Church Statistics Often Misleading
Churches today have a dizzying problem in arithmetic.
They're stumped, in a sense, by statistics. As widely assessed by authorities, the figures on current religious activity can be used to show contrasting conditions — either liveliness or lull — and often are.
"It's a wide open field for interpretation," said Dr. Benson Y. Landis, a longtime, top church statistician.
"The great difficulty is that many of the figures not only are crude estimates, but they don't cover nearly all the ground that they should."
Latest contribution to the question is that of University of California sociologist Seymour M. Lipset, who presents data to show that the much-heralded church boom in this country is mostly a myth.
"The idea of major postwar growth in religious practice is not well-founded," he writes in Forum, a Columbia University quarterly. He presents an array of computations to back up his thesis.
On the other hand, editors of Presbyterian Life not long ago rounded up a set of figures to show that church affiliation in America is far greater than usually counted — about 130 million rather than 104 million.
That's about three-fourth of the population instead of two-thirds.
Official tales listed by various churches show a strongly rising graph, particularly in postwar years. But Dr. Landis, editor of the Yearbook of American Churches, points out various disparities including:
1. Of 268 religious bodies, perhaps only half of them compile new tabulations annually, with some figures long out of date.
2. Denominations have inconsistent definitions of membership with Roman Catholics and some Protestant bodies counting all baptized persons, including infants. Most Protestant groups count only adults.
It was by including Protestant children that Presbyterian Life arrived at its higher Protestant figures — about 86 million instead of the 60 million generally given. A 1957 census bureau sampling got similar results.
3. No uniform policies exist for removing deadwood from local church rolls. Examples were cited of congregations with a fourth of their membership listed with addresses unknown. Many are probably counted in congregations elsewhere.
4. Lipset cited numerous studies challenging the usual picture of a rising religious tide, including these findings:
1. Lessened religious activity by American businessmen, with 63 per cent having church preferences in 1920, and only 41 per cent in 1950.
2. Lack of proportional expansion of the clergy, with 1.12 ministers available to each 1,000 population in 1950, less than the 1.16 available a century ago.
3. In 18 Protestant churches, studies show donations in relation to income in 1953 were lower than in 1929 — about the same level as late in the depression.
4. Some churches which formerly didn't count children under 13 as members now do so, thus inflating comparative totals. Studies show adult membership at 55 per cent in 1940; 64 per cent in 1950.
5. As for church-going, polls indicate weekly attendance by 41 per cent of the population in 1939; 39 per cent in 1950; 47 per cent in 1957.
"No basic trend exists," Lipset said, "By far the most striking aspect of religious life in America is not the changes which have occurred in it — but the basic continuities it retains."