Has the USCF ever tried to ascertain the religious affiliations of its members? I don’t ask this for any reason other than curiosity. As a UU I’d like to know our percentage which is no doubt small. I would think the percentage of Jewish adult players would be rather small as well.
I’m guessing the Jewish population within USCF would be fairly substantial. As for UU, if that means what I think it does, there are at least two – well, at least I’m culturally UU. 
Bill Smythe
I would expect to chess players to have more Jewish people than the population at large.
I’m atheist.
We can check to see how many ballots are returned marked Ishmael Sloan.
Using data from the U.S. Census and Mike Nolan’s state-by-state membership figures, I was able to correlate USCF membership with certain occupations and ethnic origins. However, the Census doesn’t collect data on religion. If someone can dig up reliable state-by-state figures on religious affiliation, I’ll run the same formula on them and see what turns up.
Those ‘correlations’ were not necessarily valid.
They weren’t necessarily causative, and they could have existed solely by chance, but several of those correlations were strong enough to suggest real relationships.
In scholastics and maybe college, I’d agree. But after that I suspect career demands would trump chess.
I found a state-by-state Gallup poll of religious affiliation here. The categories are broad: Protestant (which seems to include nondenominational evangelical Christians and African-American churches as well as mainline Protestants), Other Christian, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish and None. I plugged the percentages into my spreadsheet, and here’s what I found:
- Significant positive correlations with Jewish (r = +0.70), Catholic (r = +0.66) and nonreligious (r = +0.41) populations.
- Significant negative correlations with Protestant (r = −0.66) and “other Christian” (r = −0.52) populations.
- No significant correlation, positive or negative, with Mormon population (r = +0.01).
Based on this, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the proportion of Jewish members in the USCF is greater than the proportion of Jews in the nation as a whole. I found no figures for Unitarian Universalists, though.
In my college years, I considered myself a Deist. But what is the point of classifying people as UU? As I understand it, there is not a uniform system of belief.
The whole idea of finding out religious information about the members is invasive and offensive. I can think of a couple of nefarious ways the data could be used/misused. Given the ruckus over privacy when the issue of having birth dates listed so that TD’s could check ID #s for tournament reports, I am surprised the privacy issue hasn’t been raised more strongly.
I’d disagree, for one reason: outreach. Discovering, for example, that USCF membership correlates highly to Jewish and Catholic affiliation in the general population tells me that I might get some mileage promoting my local club by posting fliers at area synagogues or Catholic churches, while I probably shouldn’t bother taking any to the local megachurch. I don’t see that this is all that different from, say, promotion through a local young professionals’ organization because of the correlation between USCF membership and employment in managerial and professional occupations.
If we were talking about seeking to determine the actual religious affiliations of actual USCF members, collecting those data like birthdates, I might agree with you. But I wouldn’t see a problem with an anonymous sampling poll. To me, that would fall into the category of “discovering interesting things about who’s attracted to organized chess.”
If you’re just trying to boost membership post everywhere there are people. As long as you can afford it and the owners/operators don’t mind. No need to do a lot demographic studies. Go find players! And good luck!
I suspect the demographic characteristics vary quite a bit from one city to another, enough so that even state-by-state breakdowns would not be very useful.
If there happens to be a chess program in a Catholic school, for example, then the percentage of Catholic members in that city (or neighborhood) would probably be higher than if the local chess program is at the Jewish Community Center.
Actually, the USCF enrollment figures I’m using for my correlations include only players age 20 and up, so school programs shouldn’t enter into it.
Just because a chess program is at a school, that doesn’t mean the only players it generates are under 20.
In most cases, I think, it probably does. Isn’t it more common for active chess players to bring programs to schools than for school programs to bring adults into active chess?
You don’t appear to be willing to accept any opinions about USCF membership data other than your own, including one from the person who manages the USCF member database, what point is there in continuing this discussion further?
They’re a hard group to pin down, aren’t they? Originally, they started as Christians who denied the Trinity, feeling there was only one God instead of three. (Hence the name Unitarian.) In more recent decades, though, many UU people have tended to be agnostic.
Hence the standard joke, Unitarian Universalists believe in at most one God.
Bill Smythe
Statistics can be truly misleading. If religeon plays a significant factor in chess participation, than the reason why needs to be identified. Otherwise, you’re wasting time on mere statistical anomolies.