> ***** Beyond the Mainline Tale
>
> Walter Sundberg
>
> Copyright (c) 1993 First Things 34 (June/July 1993): 55-57.
>
> The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers In Our
> Religious Economy. By Roger Finke and Rodney Stark. Rutgers
> University Press. 325 pp. $22.95.
With all due respect, this is sociology at its silliest, and I say that as an accredited sociologist. It's pure datalatry. It reminds me of a book by Judith Blau where she proved that high art was actually more popular in the United States than football, since data showed that more people have visited a museum in the last year than gone to a football game.
Sometimes new data serve to correct the accepted interpretation. And sometimes the accepted interpretation alerts us that our data are bonkers. This is an example of the latter case. To say that America is more religious now that it was at its founding is just wrong on its face. It's like saying that we're poorer now than we were then. To give just one out of innumerable examples, you couldn't even become a citizen of one of the original colonies unless you belonged to one of the prescribed faiths. Pennsylvania's citizenship laws were the cutting edge of tolerance, not only for America, but also for Europe and perhaps even the world at that time. They let anyone become a citizen -- except Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, and atheists (which just happens to cover the four corners of my own religious heritage).
This book goes wrong every way to Sunday, if we can trust this review. But it's not worth deconstructing, IMHO. Better to start from scratch.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com