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| A pie chart with sections labelled "Lies", "Wrong", "Guesses", and "Who knows?" Image source. |
I'm late to the party on this, but I want to talk about this great post from Sheila Wray Gregoire: PODCAST: The 93% Myth That Fathers Matter More than Mothers.
There's a statistic that I've heard in conservative Christian spaces. It goes like this:
When dad comes to Christ first, 93% of families will follow.
When mom comes to Christ first, 17% of families will follow.
When kids come to Christ first, 3.5% of families will follow.
("come to Christ" is Christian jargon meaning "converting to [the correct type of] Christianity")
This statistic is used by conservative Christians to make the point that it's SO IMPORTANT for churches to try to reach men. Some churches even use this statistic to justify prioritizing men's ministry higher than women's ministry, or getting rid of women's ministry altogether.
In the podcast I linked, Gregoire talks with Miranda Zapor Cruz (who wrote a post in 2022 showing that no actual research can be found to support this stat) and Beth Allison Barr. Basically, it's about how this statistic is totally made up- and also, it doesn't really "ring true" with most people's experiences- if you ask people who had the biggest influence on their religious beliefs, they often say their mother had a bigger influence than their father.
I liked this quote from Beth Allison Barr:
Beth: I actually had known about the statistic before. Back when my husband and I were still at the church before he got fired a long time ago and we were really starting to question what the church was teaching about male and female roles, and my husband came to me. And he said, “Hey, the pastor gave me this statistic this morning. He said that there’s been this study that shows this. Do you know anything about this?” And as an academic, I looked at it, and I was like, “How would they even know that from this? I mean it’s such a weird thing.” And to say that 93% of families will go to church if the father is the first one to attend. And, of course, all the questions in my head were like, “Well, what church are they talking about? How did they get the numbers on this? Did they follow people across 10 or 20 years or something to try to figure out when,”—I mean it was just all of those questions. And so I was just like that sounds made up. I was like, “Where did you get it from?” And he didn’t know where it came from. And I just kind of wrote it off.
Yes! How would they even know this? How would you design a study that could show this? You can't just ask all your church members "who was the first person in your family to become a Christian?"- that's not the data this stat is getting at. You would have to find a bunch of families (how do you define family, exactly? Do the parents have to be married? Are we only looking at families with minor children?) where all members are non-Christians, and then track them (for how long? Barr says 10 or 20 years, that seems about right). You would then check if any of the individuals in these families converted to Christianity (what does that mean, exactly- who defines what "convert to Christianity" means? Do they have to be active in a church for it to count?). And then you check what happened after that- in the families where the dad was the first person to convert, did the mom and kids convert? What about when the mom was first? What about when a kid was first? Do you only track 2 outcomes- "entire family converts" vs "there still exist some immediate family members who are non-Christians"? Wouldn't it be more useful to track how many individual family members converted, rather than only "counting" it if it's the whole family?
And even if you did that, and the result was that "when the dad converts first, 93% of the time the wife and kids convert too", that still doesn't mean churches should prioritize men. Because we don't know anything about how common it is for a man to convert first, compared to a woman converting first. What if it's 100 times more common for a woman to convert first (or, 100 times easier in terms of the amount of resources a church needs to spend, however that's measured)- then, even though there's a lower chance the rest of the family will convert, overall you will get better results if you allocate the resources toward reaching women. If you spend those resources on reaching men, but you don't end up reaching any men (and the statistic says nothing about how easy or hard that would be), then that doesn't help.
The other thing I want to say about this is... about the evangelical attitude toward statistics. People hear this statistic, and it fits with what they believe about how men are naturally the leaders of their families, so they believe the statistic, even though it's hard to imagine an actual study existing that would show this.
I mean, people are like this in general, though. Let's not act like this is just an evangelical problem. Plenty of people who are "on our side" (whatever that means) are quick to believe and spread statistics that aren't right.
Let's be on the lookout for this kind of bias in our own thinking. Wanting to use science and logic to win arguments, rather than to actually find out which things you're wrong about, so you can change your own beliefs. Repeating a statistic just because it is consistent with things you already believe, not because it actually makes sense as a thing that can be measured.
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Related:
Wow This Headline Gets the Statistics COMPLETELY WRONG
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