Browsing by Author "Lynn, Christopher D"

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    Counting with Myth: Applying Roland Barthes' Theory of Myth to Uses of Quantitative Data in the Academic Study of Religion
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2024) Nuttall, Aidan; Altman, Michael J
    In their award-winning 2020 book Taking America Back for God, Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead introduce their Christian Nationalism scale, an attempt to empirically and quantitatively study Christian Nationalism as a phenomenon. Borrowing from Roland Barthes’ concept of myth, I propose in this paper an analysis of Perry and Whitehead’s work and quantitative data which attempts to measure religion and religious behavior through a semiological lens. This paper analyzes the use of numbers in Taking America Back for God, and particularly the Christian nationalism scale, both methodologically and through a Barthes-ian lens. It does so in order to better understand the way that the authors construct their scale, argue for the validity of the data it produces, and for the validity of their analyses of that data, as well as the ways in which the data and method are turned into myth by the authors in those analyses.