New Survey on American Religions 

Whoa - I am astonished at the survey's numbers quoted in the article: 77% of US adults claim that they're Christians? Amazing - this may be yet another indicator that California is isolated from the rest of the country. In the SF Bay Area, only 6% of the population attend any kind of religious service regularly (and that's all faiths, not just Christian ones).

But then, those aren't equivalents, are they? This is also an indicator of how surveys can be skewed before they even begin: the ARIS doesn't track whether people actually observe any religious practices (the Behavior section tracked only 3 things: whether there existed ceremonies for joining a religion, ceremony for getting married, and death ceremonies in the respondent's religion), so it's possible that more than 70% of the population self-identifies as Christian but doesn't actually follow any religious practice (such as having or attending a church, reading a religious text, praying)...essentially a religious identifier without any religion or faith involved.

That's a bit like having a survey that asked people if they thought of themselves as Democrats or Republicans, but didn't ask whether they were actually registered to those parties, or whether they had voted along party lines in the last elections. You're going to get very different results with one set of questions than the other.

Of course, there is the old aphorism: "There are lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics." Heh.