Fastest-Growing Religion? Reflections on Contemporary Paganism’s Rapid Growth and How Scholars Describe That Which They Study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Starting around the early 2000s, many scholars declared that contemporary Paganism was the “fastest-growing religion” either worldwide, or in specific locales. This claim was most often based on data from the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which found a dramatic rise in Pagans compared to a similar study conducted ten years earlier. Although Paganism most certainly witnessed explosive growth around this time, there are many reasons to question Paganism’s status as the fastest-growing religion, including social factors that shape data collection and the interpretations that scholars applied to the data. This article analyzes the data that Pagan studies scholars used to proclaim Paganism’s growth, and suggests that the claim represents a legitimation tactic. By suggesting that a group is growing quickly, a fairly meagre population is given increased importance. This enhances the perceived significance of both the community in question and any scholars who specialize in studying that community. Although Paganism is not the only religion to assert this claim, and this statement is no longer as prominent as it once was, publications from Pagan studies that make this proclamation offer case studies which demonstrate how scholars manipulate data to legitimize the topics about which they write.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it