Another poll
This is, not surprisingly, depressing stuff (not surprisingly because of the subject matter and the source). It’s depressing not just because of the substance but also because of the patronizing stupidity of the writing – the cuddly babytalk, the low (the almost non-existent) expectations.
Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam.
Note the lightning-fast shift from ‘a specific religion’ to the now more usual familiar cozy reassuring ‘faith’; note the assumption that readers are so feeble and so delusional that they can’t bear to see their own religions referred to as religions, that they have to be somehow soothed and mollified by seeing them called ‘faiths’ instead, and that that putative requirement imposes an obligation on journalism to use such language. If things go on this way, soon baby talk will take over completely. The newspapers will have short pieces about the nice men and ladies in the gov-ern-ment who figure out what is the nicest thing to do for all the mommies and daddies and babies, and the mean men in other places who want to hit the nice men and ladies and take away the mommies’ and daddies’ toys and cars and cookies so we have to hit them first, and then it will be supper time and we’ll all go to sleep and play again to-mor-row.
But, who knows, maybe we are that stupid.
Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact…Although one in ten (10 percent) of Americans identify themselves as having “no religion,” only six percent said they don’t believe in a God at all.
The 34% of college graduates item is pretty scary – but then it’s important to remember that there are a lot of ‘colleges’ in the US and that necessarily a great many of them are, how shall I put this, not very good or very demanding. Many are more like church schools; many are more like not very good high schools; many (most?) are largely vocational schools rather than academies of arts and sciences; many are some of both. In short, being a ‘college graduate’ in the US does not necessarily translate to being educated in the usual sense of the word. (In particular, that 34% does not translate to a finding that 34% of the graduates of any particular college or university accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. At some the percent will be much higher, and at others, mercifully, it will be much lower. There’s no need to go around thinking the 34% applies to graduates of MIT or Cornell or NYU.)
I think you _may_ be being too cynical about the religion -> faith shift; it seems just as likely to be down to journalists’ love of “elegant variation”. And I’m not sure “faith” is much cuddlier than “religion”, though I suppose there’s a part of the Christian subculture that likes to say things like “I’m an ardent Christian but I’m not religious” and “Christianity isn’t a religion”, and maybe they’re trying to avoid annoying those people.
But yes, very depressing stuff.
Well, maybe, except that the pervasiveness of ‘faith’ is new. The use of the word isn’t, but the insistence on it is.
I do think it’s cuddlier though. It carries connotations to do with loyalty, trust, love – all sorts of relational stuff, in a way that religion really doesn’t. ‘Faith’ sounds a whole lot warmer. I can tell this because I hate warmth, so I’m very alert to it.
I have to admit to being heartened by the news that the U.S. is 90% christian,Bearing in mind that the west is facing a new crusade from islam!
It may be that “faith” is just a currently popular euphemism for “religion.” Also, the term “faith-based” has been used quite a bit in the last few years, especially in connection with government agencies and programs, and calling them “religion-based” would make it all too obvious that they flagrantly violate the 1st Amendment. Hence the term “faith-based.”
As for the main subject, it’s never safe to overestimate the level of education of the American public in these philosophical and theoretical areas. American education for the most part has always been oriented in practical, vocational directions; we’ve never concentrated on drilling scholars in the fine logical points of proofs for the existence of god, etc. So of course most people, even in tertiary educational institutions, concentrate on what they need to make a living, and stick to what they learned as 4- to 6-year-olds when it comes to anything more abstract than that. And for most Americans, of course, that is primarily the Old-Time Religion.
Eight years of Hilary Clinton, and then …..
GILEAD.
( The Handmaid’s Tale )
Mind you, if only 3% of Americans are atheists but 49% of Americans know an atheist, then atheists obviously have lots of friends…
I agree with Ophelia here: faith is a horrible word used in this context, clearly a manipulative trick to make us think it’s fluffy and cuddly. I never use the word in what bit of writing for a readership – albeit only on blogs these days – I do: I use religion or, when I want to make a comment by implication, superstition. I have seen the odd call for people to use religion in anything they write, be it letters to MPs, articles, blog entries, whatever. You don’t have to draw attention to it, but just to do it. Let it be insidious, as the drip, drip of the word faith has been in our lexical consciousness. So I talk of religious groups, religious schools, religous people (occasionally I call these nutters) and religions.
I think I agree with Ophelia, too. “Faith” suggests a reference to a (supposedly) virtuous, personal, internal and inviolable attitude of individuals. It connotes an emotional warmth, together with the avoidance of giving any account of itself. While maintaining a “belief” might invite the question, “why do you believe?” the word “faith” does not as easily invite the question “why do you have faith?” Faith, as a personal virtue, is automatically considered beyond questioning.
I had a very violent argument in a school staff-room once about “faith/sincerity”.
I commented, …”but the SS and the NKVD were sincere, and they really beieved in what they were doing, didn’t they?”
And you should have heard and seen the head-explosion.
But, no “faith” doesn’t necessarily mean good things.
And when I pointed out the horrors of Sprenger u Kramer (Malleau Malleficarum) that didn’t help the discussion either, since it became oibvious that my opponents were not using the English words with their normally accepted meanings.
And these were TEACHERS – admittedly “arts” teachers, with no training in critical thinking.