On Tue, 04 Dec 2001 13:20:09 -0800, Jeffrey Miller wrote: >"J. van Baardwijk" wrote: >> >>According to the CIA World Factbook 2001, 84% of the population is >>Christian, 2% is Jewish, 4% follow an other religion, and 10% are >>not religious. Is this reflected in Congress en Senate? Following >>these statistics, 10 members of the Senate and 44 members of >>Congress should be non-religious; 4 members of the Senate should be >>Muslem/Hindu/<whatever> and 17 members of Congress should be >>Muslem/Hindu/<whatever>. > >I'm not really super comfortable using population distribution as a >litmus test for racism/intolerance/etc. In order to be elected, >there are legal and social realities - you have to have been born >here, a certain age, garner enough local support via >primaries/parties, have enough money to run (and to be able to >afford to serve - many of the local/state level positions that earn >a person experience and credentials are underpayed or pay a token >amount only.) > That was part of what I was going to say myself. Thank you for expressing it so well.
I have to add that you can't count on any kind of uniform distribution of the population, either. While 2% of the population might be Jewish, a vast majority of them live in the Northeast, I believe. Further, due to having such a small percentage anyway, it would be difficult to garner a majority in a sufficiently large area, regardless of the concetration. In addition, if we *do* assume a uniform distribution *and* that voters will vote strictly across religious lines, a Christian candidate would always garner 85% of the vote, thus precluding another religious background's election. Of course, that's not the case. We could, though, assume that there's a certain percentage chance of a person becoming a politician. Then we can apply that percentage to the population, assuming a uniform desire to join politics for simplicity's sake. Also, we have to assume that religion is a large factor in choosing a candidate. Given that religion shapes many aspects of a person's weltanschauung, that's not *too* unreasonable, for our purposes. *If* that was the case, it seems to me that it would take a fairly serendipitous set of circumstances for a candidate from a small religious minority to come along who is both interested in politics and is in an area where enough people of his mindset live to vote him into office. Of course, these are all fairly large assumptions. I wonder if John or someone else could supply us with a breakdown of the Congressional religions. That would certainly shed some light on this, more than mere speculation, I think. Jim ______________________________________________________________________________ Send a friend your Buddy Card and stay in contact always with Excite Messenger http://messenger.excite.com
