A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on December 10th, 2008 in Progressive Faith

Elyas Bakhtiari has an interesting observation picked up from Secular Right. It seems that prayer and partisanship have rather strong correlations (though no one actually did that work, it would seem). He picks up a comment from a reader of Andrew Sullivan as the “best” explanation for this:

“The more willing you are to “believe” in anything, the more likely you are to “believe” in something else.”

That is not only offensive, but totally illogical. What it says is that some people are so weak that they have some psychological need to “believe” in something – and just about anything will do. What proof is there of this? Actually, none. There has been, so far as I know, no widespread study that looks at a person’s need to belong or how easily they are caused to believe something versus their political identity or its strength. I’m willing to bet that neither Elyas Bakhtiari, Andrew Sullivan, or the person who posted on Secular Right have any knowledge of such a study, either.

The best explanation is called “the law of large numbers”. Supposedly, 20,000 were polled to glean this information. You could probably get strong correlations between all sorts of things in that size of a sample – like baldness, how often they brush their teeth, access to healthcare, and whatnot. The point is that none of that has a logical connection to partisanship.

There is also the problem of the very first lesson every statician is taught – correlation is not causation. Nor are they necessarily related just because there is a high correlation. Hey, I’d guess that the number of people who voted who also have teeth is pretty high. Are we to assume that the ability to eat is predictive of the act of voting? Only if we are incredibly stupid.

What is interesting to me is that it shows, in every group, those who never pray are a miniscule minority – less than about 3% of any group (or so it appears to me). Seems like they might want a little bit of humility to counteract that arrogance of all of us idiots who are either partisan or faithful. That’s asuming that everyone who does not pray does not believe in God – which I would say is an unfounded assumption. Probably most of them don’t, but there are definitely people who believe in God who don’t believe in prayer.

Nor do I believe that Bakhtiari has the right idea by comparing agnostics to partisans. An agnostic holds a philosophical belief that leads them to participate in no religion. A non-partisan person either holds no philosophical belief – and so aligns with neither side – or holds a philosophical belief that allows them to participate to either side somewhat equally. Those are very different motivations.

There’s just a whole world of ignorance being spouted – and highlighted – such as Andrew Sullivan’s quoting of this comment:

Finally, there is possibly some demographic thing going on as well. Most on the far right would be strong conservatives, which today means social conservatives, which means white, lower or middle class, and likely religious. The far left would have a large black contingent, which means large numbers of Baptists and churchgoers.

Secular Right’s second graph is a “Whites Only” graph. Around 25% of strongly Democratic people pray several times a day. The percentage of non-praying people grows by only about one percent. Guess that means that “Blacks make Democrats religious” thing is total crap. For those on the far right of the graph, there doesn’t seem to be much movement. So either there are a very small number of non-whites in that group – which is possible, but impossible to determine from this information – or they pray with about the same regularity. I’m guessing it is likely both.

The thing that irks me is that someone who wants to push for secularism looks at this and writes something to the effect of “look at those dufuses that believe in God – all the problems in the world are their fault”. It’s easy to blame 98% of the population. It works for just about everything. But this graph is sure to make the rounds to show how stupid and infantile believers are. Meanwhile, we get ready to welcome how many non-partisan people into our political leadership? Yeah, Joe Lieberman and Bernie Sanders. Wow. And Lieberman is a hard-core practicing Jew. So someone remind me why this non-religious, non-partisan thing is supposed to be de facto and a priori better for everyone.

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