Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Here Is Something To Think About
There are few more quoted books on the our nation that Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy In America." It is pretty much the defintion of what one would call a "seminal text."
So I am reading a Canadian piece by Mark Steyn looking at a book by some Canadian author that can't find an American publisher in which the author compares himself to de Tocqueville and I run into this rather amazing paragrpah
Just something to think about the next time you are reading something by George Barna or checking the neighborhood demographics to know which direction to take your church.
Related Tags: Mark Steyn, de Tocqueville, church growth, demographics, polling
So I am reading a Canadian piece by Mark Steyn looking at a book by some Canadian author that can't find an American publisher in which the author compares himself to de Tocqueville and I run into this rather amazing paragrpah
But my problem with Adams, the founder of the Environics polling firm, is more basic than that. In the "Montreal Gazette" the other day, he was comparing himself to Alexis de Tocqueville: "He was a count. I like to think I can count." Well, I'll take Monsieur le Comte any day. Tocqueville went to taverns and churches and observed Americans on the ground. Adams crunches numbers and then assigns meaning to them, based on a map of "social values." At the top of the map is "Authority," at the bottom "Individuality." Okay, seems reasonable. At the left is "Survival" and at the right "Fulfillment."How many polls, studies and books have come and gone in the course of a few months in the last 30 years? Maybe de Tocqueville's methods, which produced a work that has been around for nearly two centuries, have something all over all that demographic and polling data.
Just something to think about the next time you are reading something by George Barna or checking the neighborhood demographics to know which direction to take your church.
Related Tags: Mark Steyn, de Tocqueville, church growth, demographics, polling
