Questions regarding the CUNY National Survey of Religious Identification

Abstract

A preliminary version of Research Report: The National Survey of Religious Identification 1989-90, done under aegis of Graduate School and University Center of City University of York, has recently received wide publicity, principally because of reported size of sample. CUNY surveyed 113,000 households by telephone, making this largest survey since last religious census in 1936. The study has received wide publicity, including major articles in York Times, USA 7bday, and Los Angeles Times. The gist of headlines appeared to be that number of non-Judeo-Christian religionists in country was much smaller than had been given in most estimates. Muslims, for example, were projected by CUNY survey to number only 527,000, rather than 4-6 million of most other estimates. (This was one of several figures surveyors thought might be low because of language difficulties, but the range of error will not be enormous even in these cases:') Much was made also of study's discovery of only some 20,000 New Age believers, despite all publicity. At same time, figures for some larger groupings were probably within range of expectation, even if they did not always jibe with denominations' own statistics: There are reportedly some 46 million Roman Catholics, 34 million Baptists, 14 million Methodists, and 9 million Lutherans. Episcopalians and Unitarians are well above their own figures at 3 million and 463,000 respectively, but this would not be unexpected in a survey based on self-identification. However, we believe there are some major flaws in this study which throw its sociological and statistical value into serious question, and must be addressed. First, survey let stand self-identifications which were unclear, overlapping, and occasionally downright naive in relation to realities of American religious life. Thus, denomination or tradition names like Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, etc., were intermingled