Tag Archives: Surveys

Statistics on Religion- Part IV

Jonathan Morgan

World Map, World Religions MandalaAfter a couple of weeks talking about Isaac Asimov, and how cool he is, the hope and dangers of neuroscience, and the humanities (whew!), I’m back to statistics on religion.  This time, I’m looking at the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), which is like a large warehouse full of information about religion.  It’d take years to really explore this site.  For example, they have stats on thirty different branches of the Pentecostal Church in the US, which is one of twenty Christian denominations in the US, which is one of 196 nations in the world.  Like I said, it’d take a while to explore it all.

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Statistics on Religion- Part II

Jonathan Morgan

Profile shot of professional man holding hands up to face againsLast week I wrote about the rise of the Nones.  The Pew Forum on Religion documented a rise in the religiously unaffiliated over the last five years.  Many interpret this as a decline in religious authority, saying religion no longer holds the power it once had.  Others see it merely as a shifting religious landscape, not necessarily a decline.  You could take either side of the debate with good reasons, but the question is too complex to be resolved by any one set of statistics.  So we turn to another set of data to gain a different perspective on the American religious landscape.

If you’re arguing with a friend about how religion is changing (do other people do this?), the Baylor Religion Surveys are a great resource to have in your back pocket.  Beginning around 2004, a team of sociologists, religion scholars, and other researchers began a twenty-year process of tracking religious belief in America.  Each wave of results focuses on different aspects of religious life.  The first wave, published in 2006, sheds light on last week’s topic.  In the latest wave, they didn’t just collect data on people’s individual beliefs, but also on how those beliefs impact their well-being, their entrepreneurial spirit, their belief in the American Dream, their sense of control… the list goes on, giving a fascinating picture of how deeply religion is interwoven with other parts of our lives.

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Statistics on Religion- Part I

Jonathan Morgan

Muslim Friday prayer, blue mosque TurkeyBack in the sixties, the American sociologist Peter Berger proposed the Secularization Hypothesis – a fancy term for the theory that as cultures become more modern, they will move out from under the umbrella of religion. This change could be seen in a number of ways. It could show up as a declining importance of religion in organizations; think about hospitals, many of which still bear religious names, but not much else religious. Or secularization could show up as fewer and fewer people professing belief or affiliation.

Berger recanted his theory and now argues that development leads to a diversity of religions, but the secularization debate continues. And the debate persists for a good reason – it’s really difficult to gain a clear picture of how religion is changing among individuals, communities, and cultures. Over the next few weeks I’m going to review some of the research that tries to follow religious change.

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Is Religion Beyond the Brain?

gears and headThe field of neuroscience is booming.  New discoveries emerge daily, and given the overwhelming complexity of the brain, many profound and important discoveries surely await.  This creates a furor of research, but it also encourages over-reaching generalizations.  People are quick to offer up interpretations about what all these new discoveries mean for our daily lives, for our religiosity, our relationships, our work, our health…  The brain and the mind are so intrinsic to who we are, and the research is so fascinating, that it’s hard to resist making these leaps of interpretation.  As a result, we see a slew of books and articles describing religion in terms of the brain, or vice-versa.  But, all too often, these works are philosophical speculation with a scientific façade.

Last week the New York Times columnist David Brooks critiqued the tendency to overextend these discoveries, by describing the difficulties faced in exploring the brain.  But in the end, he just returned to his philosophical camp by proclaiming, in opposition to most neuroscientists, that “The brain is not the mind.”  Okay, that’s fine to say and true to what most of us feel, but it does little to unearth the real richness of the problem: if the brain is not the mind, then how are the two interacting?  For a deep and quick overview of the mind-brain problem, see this lecture (if you’re worried about time, the relevant section is only six minutes long, starting at 9:27).

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