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Over on Religion Dispatches, co-editor Gary Laderman, chair
of the Emory religion department and an old acquaintance, takes the ARIS
survey (and its ilk) to task for missing the boat–not providing an adequate
account of religion in America. Or, as he puts it:

On the one hand we can thank God
for polls and surveys that monitor how Americans identify their religious
preferences and identities. But on the other, who really needs God to be
religious anyway? And do these polls really capture the spiritual landscape in
all of its complex, contradictory, and confounding realities? It would be neat
and easy if a simple question, like “Do you believe in God?” had the ability to
get to the heart of religious life for most Americans. But in fact the
spiritual realities are simply not reducible to these narrow questions and a
facile, multiple-choice perspective.

 Here’s an open letter in response.

Dear Gary,

Of
course, a telephone survey of 54,000 adults, conducted by non-specialists at $1
per short-answer question per respondent–cannot hope to capture all the complexities
of American religion. And no one should expect it to. What such a survey does
is provide a bird’s eye view of how Americans identify themselves religiously
and something of what they believe, and of how those identifications and
beliefs match up with various other demographic characteristics of the
population.

The results can point researchers such as yourself to
conduct more in-depth–anthropological, if you will–inquiries. I notice, for example,
that you claim that “the sacred” is a force “that now more than ever is
free-floating and disconnected from conventional anchors, like specific texts
such as the Qur’an or particular institutions like the church.” How do you know
that this force is more disconnected than once upon a time? ARIS provides some statistical
evidence to undergird such a claim–showing not only that twice as many adult Americans
claim no religious identity as did in 1990 but also that 27 percent do not expect
to have a religious burial. Presumably, the more people there are floating free
of traditional religious institutions, the greater likelihood of a more
free-floating sense of the sacred.

In this regard, it seems somewhat perverse
for you to criticize us for “facile” questioning about God. Previous surveys
have simply asked people whether or not they believe in God–and come up with
affirmative answers in the neighborhood of 90 percent. By probing further, we
have for the first time discovered that less than 70 percent of Americans
embrace the conventional Judeo-Christian idea of a personal God.