>Um, George Gallup and his son were/are born-again Christians, and the
>operation is very sympathetic to religion (and the Republican party).
>
> > and asking people about their reasons for going to
> > church, or for anything else that they do, is dumb from the get-go.
really? i didn't know they were repug-symps. i don't recall that coming up in the nearly 10 yrs this list has been around. the sympathy to religion was obvious. I think they tend to ask pretty decent questions, myself. my criticism is, of course, with the limitations of survey research. it needs to be mixed up with the scads of other kinds of research such as ethnographies and the social network studies woj mentioned. Nancy Ammerman's classic study, which I've mentioned before, was presecient -- and she studied fundamentalist churches in connecticut, composed of folks who were not the stereotypical poor, but the working middle strata and, in some respects, the professional-middle strata. One of her questions was why women, many of whom had taken seriously the gains of the feminist movement, would want to join fundamentalist churches -- which, in her study, certainly did promote father/hub as head of household. What she found was that they joined as a form of marriage therapy. And hey, that's how GDub found the lawd jaysuz.
In Bellah et al.'s quite excellent study (*smirk* oh, and Wolfe's follow up attempt to delve into ethnography. *smirk harder*), they did what Michael asks us to do: look at it as not an either/or. People join for complex reasons, including very practical ones such as the social life, the ability to have fellowship with others, the desire to get to know people in a new town, or fit in with workmates and neighbors. But they probably wouldn't feel those pressures and desires if they weren't already inclined. And it's not hard to be inclined in a culture where being a atheist or agnostic isn't always received well. Atheists and agnostics may be gaining ground, as Doug points out, but they are still only, what?, 13%?
Bellah et al. point out that religiosity in their study provides people with what they call a second language of individualism -- where the individual is realized *in* community, not separate from it, which is a characteristic of what they call the first language of individualism -- evidenced as utiliatrian individualism (promoted by the market) and therapeutic individualism (promoted by the culture of therapy, self-help, talk shows, and now, reality shows). In the latter, the individual is "suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation" Bellah et al wrote, where they have a hard time figuring out how to achieve the 'good life'. They think they know what such a life entails, but how to get there and how to do so while recognizing the structural impediments *and* requirements for doing so becomes nearly impossible to even speak about, because our language of isolated individualism makes it difficult to conceive of how we can be individuals *in* communities with others.
I'd have to look at the archives of my discussion of Wolfe's book to refresh my memory but he annoyingly pointed out that a lot of religious folks he talked with -- in the same cities where Bellah et al did their work -- were more tolerant than people want to think. E.g., they might be opposed to abortion, but they were willing to concede that it wasn't their place to make it law. Bellah et al and Wolfe, though, did their work in the mid-90s/mid-80s and things have changed under the onslaught of a concerted religious right movement hostile to such thinking.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)