There's something awful in the news. It seems “The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.” That's dreadful – how can the followers of a saviour who was tortured to death be so hypocritical? Is it really true that the more devout an individual is, the less likely they are to respect the humanity of another?
Given my personal experience of Christians (as opposed to the collective abstraction people like to lampoon), that seemed so unlikely, I had to dig a little further. First, let's look at the survey results that CNN has published. According to CNN,
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
So that “more often” in the lede is actually rather dodgy. While it implies that, for any given American, the frequency with which they go to church will be an indicator of their willingness to torture, it's actually dealing with some different sort of statistic. The picture becomes clearer when two further details are observed. First, the baseline for American society is apparently 40%:
People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
Then it seems that non-evangelical protestants are less likely than the non-religious to support torture:
The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations -- such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- categorized as "mainline" Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified.
Ah. So that lede isn't correct, then. The indicator is not really “how often the person attends church” - it's “what denominational affiliation the person has”. Members of “mainline” (i.e. non-evangelical) denominations are less likely to support torture than the average American. According to CNN, that is. Who don't link to the actual research just in case you study it yourself.
So let's take a look at the original research as well as the generic, non-religious-based research. Well, actually, we can't as it doesn't appear to be published – there are only interpretations of selected results, with selective quotations provided. The full demographic data of the sample surveyed is not available anywhere I can find it.
What we do discover from the second article though is that these results:
are from a very small sample size, only just large enough to make any statements about “religious people” and too small to talk about anything other than abstract categories;
result from a single question which is framed in a way that eliminates the possibility of the sort of nuanced understanding of ethics any difficult question deserves;
ultimately say more about partisan political views than about religion. Maybe what's going on here is a characterization of “conservative, political” as “conservative, religious”?
So is there anything useful here? Are these grounds for evangelical atheists to once again pronounce the evil of religion? Well, no, I don't think so. I don't think there is really any useful data available on that subject here. Rather, it's been framed as an opportunity for tub-thumping reinforcement of prejudices against red-necks. Big deal.
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