Discussing the Limits Of Religion Polling on What’s The Point?

I had a great time talking to Jody Avirgan (my colleague at FiveThirtyEight) and Emma Green of The Atlantic about the limits of statistics to tell us interesting things about religion.  (This was the first time I got to meet Emma in person, and she’s just as sharp and delightful as her performance on this podcast implies).

We wound up talking about our biggest gripes with the way religion data is covered (or collected!), some of the information we’d most like to collect, we both confess our desire for an army of T.M. Luhrman-types to dispatch to answer our questions,

I’m drawing on some of what I covered in my essay for First Things on some weird/interesting questions have come up for me as a Catholic statistician, plus, I’m doing some “Guess how little you can learn from religion statistics!” journalism today for FiveThirtyEight as part of our preview of the upcoming election year.