"In other words, it’s a miracle that democracy works at all given just how little the average voter knows."
I could not think of more apt, true, tragic, and darkly humorous words about our current state of affairs. Whenever I get too deep in my despair hole, I take comfort in that it is truly a wonder that things are not much worse
Professor Burge, the Baptist General Conference (now known as Converge) is a denomination with Scandinavian Pietist roots. It's not connected historically with the Black Church tradition.
AME is very upscale within the Black Church tradition and usually exists in affluent areas. I live in a working class area with a high black population and the primary Protestant denominations are COGIC and Holiness / Assemblies of God. PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) is mostly East Asian where I live.
I suspect theology and subculture are factors here. Some churches turn their back on the world and focus on more manageable issues like last-days prophecy, praying away demons or theological debate. I wonder if the Muslim outliers in your graphs can be explained by this kind of immersive subculture, as well as the migrant experience.
I'm a 'done' with a Seventh-day Adventist background and, let me tell you, Dr Ben Carson's presidential run was very much abberant behaviour for his denomination. Many Adventists abstain from voting and political parties as well as from alcohol, caffeine, 'unclean meats' or animal products altogether. Conservative Adventists won't watch TV or read newspapers. Their only political concern is that the Catholic Church will one day collaborate with government to enforce Sunday worship, as opposed to the 'true' Saturday Sabbath, and they flinch at any glimmer of this. (Having said this, a surprising number of conservative Adventists have been attracted to Trump in recent years - MAGA conspiracy thinking clicks, I suspect.)
It's a very different way of thinking and lifestyle in comparison to a politically or socially active denomination.
There are a lot of complications within some of the assumptions behind the intersections of political knowledge, education, and religion.
Vince Tinto, a globally-recognized interpreter of education statistics, mentored me for three years while I studied in the program he helped create at SU. He wanted to be sure we knew the numbers behind the statistics we see in headlines every day. One of the chief ones is that in the U.S., the "sociological imagination" defined by Mills _decreases_ on average as educational attainment _increases_. Sociological imagination is arguably a better measure of political knowledge than who holds the majority in Congressional houses.
Fox is the most popular U.S. news source and MSNBC is sometimes close behind, even though studies have shown for decades the most misinformed Americans watch Fox and the next most misinformed watch MSNBC.
Religion and education are often swallowed wholesale as primary shapers of identity. That may have more to do with who is well-informed politically than anything else. Identity not only shapes information bubbles, it can encourage people to knowingly provide wrong answers in order to better fit one's chosen identity. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=pubadfacpub
Responding to your classification of Nones, I'd say Australians are overwhelmingly Done, even those with a stated religious affilation. About 20 per cent pray regularly, attend church etc. The rest of us don't worry much at all. In particular, if there are any zealous atheists I haven't met one. A fair bit of vague spiritualism, horoscopes, crystals etc, but it seems more like a hobby than a serious belief.
And there is no religion-shaped hole, AFAICT. Some earnest people tried a while ago to set up Sunday meetings as a church substitute, but it went nowhere. Sundays are for sport or relaxing at home.
Super interested to hear more about the "Dones"! Seems somehow that the bulk of our circle of friends are out of - really out of - some kind Christian background, usually on the legalistic side.
Maybe I'm seeing things through a filter of Kinnaman's "unChristian".
Kinnaman's is a classic we might always keep on our shelves as a reference. I suspect the "Dones" have more to do with the _Great Dechurching_ categories, which Ryan broke down into more discrete groups in that book (written by Davis & Graham).
“A slim majority of folks knew that the House was being led by the Republicans - 52%. The share who knew the Senate belonged to the GOP was slightly higher at 56%.”
Minor correction here but looks like you swapped the percentages from the graph and the Senate was a Dem majority.
Interesting assessment, but I wonder if those are the best questions to determine a judgment. I can see reasonably astute people getting sidetracked by small majorities of recent creation. It might have been better to choose, if possible, two questions that Americans would be expected to know. Things like who is your Senator/Governor or Which Is Not a Civil Rights Protection? There have been studies on this. Failure to identify one's own elected officials is rather high even when the officials have held office a considerable time. It's better to stratify what should be common knowledge among religion, education, and party.
Can't wait to see more analysis on the Nones. I used the built-in article voice to read it to me and it was strange not hearing it in Ryan's voice (also, the computer pronounced it as "No-ness")
I also love that post. I almost think it should be a hyperlink every time you mention the CES so that people can quickly get a brief overview of that data without having to wade into the mud of the survey documentation.
It makes sense to me that the AME and Baptist General Conference (as well as Jews) would be politically knowledgeable because they're very polarized and politics is discussed at gatherings.
Oddly (as discussed in previous posts), another group that's nearly as polarized is the Assemblies of God. But they seem to know much less.
How are these two things both possible? How do you maintain strong opinions over something you're not actually interested in?
My Jewish lenses take a different view. Our voting patterns have not changed since FDR. Our major sects have clear majorities, with Conservative and Reform trending Democratic, and Orthodox tending more Republican, with the Haredi Republican nationally and Democratic regionally in places where public assistance needs are high. this, our synagogues, most advocacy organizations, and all social protection organizations are politically diverse. Unlike some Protestant denominations, we have no political litmus tests for participation in our synagogues.
Politics is not that common a discussion, which tends to focus more on our protection locally and now globally. This acceptance of opponents goes back to the Talmudic disputes of Hillel and Shammai. It is our local JCC that sponsors the biennial statewide candidates forum because of our commitment to civility to views we find objectionable.
Knowledge is a different matter. We are top-heavy with advanced degree professionals. We depend on our advocacy agencies who issue reports and take positions on current issues. We donate highly per capita to elctoral candidates and to agencies that take positions on public issues outside the immediate ethnic concerns. That's where our awareness originates.
>How do you maintain strong opinions over something you're not actually interested in?
1. Is the statistic you're highlighting testing strength of opinion? It seems that it's testing conformity to a single opinion. I think it's usually easier to achieve higher conformity if a large part of the group is not that interested in the topic.
2. One thing this speaks to is that Congress has been largely paralyzed and therefore historically weak in recent years. So a lot of people who DO have strong political opinions but fail this test are probably concerned about the President, the Supreme Courts, and maybe state and local officials. I can't remember the last time I heard someone complain about Congress.
"Is the statistic you're highlighting testing strength of opinion? It seems that it's testing conformity to a single opinion. I think it's usually easier to achieve higher conformity if a large part of the group is not that interested in the topic."
This brings up an interesting phenomenon in recent years. For a long time abortion was the case study for questions like this. Most people were pro-choice but didn't feel strongly. The minority was pro-life and very engaged. This pattern was stable for decades. But somehow after Roe was repealed and Trump removed abortion from the Republican platform, that intense interest has largely evaporated, despite the fact that abortions have been going up. Or maybe the interest has been redirected towards immigration, which is odd because the two issues have little in common. Interest vs. conformity. It feels like conformity is winning these days.
On the congress front, I hear a lot of complaints about people lacking backbone. Congress didn't stand up to Biden over his age, and isn't standing up to Trump over his extra-constitutional actions. But I suspect I'm around a more-knowledgeable crowd than average.
I wonder if you'd be interested in the historical connection between white supremacy in many Christian movements and abortion. Christians who argued for segregation found a strong correlation between racism and abortion opposition, so began promoting themselves as extremely pro-life to generate support for their anti-integration institutions. Bob Jones University is a famous example but not the only one. It's not an obvious connection but some researchers feel it helped concretize the debate over abortion.
I had heard that the NRA came into existence the year after the KKK was declared a terrorist organization, making support for gun rights a proxy for white supremacy. I guess it doesn't surprise me that abortion played (or plays) a similar role in some places and times, though the ideological link is less clear to me than it is for guns.
Interesting overall. Though I would think one potential flaw with this methodology over time is that this statistic will bounce around based simply on the status of the parties' hold over Congress; i.e., how hard is it at any one time to know the correct answer to these questions? I would predict this percentage is generally going to be higher under undivided government, and it's going to be especially high after a resounding win, like Obama's 2008 win.
Also, RE: Buddhists - What percentage of self-identified Buddhists in the US would we say are white native-born Americans? Anecdotally I don't think I've ever known an Asian cradle Buddhist living in the US, while I've known a few white Americans that identified as Buddhist converts, especially in college. It feels like in the US, cradle Buddhists are outnumbered by Sikhs, whom I actually have known personally on multiple occasions.
And I've known enough recent arrivals from majority Buddhist countries; it just seems they tend to either be from their country's Christian minority, to be non-religious, or to drop Buddhism quickly in the US. My town has at least 3 Korean churches but to my knowledge zero Buddhist places of worship.
Though maybe there's geographic concentration at play?
"In other words, it’s a miracle that democracy works at all given just how little the average voter knows."
I could not think of more apt, true, tragic, and darkly humorous words about our current state of affairs. Whenever I get too deep in my despair hole, I take comfort in that it is truly a wonder that things are not much worse
(how much of this is explained by a significant number of Hindu and Muslim grad students being non-U.S. citizens?)
Huge chunk. 37% of Muslims in the sample are immigrants and another 20% are first generation Americans.
“The clear winner here? It’s the atheists.”
Gonna have to disagree with you on this one. There are no winners when the scores are this low. That graph is just depressing.
In the land of the blind....
Professor Burge, the Baptist General Conference (now known as Converge) is a denomination with Scandinavian Pietist roots. It's not connected historically with the Black Church tradition.
Oof. Good note. Making changes.
AME is very upscale within the Black Church tradition and usually exists in affluent areas. I live in a working class area with a high black population and the primary Protestant denominations are COGIC and Holiness / Assemblies of God. PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) is mostly East Asian where I live.
I suspect theology and subculture are factors here. Some churches turn their back on the world and focus on more manageable issues like last-days prophecy, praying away demons or theological debate. I wonder if the Muslim outliers in your graphs can be explained by this kind of immersive subculture, as well as the migrant experience.
I'm a 'done' with a Seventh-day Adventist background and, let me tell you, Dr Ben Carson's presidential run was very much abberant behaviour for his denomination. Many Adventists abstain from voting and political parties as well as from alcohol, caffeine, 'unclean meats' or animal products altogether. Conservative Adventists won't watch TV or read newspapers. Their only political concern is that the Catholic Church will one day collaborate with government to enforce Sunday worship, as opposed to the 'true' Saturday Sabbath, and they flinch at any glimmer of this. (Having said this, a surprising number of conservative Adventists have been attracted to Trump in recent years - MAGA conspiracy thinking clicks, I suspect.)
It's a very different way of thinking and lifestyle in comparison to a politically or socially active denomination.
Question about the end of the article and the non religious. The Dones? What does that group consist of?
There are a lot of complications within some of the assumptions behind the intersections of political knowledge, education, and religion.
Vince Tinto, a globally-recognized interpreter of education statistics, mentored me for three years while I studied in the program he helped create at SU. He wanted to be sure we knew the numbers behind the statistics we see in headlines every day. One of the chief ones is that in the U.S., the "sociological imagination" defined by Mills _decreases_ on average as educational attainment _increases_. Sociological imagination is arguably a better measure of political knowledge than who holds the majority in Congressional houses.
Fox is the most popular U.S. news source and MSNBC is sometimes close behind, even though studies have shown for decades the most misinformed Americans watch Fox and the next most misinformed watch MSNBC.
Religion and education are often swallowed wholesale as primary shapers of identity. That may have more to do with who is well-informed politically than anything else. Identity not only shapes information bubbles, it can encourage people to knowingly provide wrong answers in order to better fit one's chosen identity. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=pubadfacpub
Responding to your classification of Nones, I'd say Australians are overwhelmingly Done, even those with a stated religious affilation. About 20 per cent pray regularly, attend church etc. The rest of us don't worry much at all. In particular, if there are any zealous atheists I haven't met one. A fair bit of vague spiritualism, horoscopes, crystals etc, but it seems more like a hobby than a serious belief.
And there is no religion-shaped hole, AFAICT. Some earnest people tried a while ago to set up Sunday meetings as a church substitute, but it went nowhere. Sundays are for sport or relaxing at home.
Super interested to hear more about the "Dones"! Seems somehow that the bulk of our circle of friends are out of - really out of - some kind Christian background, usually on the legalistic side.
Maybe I'm seeing things through a filter of Kinnaman's "unChristian".
Kinnaman's is a classic we might always keep on our shelves as a reference. I suspect the "Dones" have more to do with the _Great Dechurching_ categories, which Ryan broke down into more discrete groups in that book (written by Davis & Graham).
“A slim majority of folks knew that the House was being led by the Republicans - 52%. The share who knew the Senate belonged to the GOP was slightly higher at 56%.”
Minor correction here but looks like you swapped the percentages from the graph and the Senate was a Dem majority.
Interesting assessment, but I wonder if those are the best questions to determine a judgment. I can see reasonably astute people getting sidetracked by small majorities of recent creation. It might have been better to choose, if possible, two questions that Americans would be expected to know. Things like who is your Senator/Governor or Which Is Not a Civil Rights Protection? There have been studies on this. Failure to identify one's own elected officials is rather high even when the officials have held office a considerable time. It's better to stratify what should be common knowledge among religion, education, and party.
Gotta work with what I have, Richard.
Can't wait to see more analysis on the Nones. I used the built-in article voice to read it to me and it was strange not hearing it in Ryan's voice (also, the computer pronounced it as "No-ness")
Ha! Well, I added that little bit over the weekend, after I had already done the VO for the rest of the piece.
Note to self - never use the AI voice for these.
You get really granular here, particularly with the protestant contingent. How big was the sample size altogether?
CES 2022 has 64K total respondents.
Oooh! That’s a lot!
Ryan goes over the details of the CES in this post: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/why-i-cant-tell-you-how-quakers-or.
I love that post. It got 20% fewer clicks than anything recently. Such is life.
I also love that post. I almost think it should be a hyperlink every time you mention the CES so that people can quickly get a brief overview of that data without having to wade into the mud of the survey documentation.
It makes sense to me that the AME and Baptist General Conference (as well as Jews) would be politically knowledgeable because they're very polarized and politics is discussed at gatherings.
Oddly (as discussed in previous posts), another group that's nearly as polarized is the Assemblies of God. But they seem to know much less.
How are these two things both possible? How do you maintain strong opinions over something you're not actually interested in?
My Jewish lenses take a different view. Our voting patterns have not changed since FDR. Our major sects have clear majorities, with Conservative and Reform trending Democratic, and Orthodox tending more Republican, with the Haredi Republican nationally and Democratic regionally in places where public assistance needs are high. this, our synagogues, most advocacy organizations, and all social protection organizations are politically diverse. Unlike some Protestant denominations, we have no political litmus tests for participation in our synagogues.
Politics is not that common a discussion, which tends to focus more on our protection locally and now globally. This acceptance of opponents goes back to the Talmudic disputes of Hillel and Shammai. It is our local JCC that sponsors the biennial statewide candidates forum because of our commitment to civility to views we find objectionable.
Knowledge is a different matter. We are top-heavy with advanced degree professionals. We depend on our advocacy agencies who issue reports and take positions on current issues. We donate highly per capita to elctoral candidates and to agencies that take positions on public issues outside the immediate ethnic concerns. That's where our awareness originates.
>How do you maintain strong opinions over something you're not actually interested in?
1. Is the statistic you're highlighting testing strength of opinion? It seems that it's testing conformity to a single opinion. I think it's usually easier to achieve higher conformity if a large part of the group is not that interested in the topic.
2. One thing this speaks to is that Congress has been largely paralyzed and therefore historically weak in recent years. So a lot of people who DO have strong political opinions but fail this test are probably concerned about the President, the Supreme Courts, and maybe state and local officials. I can't remember the last time I heard someone complain about Congress.
"Is the statistic you're highlighting testing strength of opinion? It seems that it's testing conformity to a single opinion. I think it's usually easier to achieve higher conformity if a large part of the group is not that interested in the topic."
This brings up an interesting phenomenon in recent years. For a long time abortion was the case study for questions like this. Most people were pro-choice but didn't feel strongly. The minority was pro-life and very engaged. This pattern was stable for decades. But somehow after Roe was repealed and Trump removed abortion from the Republican platform, that intense interest has largely evaporated, despite the fact that abortions have been going up. Or maybe the interest has been redirected towards immigration, which is odd because the two issues have little in common. Interest vs. conformity. It feels like conformity is winning these days.
On the congress front, I hear a lot of complaints about people lacking backbone. Congress didn't stand up to Biden over his age, and isn't standing up to Trump over his extra-constitutional actions. But I suspect I'm around a more-knowledgeable crowd than average.
Perhaps it all comes down to backbone.
I wonder if you'd be interested in the historical connection between white supremacy in many Christian movements and abortion. Christians who argued for segregation found a strong correlation between racism and abortion opposition, so began promoting themselves as extremely pro-life to generate support for their anti-integration institutions. Bob Jones University is a famous example but not the only one. It's not an obvious connection but some researchers feel it helped concretize the debate over abortion.
I hadn't heard that. Thanks for sharing!
I had heard that the NRA came into existence the year after the KKK was declared a terrorist organization, making support for gun rights a proxy for white supremacy. I guess it doesn't surprise me that abortion played (or plays) a similar role in some places and times, though the ideological link is less clear to me than it is for guns.
Interesting overall. Though I would think one potential flaw with this methodology over time is that this statistic will bounce around based simply on the status of the parties' hold over Congress; i.e., how hard is it at any one time to know the correct answer to these questions? I would predict this percentage is generally going to be higher under undivided government, and it's going to be especially high after a resounding win, like Obama's 2008 win.
Also, RE: Buddhists - What percentage of self-identified Buddhists in the US would we say are white native-born Americans? Anecdotally I don't think I've ever known an Asian cradle Buddhist living in the US, while I've known a few white Americans that identified as Buddhist converts, especially in college. It feels like in the US, cradle Buddhists are outnumbered by Sikhs, whom I actually have known personally on multiple occasions.
And I've known enough recent arrivals from majority Buddhist countries; it just seems they tend to either be from their country's Christian minority, to be non-religious, or to drop Buddhism quickly in the US. My town has at least 3 Korean churches but to my knowledge zero Buddhist places of worship.
Though maybe there's geographic concentration at play?
30% of Buddhists are immigrants. And 22% are first generation Americans.