Does Sociology Matter for the Church?

Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, executive director for cultural engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in the Hendricks Center there. Our topic today is sociology, and our guest is Sam Perry, Samuel Perry, who is associate professor for sociology at the University of Oklahoma, so a Sooner. He's also affiliated with the Religious Studies Department there. How long have you been at OU? 

Samuel Perry: 

This is my eighth year at OU. This was my first academic job out of grad school. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, and where did you do your grad work? 

Samuel Perry: 

I went to Dallas Theological Seminary from 2005 to 2008, and then I went to the University of Chicago, where I finished with my master's and PhD there. 

Darrell Bock: 

Oh, wow. Good old Chicago, where the weather in the winter is really exciting. 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah, it's... 

Darrell Bock: 

I'm at Wheaton, up three times a year for board meetings, and when we come to the February board visits, and my wife says, "What should I pack?" I go, "Single digits." 

Samuel Perry: 

Especially around this time of year, it's pretty bitter there. 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly right. 

Samuel Perry: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Anyway, we really appreciate you taking the time to be with us. We're going to walk into the area of sociology and how it can help us see and understand the world around us. 

Samuel Perry: 

Sure. 

Darrell Bock: 

Let me start with what is a traditional question for anyone who's a first-time guest, and that is, what's a nice guy like you doing in a gig like this? How did you get, I guess, from seminary to sociology? That actually has a rhetorical ring to it. 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah. You know, actually, it was the seminary's influence. I was not a strong student. In undergrad, I was a B student. I wasn't a Christian before I came into college, went to the only college that would accept me, became a Christian in college and was discipled through that, and only through that became a halfway decent student. I got into seminary and realized that I actually really enjoy academics. I love research and I love writing. I think, like many, I also saw that, and this is part of seminary's role is discerning calling and figuring out what you're supposed to do and how you can contribute, and I quickly discovered that I think I'm too much of an introvert and not... I don't have the right skillset or personality to be a vocational pastor, but I felt like being a professor of something, that suited me really well, and by that, all of that I mean, I think the teaching, the research and the writing, and the academic life. 

I actually got some really good advice from some seminary professors. They took me out to lunch, and they said... I don't know if I should say it. They said... I was academic New Testament at the time, and I was tracking towards some PhD into Edinburgh or something like that, as is often the case. They said, "Whatever you do, don't get engaged in something like New Testament Studies," or whatever, because they were cautiously saying like, hey, the jobs are really slim. It's really hard to get a job- 

Darrell Bock: 

True enough. 

Samuel Perry: 

They said, "You should consider other fields and disciplines that you might find interesting, that you could go and pursue." I thought about the fields that I loved in undergrad, and one of those happened to be sociology. I was fortunate to get into a really strong PhD program at the University of Chicago, where I could study the things that I wanted to. Chicago has a reputation of just kind of letting you do your own thing. The mentorship is not particularly intrusive and involved in that way. They just kind of give you a stipend and say, "Come back when you've done some sociology," so I was able to study what I wanted to and work on my own. 

Yeah, so the University of Oklahoma, I was able to land a solid job out of graduate school, and I've been here ever since. That's really great for us, because we have family in Texas and we're native Texans, and so we're close to, I think, the kind of culture and restaurants that we are familiar with and family and those things. 

Darrell Bock: 

Fair enough. Let's talk a little bit about your time in Chicago, because I'm interested. American programs vary. Some of them are just dissertation. Some of them are a little bit of classroom work and dissertation, so what kind of a program did Chicago have? 

Samuel Perry: 

Chicago was really well-suited to somebody like me, who knew what they wanted to do and wanted to get out quickly. They do have classroom requirements. It's not like a UK PhD; it is there. There was maybe like a year or so of light class requirements. After that, it was basically you take some comprehensive examinations, which you can do in a number of formats, and then you just focus on the dissertation, so I was able to be pretty direct and focused and finish quickly, which was good. 

The University of Chicago, I think, was a really... academically and intellectually, it was a really intoxicating kind of environment, since it's very prestigious, but it's also just people are- 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, the Chicago area is terrific. 

Samuel Perry: 

People are just very driven by big questions, and that's kind of what their currency... right? Like they have a reputation of they are people who are not impressed easily with a lot of flash and show. They really want to dig in and argue, and so I think that was a lot of fun to be a part of. 

Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. What did you work on there? 

Samuel Perry: 

I actually, all research... This is all social scientists end up writing about things that are relevant to them personally. This one was no different. I got to the University of Chicago, and I was fascinated by what was called, at the time, the Evangelical Orphan Care Movement. This is Christians involved in adoption and orphan care and foster care. I was curious of the workings of this movement, how it got off the ground, and what had the results been like, and whether it was succeeding, whether it was not succeeding, what are the reasons for those things? My dissertation was on the Evangelical Orphan Care Movement, which ended up being my first book, Growing God's Family, and so it's about the challenges that evangelical movements face when they try to get involved in social activism and ways that goes well and ways that they end up kind of undercutting their own efforts, unfortunately. 

Darrell Bock: 

Was that local orphan care, or did it involve traveling overseas to care for kids or all of that? What kind of organizations were you looking at? 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah, so I looked at the primary organizations leading this movement, so Christian Alliance for Orphans and their leadership, and this involved a lot of quantitative analysis, but it involved interviews with several hundred leaders and families, everybody from Russell Moore and people who were writing books about adoption and foster care to people who were leading whole organizations and ministries about this to try to pick their brains about how people had been mobilized, what was working, what was not, what are the challenges? Looking at and comparing their accounts to the actual numbers of how many kids are being adopted from foster care in states? Are those numbers changing over time? What is the evidence that Christians have played a role in those kinds of changes? It was really taking the movement and scrutinizing what had been going on to try to develop a broader theory. That's really the goal is we're trying to develop a, or I was trying to develop a broader theory about how religious faith motivates or does not motivate collective action in a way that can contribute to addressing social problems. 

Darrell Bock: 

Interesting, and it was basically local adoption agencies that you were looking at that they were working with or was it global? 

Samuel Perry: 

No, so it was global. Local, global, foster care agencies, international adoption agencies, I mean I was asking any and everybody who had any experience or exposure to that, yeah. 

Darrell Bock: 

Just curious. What years would this have been? 

Samuel Perry: 

I was doing my research. The movement runs from early 2000s all the way to today. I was doing my research from about 2012 to 2017 when I wrote the book. 

Darrell Bock: 

I see. 

Samuel Perry: 

I still track those numbers, but that's when I was doing my research. 

Darrell Bock: 

This is actually an area of interest for me, because I happened to be in Romania the year Ceausescu was replaced. 

Samuel Perry: 

Wow. Wow. 

Darrell Bock: 

Albanian adoption agencies were functioning and took relief from Germany into Romania, five different orphanages in Romania while I was there, once on sabbatical, got to see those agencies up close, got to see how relationally isolated these kids were that were in these adoption agencies. I mean, you'd go to hold a kid, and they would not let you go because you were holding them. I mean it would... I mean, it brought tears to your eyes. I mean, it was really a tragic situation. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

The issue of caring for kids who need care and need a family is very, very close to my heart, so it's a terrific topic, it sounds like, and was a great way to start. Let's talk about the mechanics of sociology a little bit and what sociology tries to do. Let me do it in that order first. If you were explaining to someone who only knows sociology as an ology and that's about all they know, how would you explain sociology? Then I'm going to follow up with some questions about how do you do your work? What makes it a science in the humanities, if you will? 

Samuel Perry: 

I teach an intro level social problems course almost every semester, so I have this conversation a lot with my students to try to explain to them what is sociology. How would we distinguish it from something like psychology or economics or political science. I stress, first of all, to me, as I understand sociology, sociology is a social science, and it has its foot in the humanities, because there's an evaluation of texts and content, interpretation, and that kind of thing, and actually people who are doing higher level theoretical work in I think the sociology of history or historical sociology, but as I practice sociology and as I engage in it, I teach it, I center sociology more within the social sciences. What that means to me is it is an evidence-based approach to understand how society works and why I say society there is because sociology, as a discipline, distinguishes people in groups from people in isolation, right? Psychology would be a social science that is an evidence-based way to understand maybe, say, the influences of things like personality and cognitive development and the stages of life, and the influence of perhaps the social on the individual. 

Sociology is far more interested in when people get together. Emile Durkheim taught that social groups, society, is a reality sui generis, like it is of its own. It is its own thing. It becomes a unique thing that is worth studying on its own, not just as individuals aggregated, but as its own kind of way of behaving. Sociology is a social science that aims to, at its best, to be an evidence-based, data-driven approach to understanding how social groups act and work, how they organize themselves and arrange themselves and all of the things that come as a consequence. 

Darrell Bock: 

Now, this raises a whole series of questions. I'll deal with the evidence side in a second. I want to pursue the social science part of this. One thing that strikes me is that in our culture, for most people, they think very individualistically. They don't think about the nature of groups, group impact, group culture. Actually, I would call it group cultures, that what we have are cultures that rub against each other in our world, and so the nature of pluralism is the plural, and so in thinking about how that works, just wrestling with things that people might not normally think about, and they certainly don't think about it in terms of, you mean there's evidence behind this? I mean, we can actually study it? Talk about what it takes to do a sociological study. What goes into that? 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah, so one of the things I appreciate about sociology in particular is it is a really eclectic discipline, in that we pull from a variety of different methods or approaches, so it's not like economics. Economics is a purely quantitative... The way it's practiced is a purely quantitative discipline that is looking at everything from administrative data to survey data to experiments. Psychologists use quantitative data primarily, as do most political scientists. Sociology integrates really a lot of qualitative data analysis that can involve interviews with people, like I did with my dissertation, or participant observation, where you're actually going in and observing and taking notes and going along with what the group is doing to try to gather data with how that culture works and what meanings are salient within that context and how people mean certain words and movements and rituals. 

Then you've got also the same kind of quantitative data that you would use as in the political sciences or psychology or something like that, so I use... Personally, I use large national datasets that we partner and pay. We get grant money to pay surveying firms like YouGov or whoever to fund large national surveys. Some of them follow people over a certain amount of time. We call those panel studies, so we are actually asking the same people the same questions over time to see how they change- 

Darrell Bock: 

Is that a longitudinal study? Is that what that's sometimes called? 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah, that there would be a longitudinal panel study, right? 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. 

Samuel Perry: 

We are doing that, so we are looking at surveys. We would also, though, look at administrative data, and I run, with my graduate students, I run survey experiments to see how exposing a group to a certain treatment or a reading or a condition will actually change their minds or perspectives or get a different response, based on, I think, social cues. We are eclectic in that way. 

Darrell Bock: 

Just to simplify, the quantitative stuff is like the survey that would go out, and you'd just fill it out with answers to questions, and there are usually options that are given to you, and it's called quantitative, because you're surveying a vast amount of people, but you're not digging in. All that you get is the answer that you could provide in the survey. 

Samuel Perry: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

A qualitative survey actually involves some interviewing and some in-depth follow-up. They're harder to do- 

Samuel Perry: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And much more, much more complex, in some ways, to analyze, because it isn't just raw numbers on an answer. You're having to fill in what they're telling you, et cetera. And you put those together into a formal study to try and wrestle with whatever it is you're looking at and what those answers are revealing. Is that... That's a really quick and dirty summary. Then, if you do it longitudinally, you're doing that over time, so you're looking at someone at the beginning and through a period of time- 

Samuel Perry: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Until whenever you wrap it up, et cetera. Sometimes those longitudinal studies can go for decades, right? 

Samuel Perry: 

Right, and those are expensive studies and those are labor-intensive, but they are so rich, in terms of the payoff, like what they can actually tell us about how people's lives change and the kinds of situations and circumstances that lead to those changes. The data that we get from those is super valuable. 

But the best kind of sociology, in my opinion, and this is what I aim for in my own research, is a combination of qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative because it provides that generalizability, like those large numbers, the representative samples that I can draw conclusions from, but also it provides that depth that you were talking about, the richness of qualitative data that allows the follow-up questions that really dig into, what did you mean there? Elaborate on that, and talk to me about your story. It allows what we call triangulation, where we can triangulate that data to really zero in on exactly the answer we're feeling like the data are telling us. 

Darrell Bock: 

Generally speaking, when you do this, do you do your quantitative stuff first to kind of surface what you want to go after, and then your qualitative after? Or do they run side by side? Or does it depend? 

Samuel Perry: 

Well, that's a good question. Oftentimes, they end up running side by side. I think, in a perfect world, I think you would do your qualitative work, I think, first, so that you can figure out what questions you're supposed to be asking in your quantitative data, right? Because oftentimes, your quantitative data, like your survey questions, you only get one shot at those. I mean, you're paying a lot of money to send this out and hopefully ask these questions of a lot of people. They're very expensive, if they're done well. But qualitative work allows you to understand, okay, what are the important questions here? What should I be asking? It helps you develop theories that you'd actually like to test with that quantitative data and be able to, I think, come up with answers that are satisfying and, I think, backed by the evidence. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, I've been involved, because of my work with Chosen People, in a variety of surveys that, one, first design the questions, and then go through on a quantitative level on how people feel about Israel and the Middle East and some of those kinds of questions. What do they think about Jewish people, and Muslims and Palestinians and Arabs. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Then, the one thing we haven't been able to do with that, because of the time and expense involved is to actually sit down and face-to-face interview in depth the group of people that we're dealing with, so we're only on the quantitative side of things in doing the work that we've done, but we're actually working on, here at the center, planning a study on doubt for young students in non-Christian university context, in which we help to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis to figure out what generates the doubts and also, more importantly, how ministries that come alongside students attempt to minister to those doubts and what's effective and what isn't. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right, right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And to sort through that layer of reflection in a way to help people think through when are they doing something that's beneficial and when they might be spinning their wheels. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right, right. I think this is actually a great, I think, segue into, I think, some important distinctions between sociology as a method, which I think it sounds like you guys are engaging in, I think, what is a very familiar sociological analysis and approach to understanding those issues that you're talking about, whether it's prejudice against Jewish people, or it's doubt and the ways those things are iterated among young people, versus what a lot of people I think mistakenly consider sociology, which is some kind of, I think, unfortunately can be like a discipline that kind of masquerades as social science but is really more kind of like ideologically driven activism toward a certain goal. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yep. 

Samuel Perry: 

I get that question a lot, and I try to dispel it whenever I can, that it doesn't have to be that. That is a way who a lot of people who self-select into sociology kind of fake their skillset, but that is not, I think, where the discipline has to be where certain practitioners would have to think up. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, I actually think that's a pretty important point, because I think that a lot of people think that if you're in the social sciences, or if you're even in the humanities in a larger kind of way, that there are... There certainly can be ideological drivers, but there don't have to be ideological drivers, in that kind of a sense, and you can deal with what it is that you find in the material that you're wrestling with. What I mean by that is that you can take a look at the factors that people themselves are actually dealing with, and I mean we all come with perspectives. I'm not trying to shed that. 

Samuel Perry: 

Exactly. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, but I am trying to say that there is a way to do the work that actually is trying to make a good faith effort to understand what's going on. 

Samuel Perry: 

Yes, exactly. Right. I think Peter Berger... I'm sure you're familiar with Peter Berger's work in The Sacred Canopy. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yes. 

Samuel Perry: 

But also he wrote, I think, a really foundational book that was foundational for me getting into sociology as a discipline that I'd like to pursue, and this is Invitation to Sociology. One of the things that he talks about in that book, really early on in the book, is that the methods of sociology are really agnostic, in terms of... I don't mean agnostic in a spiritual sense. I just mean, ideologically, they could be used for anything, because it really is just an evidence, data-driven way to understand social groups and the intersection of history and identity and your own social experience, rather than something that has to be driven by some kind of political or ideological viewpoint or another, right? We all come with priors, but it doesn't have to be so infected with that. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. In fact, one of the challenges doing good sociology is figuring out how to actually word your surveys, so that they are- 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

They don't skew the results by the way you ask the question and that kind of thing. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right, exactly. Exactly. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, so you did this one on orphanages. What other kinds of sociological work have you done? 

Samuel Perry: 

My second book was, and actually I've done a lot of work on this, which was on people of faith and their experiences with pornography. This was my book, Addicted to Lust. What I do is, it's qualitative and quantitative, and what I do is we found that, and this is my co-authors and I, and over time, we found that pornography use tends to be associated in all of the expected ways with things like unhappiness and marital struggles and relationship struggles, right? People who look at pornography more are more likely to say their marriage is unhappy, more likely to say that they themselves are unhappy. 

Now, it's always difficult to disentangle what causes what there, right? Is somebody unhappy, and therefore they look at pornography? Or did the pornography make them unhappy? Is somebody in an unhappy marriage, so they run to pornography? Or did the pornography make their marriage unhappy? In reality, it's probably some of both, but one of the things that we've found is that we've found that whatever the negative consequences of pornography use, it seems to influence people of faith more. It's way worse, like their marriages are worse off. Their personal happiness is worse off, when they're looking at pornography. 

One of the things that I was talking about in Addicted to Lust, and this is a theory of moral incongruence that we've developed with clinical psychologists. I'm very eclectic in who I work with, so I work with a lot of clinical psychologists and political scientists. One of the things we wrote about, and that I wrote about in this book, was the connection between our own culture within, say, evangelical culture, and our inability to talk about, say, pornography use in a way that is constructive and healthy, either as couples or within the church, and how that contributes to shame and isolation and really a way that elevates pornography use to such a heinous and unforgivable sin that we have a difficult time breaking out of that pattern in our lives, either in our romantic relationships or in our personal struggles. 

One of the things I was talking about in that book, it was published in 2019, one of the things I was talking about is what would be a better way forward for the church, in light of the fact that evangelical Christians are the least likely to look at pornography, but they're the most likely to say that they feel addicted to pornography, that they feel overwhelmed or overcome or depressed because of pornography, or that they hide their pornography from others. 

That shouldn't be, right? That should be, according to our own expectations of how the church is supposed to work and relationships should work. We should be willing to talk, open, and there for one another in that regard. That was Addicted to Lust. 

Subsequently, most of my work has been on religion and politics, so the study of Christian nationalism and what that looks like and how to define it. What is it? Is there a good way to measure that kind of thing? What are its consequences for our political attitudes and behaviors? That's been the last five years of my work has been focused on that. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, so let's take these, one after another. It's interesting that you did this analysis on pornography, and then turned around and began to wrestle with what the solutions might be, which raises an interesting question for me about sociology and how it works, because I think, for a lot of people, if they do know something about sociology, they tend to say, "Well, they're just analyzing the nature and causes of where we are," and the issue of how you deal with this... I guess this is the way to ask the question. Is the question how you deal with what you find a part of sociology, or is that kind of the addendum that comes out of it, where you're trying to get reflective on what it is that you're seeing? 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah, I think for me, it's a necessary part of what am I supposed to do with this? It's one of the things that I think makes social science different from physics or geology is that the geologist or the physicist may have some ethical or moral kind of import to what they do, if they're developing weapons or something that's going to harm people, or whatever, but as a social scientist, I'm interviewing people who are struggling and crying before me to talk about their own struggles. I feel like it is imperative for me to say, what are some tools? What are some conclusions that we can draw from the data that would actually benefit human flourishing in a way that is conducive to the goals I think they are after, right? 

Each conclusion, at the very least, is wrestling with where would... People who are interested in this topic, where would they go from here, based on the data? I think this is something that Max Weber... Max Weber, this eminent sociologist, talked about we have the term the Protestant ethic, right? This idea comes from Weber, but he wrote a lot about ethics and research and objectivity. One of the things that he concluded was that science, and the social sciences in particular, cannot determine what is moral, because that's a question for, I think, our priors, our ethics, our theology, our philosophy, but it can inform our morals in what we feel like are the best ways forward to attain those moral goals. 

For example, in the book Addicted to Lust, as a sociologist, I don't feel like, from a social science perspective, it's necessary for me to say pornography is evil, right? But I can say, as a sociologist, pornography seems to be associated with a lot of harm, and particularly for this group of people who really want to avoid it, so what would be some really practical ways forward, based on the evidence of how people get out of pornography, so habitual pornography use. You see, in that regard, I'm using the social science and the evidence to say, for people who want to get out of this habit in their life, this pattern of behavior, what are some ways that have been demonstrated beneficial and conducive to that, and what are some ways that are not beneficial to that? You see how I'm like... It's not making a moral claim, but I'm using the science to kind of inform that moral pursuit. 

Darrell Bock: 

Mm-hmm. You used a phrase earlier that I think is also important in this kind of conversation, and that's the phrase human flourishing. 

Samuel Perry: 

Yep. 

Darrell Bock: 

You're really studying to see both what is and, I guess, beginning to raise questions about how it could be better. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

That seems to me to be some... That seems to be an area where, if I can say it this way, faith and social science could work together to raise and wrestle with those kinds of questions. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right, absolutely, in the same way that faith and the medical sciences should work together, right? 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly. 

Samuel Perry: 

Like we, as a medical professional, I should absolutely, 100%, be committed to whatever the data tell me about what is the best way to cure a virus or cancer or to solve an epidemic or that kind of thing, to accomplish the kinds of things that we feel like are beneficial for all human beings. The social sciences, I mean, that really is an approach. 

Every semester I teach a large social problems course. In that social problems course, I tell students from the very beginning that this is not going to be like an ideology course or an activist course. This is a course on what does the data tell us are the reason behind we have the reproduction of, say, poverty, generational poverty, in this country or generational racial inequality or those kinds of things? What are the sources of that? If we would all conclude that those things are problems that we want to solve, what does the evidence tell us about the best solution forward, rather than saying, "Hey, this is... The solution is, I've already decided the solution is this, and let me just tell you that." I mean, I really am committed. Personally, I want to be a social scientist that is guided by where the evidence leads and, in a professional capacity, offer solutions to a world that says, "How do we learn about this? How do we prepare?" 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, I find one of the things that, and the reason I think sociology is so, one, fascinating, and two, valuable, is because it probes these corporate structures in ways that, generally speaking, people don't pay attention to. They react to, but they may not pay attention to it, and those are two different things. Sometimes I find myself... I sometimes get asked the question about the nature of certain structures and whether they're operating in our society in certain ways. I mean, you know this. You get into discussions about whether something is systemic or not, that kind of thing. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

The only way to know that, it seems to me, is to actually take a pretty close, cross-sectional look at the space and see what's going on. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right, right. That requires... But, and so, this is where I think the science part of this comes in. Because we are human beings, and all of us have biases and blind spots, it is the reason that we invite accountability when we're part of a translation committee for a Bible, right? 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. 

Samuel Perry: 

If I'm part of a translation committee, I do that because I need different perspectives, and I need to be challenged in my own biases and my own leanings. I need accountability in that way. Science is supposed to be, when it's done right, is supposed to offer that through the process of, say, peer review and criticism and challenge and data and evidence and showing your evidence. I'll get to... One of the reasons I like the NET Bible so much is because we want to show the process by which we gathered this information and we made choices about what we think is true. We did that within a context of accountability, so that we feel like this is moving us forward now in a conversation about what can be known. I mean, I think these are really important. 

Society and decisions that we make about policy and about how society works need to be, I think, developed within that same context, rather with just all priory assumptions they need to be guided by what the best evidence suggests is good practice and effective, which... about the NET Bible. This is one of the things I tell everybody. People ask me all the time, and I've been writing a lot about Bible translations, and I think that's really important, but I get asked often, "What's the best Bible translation?" I'm trying to steer people away from what I feel like are kind of historic kind of slogans or ad campaign words, like literal or things like, oh, I guess, literal or- 

Darrell Bock: 

Paraphrastic? 

Samuel Perry: 

What is it? 

Darrell Bock: 

Paraphrastic? 

Samuel Perry: 

Paraphrastic. Yeah, yeah, right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, yeah. 

Samuel Perry: 

What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to push people towards greater transparency and accountability. Those are words that I would like to be higher in our lexicon for when we talk about what Bibles are good Bibles to read. One of the things I really value about the NET Bible is because I think it gets as close as possible to what we would consider the open science understanding of how we come across, how we come about our decisions. There's accountability there. There is a transparency there in how decisions were made. Whether or not I think Romans 3:23 is translated in that objective or subjective genitive, like whether they got it right- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Samuel Perry: 

At least they explained it, right? At least I know how they went about it. 

Darrell Bock: 

You know what the options are and what the contextual choice is. 

Samuel Perry: 

That, I think, is a picture of- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Samuel Perry: 

If anybody who appreciates that about the NET Bible should appreciate what I'm talking about with the social science perspectives, that we are transparent about the methods that we used, and we're accountable to our peers and to everybody else to say, "This is how we drew our conclusions. Show me the bias." Right? If there is no bias, which is our goal, we use that to be able to draw conclusions about what the data say. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay, so we've got time for your third, kind of... You've kind of given us three studies here, the Christian nationalism stuff. I guess the first question is what drove you to go study this particular topic? 

Samuel Perry: 

In all honesty, we backed up into this subject as something that we were... We were playing with the data back in 2013. We were looking at several surveys, and surveys that asked questions about how Americans thought about whether or not America should be considered, whether the government should declare us a Christian nation, whether we should institutionalize our Christian identity as a nation. We looked at how that was corresponding to various attitudes, and we found that, wow, this really tracks with a lot of what we would consider pretty reactionary or far right political attitudes. I mean, these were not just kind of like, "I value faith or religion," or, "I value pro-life kind of things," even though those things are correlated. 

We have shown, within the last, I think, 10 years of studying this thing, that Christian nationalism is an ideology. It is associated with things like authoritarian control, support for authoritarian control. For example, any means necessary policing, that the police should be able to use any means necessary to enforce law and order, or things like torture, voter suppression, things that we would, hopefully, agree that, you know what? Those things do not contribute to a thriving, stable, liberal democracy. 

Subsequently, we collected a lot of data post, say, January 6th, so Christian nationalist ideology tracked very closely with, say, absolving anybody there of any blame for anything, saying that it was a good thing, that actually it was something positive we ought to see more of, all of these things. What we're ultimately getting at is that, I think the evidence would suggest that this isn't about, and we've never been against, never, never been against Christians voting their values and living out their faith in the public sphere. 

I think that is something that is not only a good thing, but inevitable, right? Like we could even ask people to suspend their faith at the door in politics, all of those things are so closely connected, but it becomes a more complicated question when we're talking about whether or not we institutionalize Christian privilege in the public sector, so that we actually disenfranchise people who are not Christians, or that we actually take away privileges, or so that we actually create a hierarchy in which Christians are at the top, systematically, and everybody else are at the bottom. You actually have several books now that are arguing for this very thing, right? Within the past six months, there have been two books written, naming Christian, using Christian nationalism as a name, saying that, essentially, we ought to create a situation, a new context, in which only Christians would be able to hold public office, that only Christians would be able to have a leading role in determining the kind of nation that we should be. 

Now, I'm not sure who's listening to this podcast, but I feel like that is, me personally, and the way I consider my own Christian values, I feel like that's, as an American, I feel like that antithetical to the Constitution, but it is also un-Christian, in the sense that it would require coercion in a way that I feel like is unhelpful. We have been trying to, in our writing about Christian nationalism, analyze the data to draw out, what do the data tell us about where this kind of belief could lead us, what are some ways that we need to approach this in a healthy way, so that we can actually have conversations between people who are people of faith, interested in voting their values, and a growing percentage of the population who is not interested in that, and how these two work together to solve problems. 

Darrell Bock: 

Interesting. Well, man, that sounds like it's almost a topic in and of itself. 

Samuel Perry: 

It's a whole can of worms, I know. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, and it isn't like we haven't been there in these conversations. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Sam, I just want to thank you for taking the time to kind of walk us through this and give us some samples of what it looks like and how sociology goes about what it does. This is very, very valuable. I know that we are constantly at the center, as we work in these spaces, where faith and pluralism and options are on the table. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

We're constantly wrestling with and utilizing material and statistics that really have emerged out of the sociological space. It's an important discipline for us. I mean, anyone who's heard the name Barna or Pew or whatever- 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Lifeway is another one... knows how this kind of data and the work that it takes to get there, which some people don't appreciate- 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

How much work it takes to actually surface this kind of material, and how it does help us look at particularly corporate spaces in ways that otherwise we might miss. 

Samuel Perry: 

Right. 

Darrell Bock: 

I guess that's a nice way of thanking you for, one, your time, and two, your commitment to a discipline that actually does, I think, serve us, when done well, it serves us very well and helps us out, in terms of the way we see the world around us. 

Samuel Perry: 

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. I will say, I think that it's a large discipline, and people can take disciplines in different directions, but I think sociology, at its best, when done right, like you said, I think can offer something that benefits the church and benefits all of us, hopefully. 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, thank you for being with us. We really appreciate it. We thank you for joining us at The Table. I hope you'll join us again soon. If you want to see other podcasts, take a look at voice.dts.edu/tablepodcast, and we hope you'll join us again soon.