January 14, 2004

And the Other Shoe Drops!

I KNEW that comment would eventually catch up with me! ;)

Linking back to a post by Justin Baeder at Radical Congruency, who in turn links to a post by Jimmy at fluidfaith, Joe Carter takes issue with some objections to a recent poll taken by George Barna regarding what percentage of people in the United States hold "a biblical worldview." I left a comment on Justin's site, and it followed me over to Joe's site.

The issue revolves around the criteria around which Barna defines "a biblical worldview:"

  • Absolute moral truths exist.
  • Such truth is defined by the Bible;
  • Jesus Christ lived a sinless life;
  • God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it today;
  • Salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned;
  • Satan is real;
  • A Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other people;
  • The Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.

Now, I am not an expert on polling, nor am I an expert in statistical analysis. However, in my so-called "day job," I am responsible for performing a statistical analysis every 18 months on each of our two units at the plant where I work. In this analysis, I take a random sample of 30 baskets, each about a foot in diameter and 48 feet long, full of borated ice in each of three radial zones around a 300 degree arc of our containment building -- a total of 90 baskets. From the weights of these 90 baskets, I calculate a 95% confidence total weight for each zone and for all of the ice in all 1,944 baskets, 1) to demonstrate that I have enough total weight to do the job and 2) to demonstrate that it is more or less evenly distributed.

I have learned from that experience to view pollsters with a great deal of suspicion, and that one needs to be very clear about the question one is asking in these polls. It's not that George Barna's definition of a biblical worldview is "wrong," per se. It's that he's not right enough. He ends up in the same box in which we Presbyterians find ourselves every time someone asks us to define "the essential tenets of the Reformed faith." Who gets to decide what goes into the box? How big does the box need to be? As you can imagine, this has great import for the conversation we've been having about the emerging church.

To put it in a nutshell, I don't object to Barna's criteria, per se. I object to the implied statement that this is all there is to it. I'm also not certain how useful the data are, other than confirming what a good number of us are readily willing to acknowledge -- the United States is not a "Christian nation," regardless of one's historical interpretation of our national cultural DNA. So George, your point would be ... ?

Posted by Mike at January 14, 2004 04:17 PM | TrackBack
Comments

Since you criticism was with the polling criteria (a legitimate gripe, in my opinion) rather than with the idea that these tenets of the faith are not applicable to all who hold a "biblical worldview", I think I should take that line out of my post and link back to this explanation.

(Whew. What a run-on sentence that was...)

Posted by: Joe Carter at January 14, 2004 04:25 PM

Having read Barna's research pretty carefully recently, Rev. Mike, I think you may be the one who has missed the point. Barna's not trying to survey just your average American. He's trying to look especially at people who claim to be evanglical "born again" Christians, and understand why, if there are as many of them as people claim, there seems to be so little effect by them on our culture. As a pastor myself, one who is quite well-educated, a woman (therefore NOT a misogynist) in a multi-ethnic church in a very multi-racial Southern university city - his results sound very much like what I see all around me. I am troubled by the need by so many 'emergent' folks to feel the need to qualify every statement, fuzz up every doctrine, nothing can be said clearly or cogently - that would be too simplistic. I think Joe is right, it often comes across as ashamed of the Gospel, and, I'm sorry to say, arrogant and uncharitable as well as VERY white, euro and upper-class. Funny, just the things Justin was decrying.

Posted by: Priscilla at January 14, 2004 05:15 PM

Priscilla, it certainly was not my intent to suggest that Barna misses the point. I find your inclusion of your bona fides mildly troubling because it suggests to me that something I wrote implies only uneducated people would disagree with me. It absolutely is not my purpose to suggest that or to advocate complexity where a simpler answer exists.

All I meant to suggest is that the tent of orthodoxy is a lot bigger than those eight criteria would imply. I suspect that if Barna included criteria related to social justice, he would see a significant step change in his results. However, I also don't mean to suggest that the Bible is strictly about social justice. That's part of the overall picture, but it certainly is not the starting point of the gospel, which many would make it.

I also don't wish to trade in the standard stereotypes regarding biblically illiterate lay people AND oftentimes clergy. We all know the stereotypes, and we all know that they became stereotypes because in large measure they're accurate. Barna simply made a decision regarding the criteria by which he would survey to reach his conclusion, criteria that I think set up a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that you also note reflects what you see around you, just as it reflects what I see around me. My point is that I'm just not sure how helpful that survey is to the church.

Posted by: Rev. Mike at January 14, 2004 07:04 PM

you guys are gutsy! I'm not sticking a wiggling toe into this pool!

Posted by: Anita at January 14, 2004 08:56 PM

George Barna did a survey to find if those who believed in a handful of central theololgical tenets made different moral choices. To look at the survey as a definition of a biblical world view is to miss the point. Barna is not a theologian he is a market researcher. It really doesn't matter how he defined a biblical worldview someone would get mad at him somewhere.

All he did was find that most of the people that claim to be Christians dont' believe certain things. Those that don't believe in these things have different moral standards.

Posted by: LT at January 15, 2004 08:57 PM

The scary thing is, that even with such a low bar, Barna got such results.

Posted by: Steve at January 16, 2004 12:46 AM

This sounds like the UK debate which has the Press quoting the Church of England's "Parish Rolls" as the representation of church attendance and the Mori (and other!) Pollsters findings that are at complete odds on whether or not the Church is dying. According to the Parish Rolls (a sort of voters roll) the CofE is losing about 2% of its membership per year, but many congregations are expanding. According to the polls around 51% of the population believe in God, but don't go to church, while around 11% of the population claim to attend church regularly. The Parish Rolls actually show a voting membership of around 3% of the population! Who is right? Or are we in fact asking the right question?

Posted by: The Gray Monk at January 16, 2004 05:19 PM