Rhetoric Race and Religion
Adding to the mounting research on religiously unaffiliated Americans (i.e. “nones”), the Barna Group examined 15 measures of non-religiosity and drew some interesting conclusions.
“We wanted to expand the scope of secularization beyond what people call themselves,” said president David Kinnaman in Barna’sannouncement of its findings. “Faith-oriented self-descriptions are fine, but they are really only skin-deep in terms of understanding faith. In addition to identity, we also wanted to account for two other critical aspects of faith: belief as well as behavior.”
So Barna “created an aggregate metric of post-Christian culture” based upon 15 measures:
post-Christian = meet at least 60% of the following 15 factors (9 or more factors) highly post-Christian = meet at least 80% of the following 15 factors (12 or more factors)
1. do not believe in God
2. identify as atheist or agnostic
3. disagree that faith is important in their lives
4. have not prayed to God (in the last year)
5. have never made a commitment to Jesus
6. disagree the Bible is accurate
7. have not donated money to a church (in the last year)
8. have not attended a Christian church (in the last year)
9. agree that Jesus committed sins
10. do not feel a responsibility to “share their faith”
11. have not read the Bible (in the last week)
12. have not volunteered at church (in the last week)
13. have not attended Sunday school (in the last week)
14. have not attended religious small group (in the last week)
15. do not participate in a house church (in the last year)
Read the rest here
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