The Spiritual But Not Religious

A Pew Research Center study released earlier this week clarifies the 18% of Americans who now define themselves as “spiritual but not religious” including 1 in 6 who are religiously affiliated and 37% of whom who are unaffiliated:

• 92% believe in God or a Universal Spirit with 55% absolutely certain of that belief
• 47% seldom or never attend a worship service while 19% attend weekly
• 31% seldom or never pray while 44% pray daily
• 55% are women, 45% are men
• 70% are white, 11% are black and 11% are Hispanic
• 23% are ages 18-29, 37% are 30-49, 30% are 50-64 and 11% are 65 or older
• 35% are college graduates, 30% some college and 35% high school graduates or less
• 44% are married, 56% not married and 22% divorced/separated/widowed, 24% never married and 11% living with a partner
• 32% make more than $75,000 or more in family income, 33% make $30,000-$74,999 and 35% under $30,000
• 35% are politically moderate, 36% are liberal and 26% are conservative
• 31% are Republican or lean Republican, 62% are Democrat or lean Democrat and 8% don’t lean either way
• 31% view religion as very important, 36% as not too important or not at all important
• 45% are affiliated with a religion while 52% are unaffiliated and 3% did not specify

It is well worth reading the full report to see how the “spiritual but not religious” compare with those who are religious or religiously affiliated.

Opinions Are Not An Entitlement

On the Idaho ranch where I was born and spent my early years what we now call lunch was called dinner and what we now call dinner was called supper and no one was entitled to an opinion at either occasion unless you could present a supportive argument.

My parents and especially my late father would have heartily agreed with a post that addressed that effect a few days ago by Dr. Patrick Stokes of Deakin University on The Conversation, which hosts independent analysis and commentary from academics and researchers.

What makes it hard today for any moderate Independent such as I am is that far too many people along the continuum of other political ideologies spout their opinions as though they were preferences for a favorite color or an article of faith or a loyalty oath that should be sheltered from any need for justification.

I find little of value during sound-bite political campaigns so I turn instead for arguments occurring within ideologies.  Let me give just two examples.

Conservatives today, which comprise nearly all Republicans, appear in lock-step denial when forsaking conservation, environmental stewardship or the use of carbon credits to roll back climate change, which are ironically all  concepts initially spawned by that movement.

Any queries to defend those reversals are usually met only with a repetition of the stance as though everyone listening, including the questioner, is somehow hard of hearing.  And then any further attempt to seeking an understanding is dismissed in a huff as if it were disrespectful.

The best way to learn more about conservatives and the environment is to look deeper within that ideology and the thoughtful counter-arguments presented by ConservAmerica, also known until last spring as Republicans for Environmental Protection, formed in 1995.

There you learn that creating a market solution such as carbon credits which were designed to more rapidly and urgently roll back climate change are not some kind of liberal conspiracy but something proposed by Republican Presidents Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.

Similarly, just as the majority of Democrats are moderate, not liberal, the majority of those in the environmental movement are far more diverse in opinion than it may at first seem.  Driven by the excesses of resource exploitation, the environmental movement can often seem to take things to an extreme.

Take the move to ban plastic bags for instance.  Beneath the appearance of unanimity of opinion in that regard are voices within the movement who question those such as Stephen Joseph and his seemingly contrarian Save The Plastic Bag Coalition.

Joseph earned his credibility by leading the charge to eliminate trans fats.  Studies show that the more detached people become from deep thinking, the more likely they are to become conservative.  Joseph is challenging liberals to continue to think deeply especially about issues considered to be “slam-dunks.”

“Paper or plastic?” isn’t a trick question and the answer isn’t simple. It has been estimated that we go through 100 billion plastic bags every year, requiring 12 million barrels of oil to produce and costing retailers about $4 billion which is passed on to customers.  Estimates are that Americans use about 10 billion paper bags a year, resulting in the cutting down of 14 million trees if not produced from recycled pulp.

Banning plastic bags in some communities and laws in states such as California have led to nation-wide awareness of the need to recycle not only plastic shopping bags but also dry cleaning covers, shrink wrap and shipping filler used to create composite decking and fencing by companies such as TREX and LifeCycle.

However, paper products are not only the most widely recycled items (more than 63%) but they continue to be the largest single component of municipal landfills where they convert into methane, a greenhouse gas with 23 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.

Plastic bags, by comparison, occupy only .04% of space in landfills and take much longer to degrade, which is a good thing.  Joseph points out that “even though consumers choose plastic bags 4 out 5 times over paper, paper bags take up 1.0% of landfill space, which is more than twice as much as plastic bags.

It is amazing what can be revealed when ideologies debate within their own belief parameters rather than being frozen into partisan gridlock or when non-experts are allowed to trump experts without being required to present supportive arguments in a news media obsessed with faux-balanced coverage.

Chronicle of the Billboard Wars

Two fellow marketing professionals and friends of mine have produced a stunning new documentary entitled Chronicle of the Billboard Wars (click here or on the image in this blog to view a trailer.)

Ossian Or and Sandra Valle of award-winning DoubleOMedia, LLC traveled the country to produce the documentary film on behalf of Blightfighters, a project of Scenic Minnesota. 

Copies of the full documentary can be purchased for $5 or even less in quantities by clicking here.  This piece provides a snapshot of how residents in communities across the nation are fighting back to reclaim their privacy, their property values, their public health and the scenic character and sense of place of their neighborhoods, cities, towns and states.

The documentary is a must-see for neighborhood associations and councils, planning officials, community-destination marketing organizations, chambers of commerce, public administrators and elected officials as well as anyone generally unaware of just how desecrating and extreme outdoor billboard companies have become.

The Overarching Role Of Critical Writing & the Arts

I had just finished reading an article by Peg Tyre entitled The Writing Revolution last week in the October issue of Atlantic Magazine, when Frank Stasio, the host The State of Things, a public radio program broadcast from Durham, NC, where I live, interviewed the author along with several of the people mentioned in the magazine article.

Although, as Tyre writes, “research has shown that thinking, speaking, and reading comprehension are interconnected and reinforced through good writing instruction,” according to Arthur Applebee, the director of the Center for English Learning and Achievement -- “Writing as a way to study, to learn, or to construct new knowledge or generate new networks of understanding has become increasingly rare.”

A survey of 500 personnel hiring managers across the nation supports Applebee’s assessment.  In a USA Today article yesterday, Andrea Kay noted that one of the survey findings is that -- “Far fewer mature workers need to improve their writing skills — only 9 percent — compared to 46 percent of millennials, born between 1981 and 2000…”

Both the Atlantic article and Stasio’s interview provide an excellent overview of how interlacing critical writing into other subjects has created a remarkable turnaround for underprivileged kids in some low-performing schools.

Throughout secondary school and college it always seemed like I had to work two or three times harder than other students when it came to handwritten essays; and it wasn’t until I entered law school in the early 1970s, where the use of typewriters was permitted, that it seemed to be as effortless as it seemed for my peers.

As if being left-handed wasn’t challenge enough, essential tremor in both hands meant that I had to write more slowly and carefully than others while still racing to beat the clock.  It helped, when in my junior year, I became the first boy in my high school to take typing but it would be another seven years before that skill would help when taking of exams.

Of course, that doesn’t explain why I have such a struggle with commas (smile.)

I always breathed a sigh of relief whenever exams were multiple choice.  However, as Duke University professor Cathy Davidson noted a year ago in a Washington Post op-ed, Frederick J. Kelly, who invented that form of test, or at least was the first to deploy it in 1914, had a change of heart 14 years later when he became president of the University of Idaho in my native state.

Kelly is famous for writing that “college is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated” and if he were still alive, he would be a strong proponent of “The Writing Revolution,” but the formulaic testing in the No Child Left Behind program, not so much.

In a blog post for Scientific American five weeks ago, Ross Pomeroy, the assistant editor for Real Clear Science laid out an equally strong case for the role of the “arts” as an overarching educational tool to include with science, technology, engineering and math, turning the commonly used acronym from STEM to STEAM.

Summarizing a few of the findings in a study linking the role of the arts in the success of science Nobel Laureates by Robert Root-Bernstein, Pomeroy notes in his blog that -- “Nobel laureates in the sciences are seventeen times likelier than the average scientist to be a painter, twelve times as likely to be a poet, and four times as likely to be a musician.”

He also paraphrases Dr. Jerome Kagen, an emeritus professor at Harvard in writing that “arts contribute amazingly well to learning because they regularly combine the three major tools that the mind uses to acquire, store, and communicate knowledge: motor skills, perceptual representation, and language.”

According to Pomeroy, in remarks made to the Learning, Arts and the Brain Summit in 2009 at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Kagen noted that:

“Art and music require the use of both schematic and procedural knowledge and, therefore, amplify a child’s understanding of self and the world.”

Apparently, government’s continuing role in raising educational standards and fostering creativity and innovation is a lot more complicated than continuing to keep “Big Bird” in existence.

Infographic - National Report Card

For a link to the article in the Atlantic, click here.