What, you were surprised? In today's Christianity Today, an article by conservative Christian, Christian Smith (no, not a mistype... his name is Christian), says that Evangelicals need to stop misusing statistics
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.
I'm glad an evangelical said that. I've said it before...
Evangelical (or Fundamentalist Evangelical?) political group Family Research Council uses amazingly false statistics to claim gays are pedophiles. They have a conclusion: homosexuality = pedophilia, and then not only massage the statistics to "prove" it, but make them up out of whole cloth*.
Examples of this are rife throughout these groups statistics (remember the totally bogus children in same-sex homes are 11 times more likely to be abused? that fundamentalists and evangelicals were quoting (without being confronted by the facts by those doing the interviewing).
(Hattip to Andrew Sullivan)
* I always wante to know what "out of whole cloth" meant, now I do
oh... just a side note...
P.S. It's not like fanatic groups on all parts of the spectrum don't do the same thing. I've read some amazingly poor use of stats from some far left groups, but these are to used to foment hate ... so I find them more egregious.
