How a person interprets the Bible could have a drastic impact on his or her political ideologies, and now University of Cincinnati researchers have devised a new, more accurate way to measure how religion impacts an individual’s views on government-related issues.
In research presented earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Andrew Lewis and Stephen Mockabee of UC’s McMicken College of Arts & Sciences proposed a new strategy to gather better and more nuanced measures of the religious beliefs of voters that will lead to more accurate results than previous methods.
Furthermore, they claim that their technique will also give those men and women being surveyed greater confidence that their viewpoints are being accurately reflected by research and the media, improving their overall satisfaction with the democratic process as a whole – which will be of the utmost importance in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
“As the media stories focus on conservative Protestants or evangelical Christians in Iowa, South Carolina, and other early primary states, it truly matters how these individuals are classified,” said Lewis. “The implications for our improved measurement strategy are quite important for how we write and talk about religion and politics – particularly conservative religion and politics.”
Literal/not literal issue doesn’t delve far enough, authors said
Many current surveys typically ask one basic question about the Bible, the authors said in a statement. Responders were able to classify their interpretation of the religious text in one of three ways: the word of God to be interpreted literally; the inspired world of God (but not a text to be taken literally, word for word); or a book written by people that is not divinely inspired.
However, Lewis and Mockabee argue that such limited questioning does not provide a sufficient representation of the viewpoints of survey responders. For that reason, they came up with a way to explore people’s interpretations of the Bible by asking a series of questions that compared the traditional Bible items with what they refer to as functional interpretive exercises.
In July 2014, they sent a experimental version of their survey to 1,850 individuals who had been recruited online. Participants were asked to rate the accuracy of a randomly chosen Hebrew Bible passage, to measure how much they agreed with a random religion leader’s interpretation of the passage, to discuss how they would describe those leaders, and to give their own interpretation of the passage. They were also asked about the Constitution and other political variables.
They used the survey data to compare the interpretive styles of responders across biblical and constitutional contexts, and found a large degree of consistency between both domains. Lewis and Mockabee also continued their research this summer, developing follow-up questions that they sent to 1,200 evangelical Christians in order to explore different aspects of interpretation.
The answers to these more detailed, multi-context questions provided deeper insight into how a person’s religiosity relates to their political beliefs, the researchers said. Standard questions that only looked at whether a person viewed the Bible literally or not “[were] obscuring the different considerations people have in mind when they form an answer,” Mockabee explained.
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