Yesterday I posted about a survey of religion in Russia. This generated some mail & comments. Razib has some remarks here (second paragraph).More skeptical is this from a Russian correspondent:

Mr. Derbyshire—Prot. Lebedeff is putting a lot of lipstick on some very ugly pig. In reality, compared to the Russians, you could say that the Brits are consumed with religious fervor (there are more people going to church in UK than in much larger Russia). If you use the methodology of that poll (and yes, I read the original article), you can find that about 100% of Americans are nice (that is, if you just ask the respondents a question “Are you nice?”) According to police estimates (Russian police do show up in force wherever and whenever significant numbers of drunk men are expected to congregate), only about 1.5% of Moscow area population actually attend Orthodox churches on Easter (and, of course, anyone not showing up even for Easter can be safely assumed not to be a Christian in any meaningful sense of the word). Also, according to polls, about one third of Moscow population observe Lent (which is very strict in the East and involves a complete ban on meat – for the entire 40 days, not just on Fridays). But actual sales of meat in Moscow supermarkets decline only the same 1.5% during Lent. In its media campaign the Russian Orthodox Church totally disregards its own rules and definitions (of what it means to be a member) in order to (grossly) inflate the number of its adherents (the Patriarch is quoted in that article basically counting even people who merely light a candle with good intentions – with such methodology one could count hundreds of millions of Hindus as members of the Russian Orthodox Church!) And of course, that article completely ignores some more scientific and meaningful polls in which the Russians were actually asked more detailed questions (about whether they believe in particular items of faith – I don’t remember whether only specifically Christian items of faith or other beliefs as well). 84-86% of respondents gave answers absolutely incompatible with Christianity of any stripe. And even if the remaining 14-16% giving ‘Christian’ answers to different questions were the same people for all questions, they do not necessarily really believe with any conviction – they may simply know the ‘right’ answers and choose to give them because they like to consider themselves Orthodox for cultural reasons. Oh, and for the record, I am a Papist.

[Derb] Perhaps people’s poll responses on religious matters should be taken with a grain of salt. I recall a US study some years ago where researchers tried to square poll responses about churchgoing with actual objective data–they counted cars in church parking lots, and so on. The numbers could not be made to match.