In May/June 2008’s (US leftist) Mother Jones magazine, Debra Dickerson has some startling news about fundamentalists. Could it possibly be the case that there are far fewer of them than we thought?

Granted, Dickerson is writing about the United States. Anyway, according to Texas Southern Baptist journalist Christine Wicker, only eighteen per cent of current Southern Baptist attendees are regular bona fide churchgoers. The rest are spun.

The Southern Baptist Convention seems to exaggerate its attendance, including the already-counted, who may attend more than one Southern Baptist church, and may therefore be counted more than once in SBC stats. Lump in current non-attendees who once attended, seasonal Easter and Christmas attendees, as well as former Southern Baptists who’ve secularised or emigrated to other denominations or faiths, and one arrives at considerably spun figures of church attendance.

It isn’t just the SBC either- according to Dickerson and Wicker, the National Association of Evangelicals also makes disparate claims about its total membership- four and a half million on the phone, but thirty million on their website.

So, why didn’t other journalists do their job properly, and find this out beforehand? Blame it on the time and staffing pressures of the newsroom workplace, which means that journos may be grateful for prepackaged information from news sources, given the other demands on their time. 

Even if the size of the fundamentalist constituency has been wildly exaggerated though, they can still mobilise against women’s reproductive freedom and same-sex marriage in the United States, and against children’s rights in New Zealand. We would still do well to tread warily and engage in critical analysis.

Recommended:

Debra Dickerson: “Myth of the Moral Majority” Mother Jones: 33:3: May/June 2008: 79-81: http://www.motherjones.com