Earlier this year USA Today ran an article and an interactive infographic about a recent survey of American religion. The American Religious Identification Survey has released data about the religion affiliations of Americans, finding that most religious groups have lost adherents since 1990.
One could find many things to quarrel with in either the survey’s design or especially in USA Today‘s visual presentation of the data. The most egregious problem is lumping religious groups into four categories: “Catholics,” “other Christians,” “other religions,” and “no religion.” Those categories are so broad and vague that they are essentially useless. Then too, the infographic suffers all the problems of bad data visualization. Someone at USA Today should buy Edward Tufte’s books.
Quibbles aside, the essential difficulty with these statistics is one of the classic problems of quantifying religion: the assumption that religious affiliation is closely linked to religious experience. Religious affiliation is the single most-used statistic about religion, because it is one of the very few facts about religion that can be quantified. The inference cannot be drawn, however, that a lower rate of religious affiliation implies a lower rate of religious experience (whatever that would mean). The ARIS study confirms what historians of recent American religion have known for a long time: that America religious experience since the 1960s has become less about institutions and groups and more about individuals and their experiences. To my knowledge, the study of religion or secularization has mostly resisted efforts at quantification. The best analyses, like Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, look at the aspects of religious experience which cannot be quantified. For more on Taylor, look for a future post.
Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds [USA Today]
See how U.S. religious landscape has changed in nearly 2 decades [USA Today]
Of course, you’re right that (in Billy Sunday’s words) sleeping in a garage doesn’t make you a car. On the other hand, I’d guess that folks who say they have “no religion” probably have a pretty limited involvement in “religious experience.”