identifying which of the current trends will continue, which will not, and what not-yet-experienced trends may occur.

This report proceed by considering a few different levels of switching out of Christianity.  With no switching, Christianity remains the majority religious tradition by affiliation in 2070, but with other switching scenarios, Christianity loses its majority status by 2070.

The report also discusses some of the nuts and bolts underlying the projections.  For example, the projections need to make various assumptions about not just rates of religious disaffiliation, but also about fertility, mortality, migration, and intergenerational religious transmission.

With so many moving parts, it is impossible to get everything correct, but making a perfect projection is too high of a standard.  What this report can do -- and does pretty well in my opinion -- is provide a limited number of plausible future scenarios.