[lbo-talk] how many Americans go to church, and why?

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Sat Apr 7 06:56:44 PDT 2007


On Saturday 07 April 2007 08:44, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Apr 7, 2007, at 6:27 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
> > I grew up in a small town in the South
>
> That was several decades ago, when the South was less industrialized
> and the population less mobile, and the small-town South is a small
> part of the U.S. population.

Point taken. I make no claim to omniscience on this or any other subject. What I do claim is some relevant experience, which I rather suspect is lacking in some of the other contributors to this thread.


> > Admittedly, the Gallup poll was silly, as they usually are.
>
> Yeah, social scientists are a bunch of idiots.

This is a little hard to unpack. Some social scientists are idiots, some aren't -- or so I'm willing to believe, though idiocy seems pretty abundant. Are the Gallup people social scientists in any case, though?


> > The list of
> > "reasons" for going to church was clearly compiled by some smug
> > secular-bourgeois Philistine with no understanding or experience of
> > religion at all;
>
> Um, George Gallup and his son were/are born-again Christians, and the
> operation is very sympathetic to religion (and the Republican party).

Do you suppose that Gallup himself compiled that list? The place hardly seems to be a one-man shop any more.


> > and asking people about their reasons for going to
> > church, or for anything else that they do, is dumb from the get-go.
>
> Yeah, no point in asking questions when you already know the answers.

The point was that people's accounts of their own motives are seldom to be relied on uncritically; partly because people's motivations are often obscure to them, and partly because they don't always like to 'fess up to the motives they do discern. This is not to say that you can't arrive at some understanding of what makes a person tick by talking (and listening) to him.



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