America's Four Gods: What We Say about God And What That Says about Us

Extract

This book focuses on how beliefs about God map onto other beliefs and attitudes. It is anchored by an assessment of answers to two questions that “pinpoint the most crucial theological disagreements in America” (p. 10), namely the extent to which God interacts with, and judges, the world. Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, sociology professors at Baylor University, use data from the Baylor Religion Survey (BRS), a phone and mail questionnaire survey conducted by Gallup with a random sample; and personal interviews with a convenience sample picked mostly from places where the authors had contacts and at the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas (the homosexual-hating, funeral-protest group), and the evangelical, lower-class, African-American Greater Exodus Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Although I appreciate mixed-method studies, I am not convinced that the qualitative data here are a good fit for the authors' interest in showing that “God continues to be the clearest and most concise reflection of how the average American perceives his world” (italics mine; p. 10). The Westboro group is an extreme cultural outlier, and the snowballed interviewees comprise a haphazard mix of atomized individuals devoid of a specific community context that could help illuminate their particular beliefs.