Slate repeats old canards about church attendance

 It's a piece that is otherwise generally good, but nothing really new — it's about the closure of ever more "mainline" houses of religious worship in the face of the rise of the Nones, etc.

But, it then goes to a Gallup Poll that claims as late as just before COVID, just over one-third of Americans went to religious service weekly and it was still 40 percent in the early years of this century.

Tosh, as I told the story's author on Twitter. Time and motion studies have shown that self-reporting of church attendance (and perhaps the same for synagogues, mosques, temples, etc.) is somewhat to highly inflated. And, it's sad that these statistics still get trotted out, especially in the context of this story, and what individual congregations, parishes, minyim etc. face — whether or not to try to renovate a religious building, whether or not to move, whether or not to shut down. 

The actual number? Yes, 2020 was the first year of COVID, but it was down to 20 percent then. Even "every week" PLUS "almost every week" was just 30 percent, according to Statistia, and THAT may be high. It was down at about 25 percent at the turn of the century, and some evangelical orgs admit that, and THAT link is from 2007. But, this from 2018 concurs.

Having accurate information might help inform such decisions. (Or it might not; motivated reasoning is still real.)

The Gallup piece then gets worse with a section, a little over halfway down, about worship converting from in-person to virtual. That, too can be fudged. (Unless the congregation takes a roll call via Zoom!)

Nowhere near the first time Gallup's had idiotic polling about religiosity.

The header's central word, "canards," is not too harsh. Henry Graber had done more than a modicum of other research for the story, but then just accepted Gallup's words as gospel truth, literal pun intended.

Beyond the issue of whether individual groups of worshipers should shut down or not, such misreporting overstates the influence of churches on American life and culture, and allows religious right churches to run with that.

Christianity is "weak," says Religious Right 2.0; Russell Moore may be hypocritical on call-out

That's per this Tumblr-length brief from The New Republic. (Sadly, it spoils itself by linking to a longer piece by Nat-Sec Nutsack Brynn Tannehill, who pivots into going off on the Russian Orthodox Church in typical #BlueAnon fashion, namely in being full of shit about a draft vs an all-volunteer army — an issue that #BlueAnon types are good at being full of shit about.)

Anyway, said editor is Russell Moore, well known for, overall, rightly bitching about his own (former it seems?) Southern Baptist Convention covering up its sex abuse scandals.

He notes, also in this Mediate piece, that the fundagelicals in general, to go beyond Moore's conservative evangelicals (which TNR gets wrong, as there ARE still, per the likes of Sojourners mag, librul evangelicals), to the Religious Right in general, on hearing about things like "turn the other cheek," will ask preachers "where did that come from"? Mediate references a longer interview that Moore had with NPR, in reference to a new book. Here's the full quote, re the "weak":

Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching - turn the other cheek - to have someone come up after and to say, where did you get those liberal talking points? And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would not be, I apologize. The response would be, yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak. And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

How much of this is the Religious Right doing its own Overton Window? Surely a fair amount. But, how much of it is due to megachurches preaching prosperity gospel and other things, and not the actual bible? I mean, he's now running a nondenominational church as well as editing CT.

OTOH, on the issue of the Religious Right, for f?

First, this issue is more than a century old. Look at Teddy Roosevelt's "muscular Christianity." I don't know if McClure's or some other mag back then asked TR what he thought about "turn the other cheek"; the answer might have been interesting. No, no might; I'm sure. Let's not forget that TR himself did some tap-dancing on racial issues before showing his true colors over Brownsville 1906.

Second, Russell Moore? Russell Moore is over the age of 50, and grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi. Not real far from Neshoba County, Mississippi, home of Ronald Reagan's "affable" racism dogwhistles at the 1980 Neshoba County Fair. Neshoba County, where the bodies of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were found on Aug. 4, 1964. Russell Moore has known, or should have known, his former denomination's history long before 2013 or whenever.

Related to that? At Religion News, Tyler Huckabee notes that while Moore was calling out his former denomination a decade ago, he was always careful not to push too hard early on. OTOH, Tyler Huckabee says that to show his own ass while calling out librul Christians for allegedly doing the same by trying to normalize Moore.