Fact Checker: Mike Pence says America has found religion

Democracy Dies in Darkness
	The truth behind the rhetoric

Mike Pence says America has found religion “Religion in America isn’t receding. It’s just the opposite,” the vice president said at a conservative Christian college in Michigan, citing statistics about the share of Americans who pray, read the Bible and attend church. Alas, this was an apocryphal claim. It all began with an article in the Federalist (“New Harvard Research Says U.S. Christianity Is Not Shrinking, But Growing Stronger”), which discussed findings from two academics. Pence misinterpreted their work. The academics actually found that, except for a core group of true believers, religion was fading away in the United States. In fact, their study suggests that as religion has become more politicized in the United States, more moderates have abandoned it — not at all what Pence claimed. “Our data do not support the conclusion that religion is on the rise in the United States,” one of the researchers, Landon Schnabel at Indiana University at Bloomington, told The Fact Checker. Our earthly judgment for this claim was Two Pinocchios.

Did an ACLU settlement with Chicago cause murders to rise?

The year 2016 was a dark one for Chicago, as the homicide rate surged nearly 60 percent. In a speech, Attorney General Jeff Sessions offered an explanation: An ACLU settlement with the Chicago Police Department had imposed requirements on officers’ use of stop and frisk. “If you want crime to go up, let the ACLU run the police department,” Sessions said. “If you want public safety, call the professionals.”

For support, Sessions cited an unpublished research paper that argues Chicago began to see a dramatic reduction in stop-and-frisk practices, and an increase in homicides, because of the ACLU settlement. This deal required police to document and collect data on all such stops, and the theory goes that these record-keeping requirements demoralized cops to the extent that they became much more averse to patting down suspects.

But other studies that analyzed the same murder spike in Chicago, including one from the Justice Department in 2017, did not blame the ACLU settlement and instead outlined a multitude of factors. We found that other cities that imposed similar or tougher limits on stop and frisk did not see a comparable rise in their homicide rates.

Sessions gave an ominous warning about the dangers of placing checks on the police. But to prove this theory requires more than one example. We gave him Three Pinocchios.

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