Being wrong is good

I’m re-reading Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity now that I know a lot more American history than I did when I first read it in 2004. The book was probably written in the early 2000s, so it’s interesting to see what Samuel Huntington get’s wrong. In the early chapters he wishes to emphasize the dissenter Protestant nature of the United States. Though in the broad brush I agree with him, Huntington makes many assertions about the contemporary United States which have been falsified within the last few years. He states on page 100:

While a precise judgement is impossible, at the start of the twenty-first century the United States was probably becoming more rather than less Christian in its religious composition.

A precise judgement is now possible. According to the Religious Landscape Survey 78% of Americans are professed Christians (inclusive of groups which other Christians may reject as Christians, such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses). According to the American Religious Identification Survey the adult population of the United States went from being 86% Christian in 1990 to 76% Christian in 2008. In other words, Samuel Huntington suspected that America was becoming more Christian precisely in the middle of the period when massive numbers of American Christians were severing their identification with the Christian religion.

Huntington is not at fault here, as he wrote just before the newest surveys came out. He relied on the 1990 American Religious Identification Survey extensively, and that survey would have given a misleading trajectory of religious change. In the footnotes it is clear that that Huntington was leaning on the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, and though Stark’s empirical data is obviously correct, he works within a particular theoretical paradigm which leads him to make specific predictions. Stark posits a “supply side” model of religion whereby sects and denominations operate in a marketplace and free choice should lead to “competition” and the emergence of a “better product” which is attractive to more. A natural inference is that in a free market of religion the population should be at a relatively high equilibrium of affiliation. The empirical data before 1990 showed a steady pattern of increased affiliation with Christian denominations up to the 1950s,* a “correction” in the 1960s, and stabilization after that period. Additionally, within Protestantism conservative denominations seemed more vibrant than liberal ones. Connecting the dots one can predict the American religious landscape from 1990 onward will become more Christian and more theologically conservative as the hand of the market favors those sects which provide a better product. Without the enormous and robust surveys of religion which were published in the second half of the 2000s Huntington would have had to rely on these sorts of theories and predictions, combined with a sense in the Zeitgeist that religious conservatism rooted in dissenting Protestantism was waxing. Hints of falsification of this model were already evident in the 2001 release of the American Religious Identification Survey, but paradigms are robust to minor deviations (you can see secularization in the General Social Survey as well).

I don’t think this refutes Huntington’s general thesis in Who Are We. Rather, I think it reflects positively upon someone’s scholarship that they make clear and distinct assertions which can be refuted when new data comes on the scene.

* Though the overwhelmingly majority of Americans always identified as Protestant Christians, the rural and low density nature of the early republic meant that church attendance and affiliation were much lower in 1800 than 1920. With improved transportation and greater density of living Sunday attendance became more practicable.

** A few years ago Rodney Stark converted to Christianity, and though his sympathy with religious conservatives was obvious very early (in The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation he admits his unbelief, but expresses a wish that he could believe), more recently he has crossed over from a researcher whose sympathies are clear to a polemicist. He was lead researcher a few years ago on a survey of religious Americans sponsored by Baylor. It seems to me that the group wanted to massage the interpretation so as not to falsify Stark’s thesis that secularization can not occur in a free religious marketplace. Here’s a chart which shows how much conservative Christianity has grown since 1990 from one of Stark’s papers:

You can see that Baptists expanded modestly between 1960 and 2000. This is true. But the absolute numbers of Baptists declined between 1990 and 2000, and their percentage of the American population went from 16% to 13%. In other words the span between 1960 and 2000 has two trends, a massive increase in the number of Baptists between 1960 and 1990, followed by ten years of absolute stagnation and relative decline. You wouldn’t know it from the way Stark presents the data though.