{"id":321,"date":"2010-01-19T21:04:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T21:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/01\/bible-done-be-the-word-of-god.html"},"modified":"2010-01-19T21:04:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T21:04:00","slug":"bible-done-be-the-word-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/01\/bible-done-be-the-word-of-god.html","title":{"rendered":"Bible done be the Word of God!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Religious fundamentalists in the US have poor verbal skills. That\u2019s not too surprising given that they also tend to be poor and uneducated. What is surprising is that, even taking all this into account (and much more besides), they still come out worse than you\u2019d expect.

Darren Sherkat<\/a> (Southern Illinois University), has analysed data from the General Social Survey, which is a regular US survey on a wide variety of topics \u2013 including (in some years) a test of verbal skills.<\/p>\n

The effect is pretty big \u2013 belief that the Bible is the word of God has a negative effect on verbal skills similar to the positive effect of being university educated. The effect of simply being a member of a fundamentalist group was smaller \u2013 about half as big \u2013 but still significant.<\/p>\n

So why should fundamentalism be linked to problems with language? One answer is simply that people who have poor verbal skills are attracted to religious fundamentalists \u2013 perhaps because it provides a peer group of similarly impaired individuals.<\/p>\n

In fact individuals who join sectarian groups as adults do have language problems, but they\u2019re not as bad as lifelong members. On the other hand, people who were born into fundamentalism but left as adults are normal.<\/p>\n

An alternative explanation is that fundamentalist groups are insular, and discourage the wider social interactions and learning that might help develop social skills. This might explain why non-fundamentalists improve much more on verbal skills as they get older.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the verbal skills help explain why fundamentalists earn less<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s some more interesting titbits from the analysis \u2013 the other factors associated with poor verbal skills in the good old US of A:<\/p>\n