Practice what you Preach Index

Here is a "Practice what you Preach" index--a quantitative way of measuring whether a group of people really do practice what they preach.

The index can be applied to various groups ex. income based groups, or race based groups or age based groups. However, since "practicing what you preach" is an index of morality, I thought it would be interesting to calculate this measure for various religions.

So here goes. I break the 109th Congress--yes, the very one that voted in favor of authorizing Bush's war in Iraq--into its religious components and express that as a percentage of the total number of people in congress. Since these are members of Congress, I call them the "preachers" as they preach and legislate what we ought to do. I then normalize this percentage by the group's corresponding percentage in the general public in this case Americans 18 years of age and older. I call the resulting index, the "Preach Index".

I do the same thing for the military--break them into their religious groups and express that as a percentage of the total. These I call the "practicers" as they put into practice what the preachers have called for. I normalize this percentage just as I did those for the members of Congress by their corresponding percentage in the general public. and I call this the "Practice Index".

Then I simply divide the Preach Index by the Practice Index to obtain the "Practice what you Preach Index".

If a religious group has an index of one, it means they do indeed practice what they preach. If the index is less than one, then they practice, but do not preach. And if the index is greater than one, then lo and behold, here are those that preach, but do not practice. A number of zero indicates that this group has no "preachers".

The results are shown below. Catholics, and Christians in general preach a bit more than they practice, Muslims, Budhists and Hindus have no preachers and so are at zero. Atheists and those with no religion practice far more than they preach, while the reverse holds true for Jews.

Religion	Military	Civilians 18+	Congress	Preach	Practice	Preach/Practice
All	100.0	100.0	100.0	1.0	1.0	1.0
Protestant	35.0	53.0	45.6	0.9	0.7	1.3
Catholic/orthodox	22.0	25.0	28.1	1.1	0.9	1.3
Other Christian	11.0	2.0	18.1	9.1	5.5	1.6
Atheist/no religion	21.0	14.0	1.3	0.1	1.5	0.1
Jewish	0.4*	2.0	6.9	3.5	0.2	17.3
Muslim/Islam	0.4*	1.0	0.0	0.0	0.4	0.0
Buddhist/Hindu	0.4*	1.0	0.0	0.0	0.4	0.0
Other religions/unknown/refused	11.0	2.0	0.0	0.0	5.5	0.0
	101.2	100.0	100.0

Note:

* reported as less than 0.5% and so 0.4 % is used as the possible upper bound--results in total % exceeding 100.
Civilian population numbers obtained from the 2002 General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center
Military figures are for 2001 and are from the DoD Defense Manpower Data Center