A snippet:
Evangelicals Behaving Badly with Statistics
Mistakes were made.
by Christian Smith
American evangelicals, who profess to be committed to Truth, are among the worst abusers of simple descriptive statistics, which claim to represent the truth about reality, of any group I have ever seen. At stake in this misuse are evangelicals’ own integrity, credibility with outsiders, and effectiveness in the world. It is an issue worth making a fuss over. And so I write…
And
Why do evangelicals recurrently abuse statistics? My observation is that they are usually trying desperately to attract attention and raise people’s concern in order to mobilize resources and action for some cause. In a world awash in information and burdened by myriad problems, some evangelicals may justify the problematic misuse of statistics to get people to pay attention to what they think are good causes. But this is inexcusable. Such desperation, alarmism, and sloppiness reflect the worst, not the best, in evangelicalism…
Read the whole article HERE
You can also revisit what THIS BLOG said about the rampant alarmism last January – if you get lost, read the day one, day two & day three posts.
I thiink I’ll do a series on this one. Alarmism. Statistical abuse. Christian Marketing. Might be fun.
