Email This StorySurvey results provide insight on faith
Sept. 18, 2008
By Sommer Ingram
Staff Writer
More than 40 years ago, the first two major surveys of American beliefs and practices were published in American Piety. For the first time, Americans could examine the many different facets of religion and the impact on people's lives.
Now, a team of Baylor professors picks up where this survey left off.
Do Americans really believe in Santa Claus? Does God directly speak to people? Should the Bible be taken literally, word-for-word?
These, along with other in-depth questions relating to religion, belief in the supernatural, and the voice of God, comprised the new wave of the National Baylor Religion Survey on Americans' Beliefs and Practices.
Baylor scholars from the Institute for Studies of Religion have released the results from the follow-up to their 2005 landmark study on American religious attitudes.
The results, which are compiled of mailed questionnaires from fall 2007 collected by the Gallup Organization, represent a national sample of 1,648 English-speaking Americans aged 18 and older. The John M. Templeton Foundation provided funding.
The initial results of the survey were presented at a press conference for Texas media Sept. 9 in the Kronzer Courtroom of the Baylor Law School. The team of researchers formally announced the results during a briefing in Washington, D.C. at 9:45 a.m. Thursday.
Results were embargoed until that time.
"We are confident in saying we have a national random sample not skewed in any way and that represents a good cross section of the country," said Dr. Carson Mencken, professor of sociology and research director for the institute.
The first wave of the study was conducted in 2005, and included questions that dealt with controversial books, such as the Da Vinci Code, whether Americans are truly losing their religion, and how often Americans pray.
"Our mission is to ask deeper questions," said Dr. Christopher Bader, assistant professor of sociology and director of the Baylor Surveys of Religion. "We take every question you'd see on any other survey and push it up several more levels."
The results of the most recent study were published in "What Americans Really Believe," written by Dr. Rodney Stark, Distinguished Professor of the social sciences and co-director of ISR.
The book will be available in stores Sept. 19.
"We have so many chapters in this book we think are important stories that we'll be able to tell over the next year," said Dr. Byron Johnson, professor of sociology and co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion.
Participants in the study had to identify what religious denomination they could most accurately identify themselves as, as well as the name of their current place of worship.
The questionnaire included questions about the strictness and structure of the church, and spiritual experiences.
The study found that 20 percent of the population has heard God speak to them, 16 percent believe they have received a miraculous physical healing, and 55 percent believe they have been protected from harm by a guardian angel.
Women, blacks and Republicans are more likely to have spiritual experiences.
"I was groping in the dark with these questions because no one's ever done this," Stark said. "But these figures absolutely knocked me down."
It is widely believed among the media that Bible believers are a naive and superstitious people.
The Baylor survey found that belief in traditional Christian values actually decreases the tendency to be superstitious, as measured by beliefs in the paranormal and occult. The religion survey was also the first to ever ask about a belief in Santa Claus.
"An argument out there says that these beliefs are the same as religion," Bader said. "They think that believing in UFOs is as crazy as believing in the divinity of Jesus. But we have been able to discount the fact that Christians will believe anything."
The researchers also assessed the attitudes of various churches to issues in the general culture.
Fifty-two percent of the population said their place of worship would forbid abortion, while 32 percent said their church would merely discourage it.
Only 44 percent of the population said their church would forbid homosexual behavior, and 38 percent of church members said their church would forbid premarital sex.
Despite the myth that the Atheist population is growing, the study found that the percentage of Atheists living in America hasn't changed from 4 percent of the population over the past 60 years.
Fifty-six percent of Americans who claim to be irreligious actually pray.
Megachurches, which are congregations comprised of more than 1,000 members, were also addressed in the study.
"None of the things we all believe about megachurches are true," Stark said. "The images we all get in our heads of a symphony orchestra accompanying the choir each Sunday with a bunch of hoopla and a great collection of a big theatre audience -- all wrong."
It is a widely-held belief that one must worship in a small congregation in order to have an intimate relationship with God, but the study shows that mega-church members actually display a higher level of personal commitment by attending services, tithing, and attending a Bible study group.
People in megachurches also participate in more outreach activities and witness to others more: 83 percent of the megachurch population had shared their faith with a friend within the past month, compared to 52 percent in small churches.
"I was amazed at how connected these people at megachurches are," Mencken said. "I've heard stories that a church service there is like going to a football game. But the survey reveals that these people are very much networked into the church through friends."
The team will continue their research until 2018 and will come out with new studies every other year. The gap between myths surrounding the religious attitudes of Americans and what Americans really believe is continuously shrinking as these Baylor professors persist in their research.
"We wanted to make sure we weren't creating something only conservatives would respond to, or something unreligious people would be so annoyed by that they'd throw it away," Bader said. "But no matter where people fell on the spectrum, they wanted to tell us about it. We are confident that we have a snapshot of what religion looks like in the United States, and that for years to come we will be able to decipher trends and patterns that we can't see now."
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