When Push-Polling Comes to Religion

When Push-Polling Comes to Religion June 20, 2013
Faithful readers of this blog know that I have a bugaboo about survey research that calls people who say they have no religion “unaffiliated” — as if they were just waiting to be signed up. It’s so much less ominously secular than calling them “Nones.”
That’s hardly an isolated example of sociological religion-coddling, according to my colleague Barry Kosmin (director of Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture) and Ryan Cragun of the University of Tampa. In the latest issue of Free Inquiry (journal of the Council for Secular Humanism), they charge that there’s a persistent pro-religious bias on the part of religion surveyors.
Such as Gallup, which recently asked people around the world, “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?” (If “convinced atheist,” why not “convinced believer”?)
Or Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby, who now asks his increasingly irreligious compatriots, “Would you be receptive to greater religious involvement if you found religion to be worthwhile?” Duh.

Read the rest here


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