Dear God: This is too good to pass up

March 13th, 2009 at 10:35am Linda Grist Cunningham

We Americans may be wallowing in the emptiest wallets we’ve seen in our lives, but we haven’t decided to let our poverty drive us to church on Sunday morning. Seems that some media (not this one, by the way) have been doing one of those ubiquitous trend stories that starts like this:

• “Well, I was at church Sunday and there sure were a lot of people there,” says one person.

• “Yeah,” says another, “seems like there were more there at my church, too. Bet it’s because people are fearful about the economy.”

Voila, a trend story is born: Is church attendance increasing because of the bad economy?

What can happens then is a reporter calls around and asks a bunch of religious leaders, they say, well, not sure, but maybe, reporter airs the story that says “could be,” some other reporter picks up on it, and pretty soon, the entire country is reading, watching or hearing that “well, church attendance appears to be up.” And, therefore, because attendance is up and the economy is bad, there must be a connection.

Not so. The Pew Forum ran the numbers. Here’s the fact: “A Pew Forum analysis of polls by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shed over half its value since October 2007, there has been no increase in weekly worship service attendance during the same time period.”

Good lesson number 1: Just because you think it or feel it, doesn’t make it so.

Good lesson number 2: Be wary of connecting the dots.

Good lesson number 3: Numbers and reality are sometimes different things.

You can check out the site yourself here.

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