Earlier this year Baker Books sent a survey to about 15,000 of our readers, and we were pleased to see a solid response. I want to share a few findings from one of the questions that I hope others will find as interesting as I did.

(Special props go to the brilliant Scott Belsky for encouraging us to conduct a survey in the first place and to analytic wizard Kurt Wilson for shedding light on the data, to say nothing of the pie chart below!)

The findings have to do with how our readers self-identify when it comes to their beliefs.

Here’s the question we asked: How Would You Categorize Your Faith Tradition (Check all that apply)?

And here’s how the responses came in: 

While “Evangelical” and “Reformed” are dominant, as expected, the number 3 category was “Other,” which arguably could be combined with “Spiritual but not religious.” That alone is worthy of some reflection. One of our largest constituencies is made up of people who selected a nontraditional category for their beliefs.

Also, remember the question’s prompt to “check all that apply”?

What this pie chart does not show is that just over 27 percent of participants selected two or more categories. In other words, a third of our readers essentially told us, “I do not fit into any single category.” Single category, shmingle shategory. Or something like that.

Several observations:

• The readers we serve are a complex group who in many ways mirror the complexity of America’s religious landscape.
• Our most dominant constituency by a large margin is people who self-identify as evangelicals. Our focus to serve them first and foremost is well placed. We welcome all readers, of course, but our core readership is evangelical.
• We have a solid Reformed constituency—a readership that goes right back to our founder, Herman Baker, and his own tradition, not to mention that of a substantial subculture here in West Michigan.
• Let’s hear it for the mainliners! (I write as an evangelical Episcopalian.)
• And finally, if our mission is to serve all our readers, and it is, we should be willing to paint outside traditional lines from time to time.

To my knowledge this if the first large-scale reader survey Baker Books has ever conducted, so we don’t have data to which we can compare the current data. But my hunch, for example, is that as recent as thirty years ago we would not have seen resistance to a singular category like we see above.

My hope is to conduct future such surveys, and if we do it will be interesting to see how our reader base changes through time. We can rest assured it will.

But here’s the most important thing for me to say, perhaps. When I look at data and pie charts like those above and consider the very real people they reflect, I do my best to glean all I can about the people who read the books we publish. I study and analyze, calculate and consider. But eventually my analytical eyes close.

And I pray. I say a prayer of gratitude for the privilege to do what we do. I pray for the strength and wisdom we need to serve our readers well. And I pray for the kingdom of God to continue spreading, now and forever. Amen.