Author examines popular interpretations of data and finds the positive

Bradley Wright, a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, takes aims at some commonly held, statistically inspired myths in Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.

Wright was inspired to tackle the subject as he tracked societal data from academic journals, which he soon saw ran contrary to statistics reported by the news media and even Christian researchers. He started a blog, beginning with a challenge on divorce rates, which provided the basis for his debut book.

“I’d heard time and time again that Christians get divorced more than non-Christians and that just turned out to be completely wrong,” he said. “I published that on my blog about two or three years ago and began to think, ‘there’s more to the story here than just divorce rates.’ ”

Challenging some of the notions behind the best-selling book UnChristian by Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons (Baker Books/Baker Publishing Group) that non-Christians have increasingly worse attitudes toward Christians, Wright contends that attitudes “have actually gotten better in the past two decades.” Even more surprising, he said, is that the group with the stronger dislike of Christians is older people.

“That’s very different than ‘the young people really don’t like us, and they’re liking us less every year,’ ” he said.

Wright believes some of the reporting he challenges comes with “good intentions,” he said. Still, he said too many of the messages are based on fear and are “ultimately counterproductive.”

Since data leaves room for interpretation, Wright is open to being corrected.

“My allegiance is to the data, not the positions,” he said. “It doesn’t benefit me either way to be positive or negative. Having said that, this is not the type of argument I would lose.”