Religious Correctness

Conservatives moan and groan about political correctness all the time, but "religious correctness" is far more endemic in this country

It's often stated that the United States is the most religious nation in the developed world. That is, we have more religious people, and we attend church in droves: typically 45% of Americans say they attend church weekly. However, as a story by Shankar Vedantam on NPR reports, if we really were that religious, the pews would be packed. And that's just not so.

Philip Brenner, a University of Massachusetts Boston professor, published a study on this two years ago. Instead of asking people whether they went to church, Brenner got a detailed time diary from participants. Because they weren't being directly asked, they forgot to lie about going to church.

The study found that only 23% of Americans attend church regularly, which is defined as two or three times a month. That's completely in line with other advanced countries like Europe. But the studies found that Europeans don't lie about it: 10% of Swedes and 45% of Irish say they attend church, and 10% of Swedes and 45% of Irish indicate that time spent in their time diaries.

What does this say about Americans? Are we hypocrites and liars? Why would we lie about going to church if we really believed that God was watching our every move? Brenner says that Americans answer falsely not because they're lying, but because they perceive the question to be about what kind of person they are: they are essentially saying, "I'm a good person and good people go to church." Vendantam equates this to lying about whether you exercise or floss your teeth.

I'm not so charitable. There's something wrong with a country when people feel forced to lie about church attendance. Perhaps it's a holdover from the McCarthy era, when conservatives portrayed atheists as evil agents of the Soviet Union. It's ironic that people in bad, old Europe are freer than Americans to tell the truth.

Conservatives bitch about political correctness because they feel it restrains their freedom to perpetuate racist and sexist stereotypes, and in general say bad things about other people. But religious correctness is the other side of the same sword: many Americans feel forced to lie for fear of being attacked by the very same people who complain so loudly and bitterly about political correctness.