National Prominence and Religious Preference

In 1927, two articles (Huntington & Whitney, 1927; Ament, 1927) explored the relationship between national prominence and religious preference. The authors sought an answer to the question: Is it the average Catholic or Lutheran or Episcopalian or Adventist who is most likely or least likely to be found among the most prominent and influential men and women in the United States, in all fields of endeavor? They hit upon an ingenious method of finding an answer, and published it. In the article which is the more suitable for our purposes, Huntington and Whitney took upon themselves the laborious job of going through the 1926 edition of Who's Who in America, and manually counting the number of times each rligious body was mentioned as the affiliation of a biographee. The authors then turned to the latest (1925) Yearbook of the Churches, where they found figures for inclusive membership, which though defined by the denominations with differing degrees of strictness, is supposed to mean (and normally does) the total number of members and adherents of each. The authors then had their formula

Political science · Preference · Sociology · Statistics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Mathematics · Religion and Society Interactions

• Strained Bedfellows

  Richard Wayne Lee•Sociology of Religion•1995

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• The Religious Affiliations of American Elites, 1930S to 1990S

  Ralph E Pyle, Jerome R Koch•Sociological Focus•2001

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