Strength of Religious Affiliation
In American Evangelicalism, Christian Smith answers the question of what it means to have a "strong" religious faith. Smith claims that strength is conceptualized and measured on the self-definition, values, and purpose of the group in question. He categorizes religious strength into six distinct dimensions, which are adherence to beliefs, salience of faith, robustness of faith, group participation, commitment to mission, and retention and recruitment of members. He states that any American Christian faith tradition is strong when its members "(1) faithfully adhere to essential Christian religious beliefs; (2) consider their faith a highly salient aspect of their lives; (3) reflect great confidence and assurance in their religious beliefs; (4) participate regularly in a variety of church activities and programs; (5) are committed in both belief and action to accomplishing the mission of the church; and (6) sustain high rates of membership retention by maintaining members' association with the tradition over long periods of time (Smith, 21)." Through his national survey and hundreds of personal interviews with distinct religious groups (Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Mainline, Liberal, and Other) he is able to display the resul
In Smith's Table 2.2 on "Salience and Robustness of Faith Commitments," the evangelicals "stand out as the most religiously vibrant tradition, not simply in its fidelity to orthodox theological beliefs, but also by virtue of the tremendous importance of the religious faith of ordinary evangelicals in their own lives (Smith, 26)." According to the table, fully 78% of evangelicals claim that their faith is extremely important to them and no evangelicals at all say that their faith is only somewhat important to them. This data shows similar results to the percentage of my first table as evangelicals have the lowest percentage of "somewhat strong" strength of affiliation [8.5% of 293 surveyed]. Thus I can imply that evangelicals have no doubts about their religious affiliation and since a majority of it is having a "strong" affiliation, I can also state that evangelicals are most serious with their religious identity. In my second table I took my cross tabulations of my first table [Row: reliten; Column: religid] from the GSS and controlled for "degree" among each religious group and noticed if this variable had any effects that change the pattern of association in one's religious strength of affiliation. Each person surveyed is asked a series of question to categorize his or her degree of education: "Did you ever get a high school diploma or a GED certificate? Did you complete one or more years of college for credit for credit-not including schooling such as business college, technical or vocational school? IF YES: How many years did you complete? Do you have any college degrees? (IF YES: What degree or degrees?)" The results are divided into five levels of education: LT High School [Not Completing High School], High School [Degree], Junior College [Degree], Bachelor [Degree] and Graduate [Degree]. In my next table (labeled Table 2), I cross tabulated religious identity with strength of affiliation and controlled for one's level of education. From this data I wanted to disprove or validate my hypothesis that the higher one's educational level is the lower his or her strength of religious affiliation. According to Table 2, there is some change in patterns of association. The liberals have a weaker level of religious affiliation as their education level rises. Around 41.3% of liberal Protestants that have not completed high school have a strong level of religious affiliation. This is 8.3% higher than the percentage of liberals in Table 1. In opposition, their levels of a "not very strong" affiliation is significantly lower (12.8%) than its data assessed in Table 1, thus meaning that liberal protestants have a stronger affiliation with religion at the lowest educational level and lower religious affiliation at the highest educational level. My third table consists of the second controlled variable of my research. For this table I used the results of my first table and controlled for "region." The surveyed results are classified by the GSS cumulative data file into 9 distinct locations [(1) New England, (2) Middle Atlantic, (3) Eastern North Central, (4) Western North Central, (5) South Atlantic, (6) Eastern South Central, (7) Western South Central, (8) Mountain, and (9) Pacific]. I took these nine regions and recoded it into four regions because my research does not require such distinction. What I am really interested in is simply the difference between people who live in the East Coast, Midwest, South and West Coast. In order to simplify the GSS's nine categories into the four that I want, I recoded the data by combining (1) New England and (2) Middle Atlantic and recoded it to the "East Coast"; (3) Eastern North Central and (4) Western North Central is recoded "Midwest"; (5) South Atlantic, (6) Eastern South Central and (7) Western South Central is recoded "South"; and (8) Mountain and (9) Pacific is recoded "West Coast." My research however is can be limited in this table because there is an unequa
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Approximate Word count = 3044
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)
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