Americans Have More Confidence in the Military than in the Church
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
What does it say about us Americans when the only institution with “a notable gain in public confidence” is the U.S. military — not churches, not labor unions, not even the U.S. Supreme Court?
The Pew Research Center notes, ”Public confidence in the military surpassed confidence in religious organizations in the late 1980s and has stayed there ever since.” Of the 16 institutions listed in a 2011 Gallup survey, only three have a confidence rating above 50 percent. Here’s the complete list of the percentage of Americans who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them:
- 78% - Military
- 64% - Small business
- 56% - Police
- 48% - Church or organized religion
- 39% - Medical system
- 37% - U.S. Supreme Court
- 35% - Presidency
- 34% - Public schools
- 28% - Criminal justice system
- 28% - Newspapers
- 27% - Television news
- 23% - Banks
- 21% - Organized labor
- 19% - Big business
- 19% - Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)
- 12% - Congress
What's Your Religious Knowledge? Take the Survey and Share Your Results with Us.
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The hot topic of discussion at yesterday’s God in America National Symposium on Religious Literacy held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. were the results of the U.S. Religious Knowledge survey conducted by the Pew Forum. From Pew’s executive summary:
“Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.
On questions about Christianity — including a battery of questions about the Bible — Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge.
Take the Religious Knowledge survey of 15 questions. And share your results with us. Of course, we want to know how you scored, but we’re also curious to hear about the questions that made you seriously pause and think, or the questions you breezed through and then got wrong.
Happiness For Sale: $75,000
by Shubha Bala, associate producer
In a time when happiness is being measured through Facebook and Twitter, it’s inevitable that we will see more and more scientific reports to help us find happiness. This one from the Gallup Organization finds:
“Emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of $75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”
This idea of happiness costing $75,000 reminded me of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s book Development As Freedom. Perhaps in the United States, $75,000 is the amount people need to have the freedom to choose how to live their lives without worrying about their basic needs. Of course, Sen also says that while happiness is an important factor in assessing well-being, it can’t work as a sole measure for very practical reasons. Sen tells David Aaronovitch in an interview for The Sunday Times:
“If you’re asked how happy are you, the answer is exactly informative as to what you would say if somebody asked you how happy you are. It doesn’t tell anyone whether you’re really happy or not. People can get very discontented when they’re very successful. And the sad thing is that people actually do adjust if they’re very deprived. I spent 15 years working on famine and it’s amazing how happy famine victims are when they ultimately get a meal. But that doesn’t mean people are generally more deprived than a famine victim having a first meal.”
The elusive definition of happiness is echoed by Buddhist Matthieu Ricard in our show “The Happiest Man in the World.” In the audio clip above he reiterates the importance of making that difficult distinction between happiness and pleasure. Should, or can, happiness be surveyed?
(photo: Indian economist Amartya Sen by Henny Ray Abrams/AFP/Getty Images)
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