HARO 2014 INSTALLMENT FIVE: Religion

Summary: This post reviews the fifth installment of HARO’s survey of homeschool alumni. For the other installments in the series please click on the following links:

1. Installment 1: Background and Summary
2. Installment 2: Demographics
3. Installment 3: Academics and Non-Academics
4. Installment 4: Food and Health
5. Installment 5: Religion
6. Installment 6: Present and Future
7. Installment 7: Sexuality
8. Installment 8: Mental Health
9. Installment 9: Abuse

The fifth installment of HARO’s survey investigates the respondents’ religious denomination and the role that religion played in the teaching of science, politics, and economics.

26.3% of the respondents said that their families were non-denominational Christians. This was followed by Baptist (18.6%), Presbyterian (5.6%), Reformed (5.3%), Independent Fundamental Baptist (4%), Assembly of God (3.2%), Catholic (3.2%), and Calvinist (3%). 18.2% of the sample was composed of smaller groups (each making up less than 3% of the sample). Finally, 12.4% chose Other/Unknown.

An overwhelming 79.9% were taught Young Earth Creationism. Only 2% of the sample were taught evolution. The survey found that being taught evolution was correlated with a higher rating of science instruction by respondents.

The survey does not go into much detail on politics and economics. 75.3% of the sample were taught the superiority of a particular political ideology; 62.2% were taught the superiority of a particular political party; and 42.9% said their form of Christianity emphasized a specific economic theory. The survey does not go into any greater depth as to what these particular ideologies may be.

Finally, the survey compares fundamentalist Christians to non-fundamentalist Christians. To help clarify, respondents were presented with this definition:

Christian Fundamentalism includes, but is not limited to, the following ideologies: Christian legalism, Quiverfull, young earth creationism, anti-LGBT rights, Christian Patriarchy, modesty and purity culture, betrothal and/or courtship, stay-at-home daughter movement, Dominionism, and Christian Reconstructionism. It is not limited to Protestantism and can also be seen in Catholic, Mormon, and other subcultures.

58.2% of the sample considered their upbringing to be fundamentalist. Fundamentalism impacted a number of different areas. In every single academic and non-academic subject, fundamentalists reported lower instructional quality than that of respondents not raised in fundamentalist homes. 60% of respondents who were raised in fundamentalist homes were victims of abuse as compared to 17% of respondents from non-fundamentalist families. The most common forms of abuse for fundamentalist respondents were emotional abuse (44%), educational neglect (27%), physical abuse (26%), economic abuse (14%), sexual abuse (7%), and medical abuse (7%). As might be expected, fundamentalist respondents were also less likely to succeed in college, less likely to say that homeschooling prepared them for the future, and more likely to suffer from a mental illness.

Today 92% of non-fundamentalist respondents and 70% of fundamentalist respondents said that they are Christians. While most respondents from non-fundamentalist families agreed that the religious environment of their upbringing was a positive influence in their lives, the results were more mixed for respondents from fundamentalist homes. Among the respondents that still identify as Christians, the distribution of denominations looks fairly similar to the denominations of the families. The most noticeable difference is among Baptists, which dropped from 18.6% to 9.1%. However, 62.6% of respondents follow a different faith than that of their parents, so a lot of respondents did change denominations, even if it may not look like it from the distribution of denominations. Of the non-religious, about 1/3 is agnostic, about 1/3 is atheist, and 1/3 is spiritual but not religious, or something else.

Appraisal: The first thing that must be noted regarding this installment is the peculiar use of the term “fundamentalist.”  Readers familiar with the conservative Christian homeschooling world will not be surprised by the trends the survey creators include in their description of fundamentalsim, but it needs to be noted that this list of positions is not how fundamentalism is usually defined.  A lot of scholarly ink has been spilled trying to craft a definition.  Perhaps the most widely cited is George Marsden’s from his famous 1980 book Fundamentalism and American Culture, where he calls it “militant anti-modernist Protestant Evangelicalism.”  Key concepts included in most definitions are fundamentalism’s opposition to modern intellectual trends (especially theological liberalism and evolution) and cultural trends (especially sex and family issues), its tendency to separate from non-Christians and also from Christians who are more accommodating to modern life, and the strange juxtaposition of premillennial eschatology with nostalgia for a “Christian America”  it sometimes fights to reclaim.  The HARO authors are correct that many scholars now apply the term “fundamentalist” to religious traditions outside of historic American Protestantism, but when they do so it is usually because of these traditions’ antimodernism, apocalypicism, and separatism rather than the specific theologies mentioned in the HARO survey.  The confusion about terminology here perhaps helps explain how this survey could find that while 80% of respondents’ families taught young earth Creationism, only 58% thought their families were fundamentalist.  Had the authors asked respondents if their families were generally against the modern world, expecting the end of days soon, and inclined to keep their distance from people who did not share their beliefs, I wonder if the percentage would be higher?  Another thing to point out is that American fundamentalism has historically been anti-Calvinist (though many now speak of a kind of fundamentalistic Calvinism that has gained strength).  At least 15% of respondents here grew up as some sort of Calvinist, and many of the trends the HARO authors associate with Fundamentalism (Quiverfull, Patriarchy, Dominionism) are more prevalent among Calvinists than among self-identified Fundamentalists.

Unclear definitions aside, the fifth section of HARO’s report reflects the high amount of ideology in what it describes as fundamentalist homeschool groups. While the differences in abuse and instructional quality between the fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist homeschoolers is remarkable, it must be remembered that HARO pulled from a population with largely negative homeschool experiences. It is unlikely that many people who had positive experiences in fundamentalist families would be connected to the social networks that are represented in this survey, and of course there is the obvious danger of generalizing from self-reported answers to potentially leading questions.  People with more positive homeschooling experiences may be adverse to labeling their families as fundamentalists due to the negative connotation.

In spite of this bias towards homeschool survivor networks, another study that came to similar conclusions as HARO is Dinas (2014). Dinas found that children raised in households with more rigid ideology were more like to rebel against their parents’ beliefs. We still lack an understanding of how often this occurs, but the HARO survey supports the premise that children who regard their upbringings as more extreme tend to abandon Christianity more often. It is unfortunate that the survey did not go into more detail about how the respondents’ beliefs about science, politics, and religion differed from the views of their parents.

Robert Lyon and Milton Gaither, Messiah College

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