Comments on: Empirical Regularities in Religion

By: wintercow20

wintercow20 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:20:09 +0000

We would need to look at the Gallup polls he is citing. I believe it is a liberal interpretation of church. While I agree that there are serious definitions of what constitutes a church that “condemns sin”, in terms of measuring the “religiosity” of Americans I am not sure a measure excluding more liberal definitions would be accurate too. The reason being that choices 100 and 200 years ago were restricted for various reasons, and societal factors played a role in what church you attended. So I am not sure that strong adherence to “traditional” religions back then are representative of “true” religiosity … whatever that means.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:08:48 +0000

I had kinda the same question about what constitutes a church. Looking at the article (it’s JSTOR, so I can access it from my school, but you need to have some sort of registration), it appears that it is survey data, so a church is defined by the surveyee instead of the surveyer.
Another aspect I wonder is how churches have changed over time. It could be that most churches back in the 1700 & 1800′s were very “fire and brimstone” in the condemnation of sin. Today there are several churches that are more of a feel-good place where sin isn’t really discussed. Naturally, more people would be willing to go to these churches. I have had discussions with people on this, and there are many who are all to willing to sacrifice doctrine in order to get a body in the pew. The survey does include non-Christian religions, too. And being highly biased about this area, I believe there is a significant difference between types of churches. None-the-less, it is an interesting article.

By: Brad Samples

Brad Samples — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:38:26 +0000

I cannot access the article, how does he define ‘church’? Does it include only ‘mainstream’ religions (I’m thinking Abrahamic ones, Hinduism, Buddhism, maybe some smaller Asian ones) or does it cover paganism and the other fringe religions?