Reviewing Robert Wuthnow’s Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith, Alan Brill examines the ways that surveys about the state of religious life can mislead and the specific implications for the Jewish community of drawing false conclusions from them:

When in 1988 George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in the polls (and in the actual election), people did not go around saying that the future is Republican or that the Democratic party is dying. . . . However, when it comes to polls about religion, we find pundits . . . and ordinary people assuming that any given trend will continue without accounting for changing times. . . . Almost all of the discussions [within the American Jewish community about] the future of Orthodox or Conservative Judaism, the Pew study, the Jewish renewal movement, or assimilation are predicated on assuming that the answers to [survey] questions at a given point in time can be predictive. . . .

[A]lways remember that polls have a very low response rate. Most of them, whether about religion or politics, have an 8-percent response rate now. . . . [According to] Wuthnow, even when we are reassured that a poll is trustworthy—for example, it claims to have a margin of error of 3 percent—the margin of error is likely closer to 20 percent. Even then most of [the results are skewed by poorly formulated questions and the like].

[Moreover], whereas political polls face occasional reality checks—elections actually happen, and pollsters can [subsequently] adjust weighting factors so that the data are closer next time—polls about religion have no such checks. So if we hear that a certain percentage of the public is not really Catholic even though they say they are, . . . we can only ask ourselves, “Well, does that make sense with what we know from other sources, and from talking with our neighbors?”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.