The world is itching for a fight. Not another war – although they seem inevitable – but fights within societies, bangers and busters, revolutions, civil wars. This is how some South Africans see the world today.
Recently Nechama Brodie of South Africa’s “Mail & Guardian” charged a highly respected American research organization with promulgating controversy and hate through media manipulation.
M&A charged that the widely respected Pew Research Center inflamed religious tensions in the U.S. by republishing a research study they didn’t do and giving it a more provocative title.
Pew – which concentrates much of its research on social and religious trends – reported on a 2015 study by the Demographic Institute and retitled it as a Pew Report, “Why Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group.”
M&A pointed out that the original studies – a behemoth of research by a huge collection of social scientists – had no intentional focus on what particular religion might or might not become the dominant one. The report’s mission was specifically to study persons who consider themselves unaffiliated to any religion.
But PEW took that research and rebranded it in an inflammatory way. It didn’t skew or misinterpret the research, it simply looked at it from an unusual angle differently from what the original designers intended. Brodie calls this “hyperbole” and I agree.
I expect Pew will simply argue this is creative mining of data. But to what end? To the same end that media excuses itself from all such inflammatory reporting: it’s what the public wants.
That means the public wants inflamed religious tension. That means the public wants disruption, bangers and busters, revolutions, civil wars.
In another closely related South African story, Pastor Mboro was snatched from his Easter service in Johannesburg by a beam of light that took him to heaven where he took selfies of himself and Jesus ‘hot’ Xhosa wife.
The Prophet Mboro later recanted his story when confronted by South Africa’s CRL Commission. The Commission was set up specifically to counter the growing fanaticism among South African religious groups.
So South Africans know a little bit about religious ridiculousness and we should take heed. Prophet Mboro earned a tidy sum from his journey to heaven by selling a lot of his selfies for $350 each!
That exceeds most Americans’ monthly tithing to their churches, but it’s a lot less than Pew researchers get paid daily! By the way, Pew is funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, an endowment of oil company heirs.
Got enough kindling? Feel the Bern?
If I may, a couple of clarifications concerning this post. First, the 2015 study you mention comes from the Pew Research Center, not the “Demographic Institute”, an agency that I could not find in a brief Google search. The paper was published in Demographic Research (DR), a peer-reviewed journal published by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. The journal ranks 13th out of the top 75 journals publishing studies that include demographic components. Second, the lead author of the paper, Conrad Hackett, holds the position of Demographer at the Pew Research Center. As an aside, he has a reasonably impressive CV. His co-authors are academics or institute staff from reasonably prestigious institutions including Lund University in Sweden, Boston University and Columbia University. I think its safe to say that the study is of high quality. Also, as I skimmed through it, I found it largely neutral in its interpretations and its conclusions with respect to any given religion. The point is that, contrary to the M&A (M&G?) charge you mention, the paper came from the Pew Institute although it involved input from authors with other affiliations.
The publication that you refer to as a “retitling” by the Pew Institute of the DR publication really is a derivative analysis using the parameters identified for the trends cited in that first paper. Moreover, it was, in fact, co-authored by Conrad Hackett, lead author of the original paper. So the Pew Institute did not take the information from this first paper and “rebrand” it. Rather the lead author of the first paper took the information and used it in a further analysis. This second paper builds on a body of studies that indicate that Islam is, if not the fastest, certainly one of the fastest growing religions and is projected to remain so for several decades to come. I think that this is an accepted demographic trend. The purpose of the paper is to place this rapid increase in Islam into the context of the parameters for changes in the sizes of religiously affiliated and unaffiliated populations identified and described in the DR paper.
I see nothing inflammatory about the second publication. The authors note that, according to their previous study, the parameters driving Islam’s growth “ultimately involves simple demographics.” In their paper they present two pieces of data to support their hypothesis that such factors weigh heavily. “Why Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group” seems to me to be an accurate description of the purpose and content of the paper. The way I look at it, the first paper identified factors leading to general trends and the second paper asked whether these factors could account for a specific trend. Further, it’s hard to see how this second paper, as you quote from Nechama Brodie, “looked at it (the first paper) from an angle differently from what the original designers intended” given that both papers came from the Pew Institute and share the same senior author. Looks to me as though Brodie did not do his homework; clearly he failed to realize that the source and authors of the two papers are the same. I’d like to think that you did not intend to perpetuate this mistake.
Although there are things both beautiful and terrible about most religions, I view them as vestiges of our primitive selves.
Thanks, Steve, for discovering this. “Retitling” I feel is still a correct characterization as the original papers mission was not to determine if there was or was not a dominant religious trend, and it’s reasonable to presume at least some of the authors would not have wished to participate in a project with that focus, precisely because it carries the mean implications that Brodie recognized.