Episcopalians. Presbyterians. Lutherans. Methodists. Baptists.
That’s the way the major Protestant groups rank today in education, employment, and income. Reverse the order and you have a listing of loyalty to the Democratic Party—Baptists highest and Episcopalians lowest.
This profile of denominational groups, first of its kind, comes this month from the Gallup Poll and is based on more than 40,000 personal interviews conducted last year. It’s part of a sixty-four-page compendium of findings on U.S. religion since 1955 by Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion.
Besides the denominational comparison, the volume contains the latest survey of church attendance. Gallup provides the only national estimates in this area by asking persons whether they went to church during the previous week. In 1966, as in the year before, 44 per cent had. This compares with 49 per cent during 1958.
Asked how happy they were, 49 per cent of the churchgoing group said “very happy,” compared with 39 per cent of the non-churchgoers.
To a large extent, inclusion of religious questions on the Gallup organization’s weekly surveys is due to Managing Director George Gallup, Jr., who runs the operation when his famous father is out of the office. The younger Gallup, 37, earned a bachelor’s degree in religion at Princeton, basing his 1952 thesis on a national survey of beliefs.
At the time, he was thinking of becoming an Episcopal priest, but he changed his mind after a year’s work with a Bible school in a Negro Episcopal church in Galveston, Texas. But church interest remains. Gallup is a lay reader and Sunday school teacher in his local Episcopal parish.
In the research at Princeton, Gallup was amazed at the low level of religious knowledge in America, despite widespread Sunday school background. Since then, he has been surprised at the high level of belief in God and regular churchgoing in the United States, compared with other Western nations.
In the 1966 Gallup Poll results on religion, churchgoers were compared with non-churchgoers on a variety of current topics. There was little difference. For instance, 53 per cent of churchgoers think “the Johnson Administration is pushing integration to fast,” compared with 52 per cent of non-churchgoers.
About half of each group favors continuing the Viet Nam war, rather than the alternative of withdrawing troops, which was chosen by about one-third of each group. The rest had no opinion. The churchgoers would tend somewhat more to prefer non-military service for their children if this were a legal option. They were 5 per cent more favorable toward the anti-poverty program than non-churchgoers, and 5 per cent more dissatisfied with “honesty and standards of behavior” in the United States.
In a battery of racial questions, about one-third of each group said they would definitely move if large numbers of Negroes came into their neighborhoods. Another third thought they might move. Close to nine out of ten from both groups thought a homeowner “should be permitted to choose the kind of person to whom he wants to sell.” Nearly as high a percentage from both groups believe a white person in a white neighborhood should not be required to sell or rent to a Negro.
A regional breakdown on church attendance showed New England the highest, at 54 per cent, with just one-third attending in the Rocky Mountain and Far West areas. The highly Protestant South, with 45 per cent attending, ranked below the Midwestern states. In the national comparison, 68 per cent of the Catholics and 38 per cent of the Protestants had attended church during the week, which is partly a reflection of Mass obligations.
Gallup’s figures show 67 per cent of the population considers itself Protestant and 25 per cent Catholic. In official membership figures, the comparison is 56–34. Within the Protestant category, the percentages identifying themselves with the various denominational groups are fairly close to the actual membership rolls.
In the nationwide data, 47 per cent of Catholic heads of household make $7,000 or more a year, but only 38 per cent of the Protestants. Thirty-six per cent of Catholics work in professional, business, or white-collar occupations, and 31 per cent of Protestants. The Jews rank by far the highest: 69 per cent are in the more desirable employment brackets, 69 per cent have $7,000 incomes, and 44 per cent are college graduates.
The following are specific figures in Gallup’s comparison of Protestant denominations:
College graduate: Episcopal (45 per cent), Presbyterians (34), Lutheran (20), Methodist (20), Baptist (10).
Professional, business, or white-collar job: Episcopal (53), Presbyterian (46), Lutheran (35), Methodist (35), Baptist (22).
Family head makes $7,000 or more: Episcopal (55), Presbyterian (50), Lutheran (49), Methodist (42), Baptist (26).
Live in urban area of 500,000 or over: Episcopal (41), Presbyterian (30), Lutheran (28), Methodist (21), Baptist (19).
Democratic vs. Republican preference: Episcopal (27 to 42), Presbyterian (28 to 44), Lutheran (34 to 38), Methodist (40 to 34), Baptist (55 to 20).
The percentage of non-whites in the denominations has an obvious relationship to economic and other status. The Baptist group is 24 per cent non-white, Methodist 9 per cent, Episcopal 6 per cent, Presbyterian 2 per cent, Lutheran 1 per cent. The all-Protestant percentage of 11 per cent non-white is close to the national average.
On Campus
A statement from a conference of Roman Catholic educators said church colleges “must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” It said that the presence of non-Catholics is desirable and probably necessary and that theology “must serve the ecumenical goals of collaboration and unity.” Signers included the presidents of Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Fordham.
Seven Lutheran theologians will have new posts in Roman Catholic institutions for the coming school year.
Woodstock College, Jesuit seminary in rural Maryland, has asked the Vatican for permission to move and affiliate with Yale University. And Colgate Rochester Divinity School has become linked with the University of Rochester. The seminary, affiliated with the Amercan Baptist Convention, was called “interdenominational” in the university’s press release.
After long efforts to get fundamentalist Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, to sign compliance with the 1964 civil-rights act, the federal government cut off any future aid. School President Bob Jones, Jr., replied that aid is unconstitutional anyway. The school had received $774,442 in student loan funds.
Church Panorama
Executives of the 80,000-member Presbyterian Church of Taiwan decided to stay in the World Council of Churches despite its statements on Red China and Viet Nam. However, they said that if future resolutions oppose Chiang Kai-shek’s policies, “we will be forced out of our spiritual convictions to withdraw.”
Roman Catholic and Dutch Reformed Churches in the Netherlands announced they will recognize each other’s baptism as valid.
The 14,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas began a year-long centennial observance July 30.
Planner Robert L. Wilson predicts that the slump in new congregations over the past six years will be reversed by an increase of church construction in the 1970s, particularly in Negro communities.
Research psychologist and Lutheran pastor Merton Strommen disputes the Glock-Stark survey, which found that conservative Christians have more prejudice. Strommen studied youths in The American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and found the greatest sensitivity to human need among conservative believers.
Personalia
Swiss theologian Hans Küng, commenting on Pope Paul’s reaffirmation of the celibacy requirement, said “there will be no peace on this point in the Catholic Church until celibacy is left to the voluntary decision of the individual, as it originally was.”
Charles Davis, famed English priest who quit the Roman Catholic Church, will teach religion at the University of Alberta.
Father James E. Groppi, Milwaukee Roman Catholic priest, was fined $100 for obstructing a policeman during a civil rights disturbance.
Little Rock priest James F. Drane was suspended and removed from the faculty at St. John’s Seminary by his Roman Catholic bishop after writing newspaper articles favoring birth control.
E. S. James, 67, recently retired editor of the powerful Baptist Standard in Texas, was listed in poor to fair condition at Baylor University Hospital after a massive coronary attack.
Ernest A. Payne, 65, is retiring after sixteen years as general secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland. His replacement is former Principal David S. Russell of Northern Baptist College, Manchester.
R. Gordon Spaugh of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was elected president of the presiding committee of the International Moravian Synod at its every-ten-years meeting in Czechoslovakia.
Paul M. Van Buren, Episcopalian and “death of God” theologian, has won both a Fulbright lectureship and a Guggenheim Fellowship at Oxford University, England, for the coming year.
Primate Howard H. Clark of the Anglican Church of Canada will move his official residence from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Toronto, site of church offices.
Yale University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a Presbyterian, is one of four clergymen organizing a Committee for Draft Resistance to encourage youths to refuse military induction as a protest against Viet Nam.
Louis Cassels, Washington-based religion editor of United Press International since 1964, won the Religious Newswriters Association’s Supple Award for “general excellence in the reporting of religious news in the secular press.”
Miscellany
The Evangelical Defense Committee presented Protestant criticisms of Spain’s new religious-freedom law to the new government agency handling the statute, but a public statement on the situation is not expected for several months. Various restrictions were put into the law before final passage. Meanwhile, a French radio broadcast said sixty-seven Spanish Jehovah’s Witnesses may face a life in prison for refusing military service, since they can be tried and sentenced repeatedly for the same offense.
The 686 clinics of Britain’s Family Planning Association now give birth-control advice and contraceptives to all applicants over 16, married or not.
Iowa’s legislature voted to exempt the Old Order Amish church schools from regulations if approved by the state school board.
The National Council of Churches’ United Church Women turned its name around to Church Women United and brought Roman Catholic laywomen into a “permanent” ecumenical structure. New president is Mrs. James Dolbey, a Methodist, who was once acting mayor of Cincinnati.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said that unless employers prove undue hardship, workers are entitled to “reasonable” time off for regular worship. Meanwhile, some clergymen fear a further drop in church attendance if the U. S. Chamber of Commerce succeeds in getting a law to put five national holidays on Mondays and create more three-day weekends.
Gideons International distributed a record five million Bibles and New Testaments throughout the world during the past year. A special drive announced at last month’s convention will supply 80,000 Testaments to school children in Africa.
The strict, disciplined Nichiren Shoshu (“True Buddhism”) sect—an American rendition of Japan’s Soka Gakkai without nationalistic overtones—claims 40,000 adherents in the United States, with 2,000 converts a month.
New Guinea missionary Robert Holst says in the International Review of Missions that there is scant biblical evidence to support opposition to polygamy by Christian missions.
Deaths
ALBERT J. LUTHULI, 68, son of an African Congregational minister who became a Zulu chief in South Africa; winner of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize for nonviolent opposition to his nation’s racial separation; in Stanger District—where he had long been kept under government restriction—of injuries after being struck by a freight train while he walked across a railroad bridge.
CHRISTOPHER II, 92, patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Egypt and much of Africa for three decades; supporter of Arab positions on refugees and recognition of Israel; in Athens, where he had lived for four years in poor health.
SHERMAN L. GREENE, 81, senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; in Atlanta.
JOHN COLTRANE, 40, perhaps the greatest tenor saxophonist in jazz, who experienced a “spiritual awakening” to God in 1957 and expressed his beliefs in “A Love Supreme,” Down Beat magazine’s record album of the year for 1965.
