{"id":880,"date":"2011-06-16T08:54:42","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T07:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/?p=880"},"modified":"2011-06-16T08:54:42","modified_gmt":"2011-06-16T07:54:42","slug":"interpreting-religious-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/interpreting-religious-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"Interpreting Religious Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Check out this post by James Chastek on <a href=\"http:\/\/thomism.wordpress.com\/2011\/06\/15\/interpreting-religious-statistics\/\">interpreting religious statistics<\/a>. He makes three points: (1) An evaluation of religious statistics that looks only to the last 50 years is short-sighted in comparison with the long-term nature of movements in religious convictions; (2) people leaving the Church is an ambiguous statistic; it could be a sign of a spiritual good, namely a greater appreciation that belonging to the Church and church attendence should be connected with the truth&#8211;having previously accepted the Church not as true, but simply as a part of culture; (3) the statistics often rely on non-objective methods to determine the numbers of members of the Church; e.g., simply asking <em>them<\/em> whether they are &#8220;Catholic&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I have often made the second point in response to what I sometimes see as an exaggerated concern with statistics of church membership, expressed on the occasion of hearing the numbers of persons leaving the Church. While it is better to be a Catholic and live as one than not, it is also better to be honestly not a Catholic than to be dishonestly a Catholic.<\/p>\n<p>One must admit, however, that while cultural christianity never saved anyone, it can be an <em>occasion<\/em> for a real encounter with Christ, who is the Savior of all men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Check out this post by James Chastek on interpreting religious statistics. He makes three points: (1) An evaluation of religious statistics that looks only to the last 50 years is short-sighted in comparison with the long-term nature of movements in religious convictions; (2) people leaving the Church is an ambiguous statistic; it could be a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,8],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-discernment","tag-interpretation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":882,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions\/882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pathsoflove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}