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The incongruity between facts continued when Gallup's Newport and Slate's Shafer argued that because surveys did not show an increase in attendance, Vitello's report of an evangelical boom was bogus. Contrary to Newport and Shafer's conclusion, it merely suggests that Vitello overstated his evidence. Surveys do not tell us everything we want to know. Like membership rolls, survey results can measure religious activity for groups as a whole, but don't tell us much about individuals' behavior. Just as macroeconomic indicators do not tell us how specific businesses are reacting to the recession, surveys and membership numbers cannot reveal how congregations are responding to the economy. This is one of the useful points made by Trinity College's Silk: Survey results are not the only way to gauge religion (or anything).

That said, Silk's other points, particularly his attacks on the legitimacy of Gallup's survey results, are tangential. Newport reported that Gallup had seen little changes in the public over the past few months. Silk, however, wants to discuss the problems of comparing attendance over the past few decades. Gallup's measure may overestimate church attendance. However, at issue is not the exact percentage of those attending church. The question is whether more people attend church today than people did a couple of months ago. Gallup's report suggests that the recession has not had an effect on the percentage of people in the pews. This does not mean that the people The Times discussed are not experiencing a growth because of the recession. But it does suggest that people, on average, are not attending church more now than they did before the financial crisis.

The result of the debate is less, not more, clarity caused by a mishmash of information. Much of it could have been avoided if The New York Times had followed a more careful practice. Shafer wrote that typically, the paper "indemnifies itself by quoting a skeptic on the other side of the issue or tosses a 'to be sure' paragraph noting the weakness of its anecdotal evidence. Not here." Instead of relying on an unpublished, unnoticed, and (to date) unimportant paper to justify his conclusions, Vitello should have interviewed a few more sociologists or economists, who would have told him that the link between recessions and revivals is just myth. This may have helped avoid the back-and-forth that has resulted in confusion over a topic where we need much more clarity.

What he would have heard would likely have been something like:

The economic downturn could increase church attendance. We know that people are less likely to be involved with churches as their income and wealth increase, but it is tough to say how many people will start attending church because of specific changes in the economy. But if they did, I'm not sure that there is any evidence that evangelical churches would benefit more than other religious groups.

Tobin Grant is an associate professor of political science at Southern Illinois University — Carbondale. He is co-author of Expression vs. Equality: The Politics of Campaign Finance Reform and dozens of academic articles on politics and religion.

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January (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53