A Bizarre Sample

I have drawn two conclusions from the Lifeway Report:

1. The percentage of Southern Baptists tempted by the Charismatic Movement is much larger than I had guessed.
2. The same percentage is likely much smaller than reported by Lifeway Research.

Does anything seem asymmetrical to you about the research sample?

	Pastors	Laity
Protestant Non-SBC	602	1,004
SBC	403	???

Where are the Southern Baptist laity? I raised this question earlier at Marty Duren's blog, and here is his response, presumably from Lifeway Research, unless Marty is otherwise somehow personally aware of the particulars of the research methodology for this survey:

The entire sampling was of 1,000 or so lay people (all Protestant) and 1,000 or so pastors (all Protestant, but with enough SBC pastors [405] to form an oversampling). The purpose of the survey was not to determine what Southern Baptist laypersons believe versus other Protestant layperson regarding the PPL issue, but what Protestants believe, with an emphasis on Southern Baptist pastors (who were oversampled to provide a large enough pool for statistical accuracy).

So, either (and I'm not sure which is the case) some number of Southern Baptist laypeople actually form a portion of the "Protestant laity" group, but have not been broken out to give us their views statistically, or all 1,004 of the laypeople surveyed were non-SBC. Either way, from what I've told you at this point the refusal to give statistics for SBC laity is merely a curiosity. But when you look at the data, you realize that it is not merely a curiosity. In the Protestant category, the laypeople broke decidedly away from a belief in PPL. Indeed, in the podcast, one of the commentators (Stetzer, I think) remarked at how strongly and surprisingly Protestant laity differed from pastors in rejecting PPL. A full 15 points (or 13, there appears to be an error in the slide I have in front of me) separates Protestant pastors and laypeople on this question. So, the very category that moves the statistics dramatically away from support of PPL is the category excluded from consideration as regards Southern Baptists. I note in this regard:

1. Overall, Southern Baptists were far less likely to support PPL than were Protestants at large.
2. If there were SBC laity in the Protestant laity sample, they may well be the explanation for this dramatic separation between Protestant pastors and "Protestant" laity. In which case, if Southern Baptist laity were considered separately (as they should have been), the resulting SBC number would be significantly lower than 50%.
3. If there were no SBC laity among the 1,004 Protestant laity, then we might expect SBC laity to be as different from Protestant laity as SBC pastors are from Protestant pastors. In which case the inclusion of SBC laity would still result in an overall number far below 50%.

Of course, I'm speculating. Of course, I am left in a situation where I have to speculate because the data have not been given to us...because of a strangely sculpted categorization of the sample. I cannot imagine how the categorization could have been accomplished in a fashion more favorable to the pro-PPL group, even if one were trying. If there were SBC laity in the survey, I call upon Lifeway Research to publish the percentages for SBC laity responses to the various questions.