Results of the 2008 Baylor Religion Survey were released Sept. 18. It found some results that might surprise those unfamiliar with the lives and beliefs of deeply religious Americans.
For example: Are stereotypes about churches that have an average weekend attendance of more than 1,000 worshipers accurate?
“We all know that megachurches have all sorts of flaws. They’re big; they have a wonderful Sunday service because they can afford a symphony orchestra. But they’re kind of cold, they have … like, theater audiences,” said Baylor sociology professor Rodney Stark, the study’s lead researcher, noting common perceptions of megachurches. “All wrong.”
The survey found that members of such churches tended to have more friends within their congregations, hold more conservative Christian beliefs, share their faith with friends and strangers more often, and be involved in volunteer work more frequently than their counterparts in churches with less than 100 in average attendance.
“How does that make any sense?” Stark asked. “The answer is: That’s how they got there. Their friends brought them to church, and then they brought their friends to church, and that’s how the congregation was built.”
An additional factor suggested by the survey: Megachurches are far more likely than small churches to be conservative evangelical congregations. Meanwhile, smaller churches had a higher rate of affiliation with what the survey called a “liberal Protestant denomination,” or with mainline church bodies such as the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church.
The survey also found that active religious believers — and particularly conservative Christians — were less likely than the general public to believe in the occult and paranormal.
“The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, and astrology, with education having hardly any effect,” the survey’s authors said.
For instance, as measured against an index of belief in occult and paranormal beliefs researchers constructed, only 14 percent of respondents who described themselves as “evangelical” rated high on the index. Meanwhile, 30 percent of those who rejected the “evangelical” label scored high on the same index.
Those who described themselves as “theologically liberal” were actually more likely than evangelicals — and than the public at large — to believe in the paranormal.
Stark, asked if it should surprise people that those who hold conservative Biblical beliefs would reject beliefs in the paranormal, said no — but that some in academia and the scientific community hold that stereotype.
“It seems pretty logical that people who are into conventional Christianity are not going to be open to this other stuff,” he asserted. “But there’s an enormous amount of belief out that they’re just suckers for anything — that they’re just credulous people.”
The survey, of 1,648 English-speaking American adults, used detailed questionnaires mailed in the fall of 2007. Collected by the Gallup Organization and analyzed by Baylor researchers, it has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.
It was funded by the Templeton Foundation, and is the second wave of a three-part survey project. The first set of results was released in 2006. The final set, researchers said, will be released next year.
