Dave’s Picks/ Week 2
Posted by Dave Keller on May 11th, 2006
This week’s picks can be entitled Mormons and Catholics by the Numbers. Here I gather some handy web resources for looking at what statistics tell us about our two great faiths. As always, feel free to use the comment section to point out additional resources. Specifically I am interested in opinion surveys, demographics, and cultural indicators.
Church growth
The new 2006 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches reports that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1.74%) and the Roman Catholic Church (.83%) are the second and third fastest growing churches in the USA. For the total number of adherents in the USA, the RCC is #1 at 67.2 million and the LDS church is #4 at 5.9 million.
Adherents.com
A fellow Mormon posted some health, family, and charitable contribution statistics on the CA forums culled from the very useful site worth further exploring called Adherents.com. They have a good page for Mormonism, but I couldn’t find a central page for Catholicism. Sometimes Rhode Island with an estimated 63% Catholics is used for a baseline comparison. An erudite poster on the CA forums reminds us the care that must be taken in using Utah statistics interchangeably with Mormon statistics. Some Utah traits don’t stand out as much when surrounding western states with significantly less of a Mormon population are compared. Furthermore a recent Salt Lake Tribune article breaks down Utah as only 62% LDS and wikipedia tallies Salt Lake City as only 50% LDS. Similiar objections can be raised about Rhode Island, given its location in the secular leaning NorthEast and religious diversity.
Barna.com
Another resource that appears to be credible is Barna, however this group seems to have fundamentalist Protestant leanings, which limits their coverage of Mormons and Catholics. Here are some interesting items:
- The group recently surveyed the influence of Harry Potter movies on teens. 84% of American teens have read or watched, but only 4% recalled church discussions and 20% percent recalled parental discussions about Harry Potter’s rogue elements.
- In mid 2004, Barna tracked reactions to The Passion of the Christ, and by then about 1/3 of US adults had seen it with 2/3rds giving it an “excellent” rating. The Passion led lists for most religiously inspiring movie.
- Barna’s Catholics page is somewhat sparse and many of the numbers have tabulated for quick comparison with other faiths here. Because the categories seem to reflect Protestant values, Catholicism is unfairly ranked. I am curious about this observation: “Catholics (73%) say the devil is non-existant and only a symbol of evil.” I think polling about beliefs is tricky, because the different groups have slightly different word usage and paradigms.
- My next blog entry will deal with Catholic divorce and marriage, so I paid special attention to these types of statistics. As expected, Barna shows Catholics have the lowest divorce rates (29%) of those married. A more recent Barna update puts it at 25%.
Politics (Quick Picks)
- Religous affiliation of US Congressmen.
- 1999 poll reveals 17% of Americans wouldn’t vote for a Mormon president.
- An April 2004 CARA Catholic Poll found a 30.5/38.5/21.8 breakdown of Catholic Republicans/Democrats/independents.
- According to CNN, Catholics favored Bush to Kerry in 2004 52%-47%. Weekly mass goers were slightly more towards Bush 56%-43%.
- It is hard to get corresponding numbers for Mormons, so I may update this later for better information. Tellingly, Utah went 70%-26% for Bush.
Approval Ratings
Last month a new poll showed nationwide approval ratings for various religions. Catholicism is a front runner. I hope sites, like this one, which seek real dialogue and understanding can help raise the public approval ratings for both faiths.
|
|
FAVOR |
UNFAVOR |
Don’t Know |
|
PROTESTANTISM |
58% |
12% |
30% |
|
CATHOLIC RELIGION |
48% |
37% |
15% |
|
JEWISH RELIGION |
47% |
16% |
37% |
|
CHRISTIAN FUNDIES |
31% |
31% |
38% |
|
MORMONS |
20% |
39% |
41% |
|
ISLAM |
19% |
45% |
45% |
|
SCIENTOLOGY |
8% |
52% |
40% |
Sixty-percent said that divorce was morally acceptable; 64% approved of the death penalty; 37% thought abortion was morally acceptable; 44% accepted homosexuality; 7% accepted polygamy; and 6% thought adultery was morally acceptable. Seventy-seven percent described the nation’s morals as only fair or poor and 67% said the state of America’s moral values was getting worse.
Discussion
Please feel free to challenge any of these statistics or analysis found on any of the links. What statistics did I overlook?
May 12th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Dave, something is wrong with this post when one clicks on “continue reading.”
May 13th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Dave - would you and Brad discuss why we in the LDS Church dont have an organisation like Opus dei in the LDS Church?
May 13th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
Ronin,
Would you mind sharing what Opus Dei is all about? Or at least giving me some references for me to check up on? This may be worthy of a new entry or two from both sides and something LDS will have to content ourselves with “Catholic envy”.
May 13th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Opus Dei is a personal Prelature of the Vatican, i.e. it is an independent organisation within the Catholic Church. people become members at different levels, and all pledge to take their religion, and incorporate it into their day-to-day lives in a very serious manner. They pledge to “walk the walk”, as it were. Now, despite what the writer of the Da Vinci Code has to say, it isnt a cult, or some weird, criminal organisation - just a bunch of catholics that take their Faith, and membership very seriously. Now, some members of OPus dei, firgo marriage and choose to live a semi-monastic life, but others live in standard families.
This is an organisation started in the earlier part of the 20th Cntury. I guess Brad being a Catholic, would probably be able to enlighten us about Opus Dei in greater detail.
Liberals within the Catholic Church, and people belonging to the liberal-left of the political spectrum, however, dont like Opus Dei - they like to vilify it.
i wonder if something like Opus Dei, would ever be possible within the LDS Church. Just wondering.
May 13th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Opus Dei (which, as Ronin said, in real life is not a bit like it is portrayed in the Duh Vinci Code) is an organization founded by a recently canonized saint and Spanish priest, St. Josemaria Escriva. Its intent is to bring the discipline and practice of monastic life (the prayer, mortification (like fasting), works, and so on) to lay people. In other words, you don’t have to be a priest, monk, or nun to belong to it. They have priests as leaders, but as I said, it’s a lay organization.
As for why LDS don’t have an organization like it, I think that’s part of a larger question: why don’t religious orders exist among LDS?
This is off the top of my head, but I think it’s pretty accurate: a religious order in the Catholic Church is established when a person or group commits to living a certain lifestyle - focused on prayer, study, works of charity, or whatever. A priest, or anyone who has vowed obedience to a higher authority, must get permission to start an order. An order started by someone else can be officially recognized by the Vatican. What I want to emphasize is that the initiative is taken by someone lower; it’s not something the Church orders from on high.
There are so many different orders that it’s hard to generalize them. You might recognize the names of some of them: Dominican, Benedictine, Augustinian, Carmelite, Jesuit, Opus Dei, St. Clare, etc. A Catholic (whether a layman or someone trying to find a specific calling as a priest or other religious) can talk to a spiritual director from an order to see if they’re being called to its way of life. There’s a period of initiation, and if the person still feels called, they take lifelong vows to officially enter the order.
Anyway, getting back to relating this to LDS, I can think of two reasons, related but separate: first, the life of the church is much more centralized, and second, the church is very small. Can you, an LDS, imagine committing to some way of life, governed by a specific set of rules, and asking Pres. Hinckley to officially recognize your group as a representative and servant of the LDS church? Maybe I’m wrong, as an outsider, but it doesn’t seem like that would be approved; it would have to be an official, church-wide program. Plus, if you did that, you’d be kind of coming up with your own calling, rather than given it from higher up.
Also, if you can imagine the LDS church having ten times the membership it does, I hope you’d expect some hangups if the church were governed as it is right now. It would probably be less centralized, and lay movements would have more of a place.
So… what I said about Catholic orders was off the top of my head; I hope it’s mostly right. What I said about the LDS church is also off the top of my head, and it’s just my guess. It was a very interesting question, and I’d like to see others comment on it as they learn more about what a religious order is and why LDS don’t have them.
May 14th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Brad - I am LDS now, but, growing up, I went to Catholic schools, and I went to a Jesuit and a Christian Brothers School. I think that since the LDS Church is a very top-down organisation, with everything controlled and decided by Church HQs, anyone proposing to start something like Opus Dei, would probably not go to far.
May 14th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say with my first point.
May 17th, 2006 at 1:21 am
Thanks for explaining this to me. I don’t think the LDS church was always so top down. For example, Primary, the Sunday School for little children started out as a grass roots org. In fact most of the auxillaries like Young Men’s, Young Women’s, Sunday School were highly independent bottom-up organizations. But it was noted that there was so much redundancy in teaching materials, which gave rise to the Correlation committee in the late 60’s.
The Genesis group is a recent example of such an auxillary. It may be the closest comparison to a religious order like Opus Dei. These auxillaries all target a specific demographic. Even if one is heavily involved in an auxillary they are still expected to be be involved in general church activities.
Some LDS communities historically attempted to live the Law of Consecration more fully; I would call them a religous order, but they were short lived and most of these were church initiated.
I would say grass roots organizations that stay independent, but unrecognized by the Church has exploded with the onset of the Internet. FAIR is a good example of this. Being active in FAIR is a definite lifestyle commitment, as any “FAIR widow” would attest to.
So I think the same underlying stimuli that would lead to a Catholic order being formed is present in Mormonism. But juggling regular church activities, parachurch(like FAIR) activities, and family responsibilities can be quite the strain. So a real religious order would be hard to pull off.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Dave - where can I get info about FAIR? Do they have a website? Becasue, when I google “FAIR”, I get links to a leftist media critique group. TIA
May 19th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Dave - saw the link to FAIR inthe main page. I should have looked before my previous message.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:53 am
dave - the Genesis group you mention - is that the group for our African-American brothers and sisters in the Church?
May 19th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Ronin,
Sorry about not posting links. You are correct about the Genesis Group. You can find some basic info about them at http://www.ldsgenesisgroup.org/ . Awhile ago I encountered an interview of their president, Darius Gray, describing some of their activities..
http://www.kued.org/productions/voices/interviews/gray.htm
May 24th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
I am mormon and married to a catholic. I think I have felt more spirtit in a catholic “rosario” than in a mormon testimony meeting. Being born mormon, I suspect that the LDS faith will turn out very well balanced people like the Catholics after about 4,000 years.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
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