Debbie T

Cool!

Shush! Next thing you know they will be sending missionaries out our way.

[ September 20, 2002: Message edited by: Debbie T ]</p>

Terracotta

I am proud (NOT!!!!!!) to say that I was once a missionary in Bend, Oregon. I was an intern with Campaigns Northwest, a Church of Christ organization that sends college students to minister to various CoC's in the Pacific Northwest. At the time I was a liberal Xian and had shed my CoC fundyism.

I really loved Oregon, and I ended up going back the next summer, not as a missionary intern, just for the hell of it. I realize now that I loved it there so much because it was such a secular place and quite unlike every other place I had ever been to or lived. The more I look back, the more I think that for years I was an agnostic in disguise, managing to hide it even from myself.

I can't wait until I'm able to go back for a visit. The Northwest is a wonderful region. But Kentucky is pretty nice, too, if you can avoid all the damn Baptists!

oriecat

I'm totally surprised about Medford. It's a logging town where they like to joke about frying spotted owls, seems like it would be fundyville to me. Maybe the survey got mixed up with Ashland. But what do I know... Is good to see all that blue for my lovely state though...

oriecat

Ok, here's a new one, or a bad mixup, on the detail page for Portland, Vancouver, it says:
Reporting Groups (149 possible): 154 (73 of 133 in 1990)

So there are 149 possible, but 154 were reported. What?! Did I miss something here?

oriecat

<a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/front_page/1032350159249722.xml" target="_blank">Here</a> is the link to an article in the Oregonian that I saw a few days ago about this same survey.

MarkW

I, too, found the results about Medford surprising. My aunt and uncle live in Jacksonville, a small town just outside of Medford. Several years ago, they had to take my two cousins out of the local public schools for them to have any sort of social lives--the public schools were full of fundy kids who refused to associate with my cousins. So my cousins wound up going to the local Catholic schools, of all places.

As for Washington and Oregon being "secular" states--I'd guess that the Seattle and Portland areas are probably as secular as any major cities in the US, barring maybe San Francisco. But Washington east of the Cascades, and Oregon outside the Willamette Valley (and maybe Ashland), are pretty religious, as far as I can tell.

Mark

Kosh

What's with the gray cancerous looking area that seems to be spreading?.....

JohnR

Well it looks like the Tri-Cities is green or red.
It is a pocket of conservative religious nuts here. One street Gage Blvd has at least 5 huge churches including a mormon temple.
But the westside is a godless haven. Too bad it is so wet and crowded there.

ohwilleke

Glenmary, the Yearbook of Churches, and ARIS are the three best surveys of religious affiliation in the U.S. Gallop and Zogby also do surveys on a national level but without the same kind of detail either in depth of information, or locality.

Glenmary's strength is that it breaks things down by denomination and county. This prevents a lot of errors that show up in ARIS because names of religious denominations are very similar and people often get them confused. For example, many people who are members of the American Baptist Church, the most liberal of the large baptist denominations, often accidentally identify themselves as members of the American Baptist Convention, which is a medium sized ultraconservative Baptist denominations. Thus, surveys such as Gallop (and organizational surveys such as those by the military and bureau of prisons) almost always overreport members in the American Baptist Conference and under report membership in the American Baptist Church.

ARIS also isn't very specific. For instance, many people identify as Baptist in the ARIS survey, but it is very difficult to determine how many attend African-American denominations which are very different theologically, than white denominations. ARIS creates a false sense of consensus in the South when it is really deeply divided between white and black baptists.

The advantage of the ARIS and Gallop methodology, in contrast, is that it penetrates through book cooking. Several African-American and Pentecostal denominations, as well as Orthodox Christians and the Salvation Army, are notorious for inflating their self-reporting numbers. The Salvation Army, for example, have only a few thousand members, but reports everyone who every has shows at any Salvation Army function (e.g. a Catholic who gets a meal at a Salvation Army event is classified as a member). Also, ARIS captures information on many denominations that refuse to report numbers (Christian Scientists, for example).

ARIS provides more local detail than Gallop, but not as much as Glenmary.

Also, while Glenmary may be biased, it is not really biased in favor of any of the groups with the biggest track records for fibbing.

The biggest hole in Glenmary reporting captured by ARIS is the large group of nominal Christians out there who are not affiliated with any church but are also not athiests or non-religious even. Another few holes in Glenmary is that it does not corolate religion information with other demographic information, and does not have any coverage of most leading African-American denominations (in part because many of their self-reported figures aren't reliable).

[ September 25, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]</p>

Grumpy

Clearly what we need is a meta-study to collate all the information. Maybe the Department of Faith-Based & Community Action can do the job.