I have two polity-heavy posts that I have been working on and decided to take a break from those to exercise the other side of my brain and crunch some numbers…

In the initial letter introducing the Fellowship PC(USA) the statement is made

“Homosexual ordination has been the flashpoint of controversy for the last 35 years.”

On most levels I take issue with this because in a larger sense Presbyterians around the world have throughout their history been debating scriptural and confessional imperatives and implications and this is only the latest specific detail over which the discussion is continuing.

But on a more practical level this statement seems to hold a fair amount of validity to me based on my personal experience.  For the last several votes on changing Book of Order section G-6.0106b it has always struck me that my own presbytery had significantly higher attendance for the amendment vote meeting than for regular meetings.  Even at the beginning of the debate, for our vote to include the current “fidelity and chastity” language in the constitution we had 284 commissioners vote.  A couple of meetings later a very contentious issue had 202 commissioners vote.  The pattern still continues today as I have had more than one commissioner ask me when our presbytery is voting and when I mention the different meetings for the different amendments they tell me they only want to know about Amendment 10-A.

Well, with the voting this year I have an ideal data set to test whether this observation holds in other presbyteries as well.  Short answer – YES!

First, the usual comments on the data I use:  My data is aggregated
from numbers from Twitter as well as vote counts at the Covenant Network, Yes on 10-A, Reclaim Biblical Teaching and the Layman.
This aggregation is available in my spreadsheet through this past weekend’s
reports.  Because I will be looking at voting on all three major issues — Belhar, nFOG and 10-A — the Layman and Reclaim Biblical Teaching charts provide the full data set.  (Note how this in itself is suggestive of my hypothesis about the focus on the 10-A voting as that is the only one followed by all four of these sources.)

Now there are 55 recorded votes for the Belhar Confession, 62 for the nFOG, and 115 for 10-A.  (Again, suggestive of the higher-profile nature of 10-A and the need for a recorded vote.)  Of these we have 39 recorded pairings of Belhar and nFOG, 36 pairings of Belhar and 10-A, and 45 pairings of nFOG and 10-A.

For those 39 presbyteries with recorded votes on Belhar and nFOG the ratios between the two range from having 31% more votes for Belhar to having 40% less.  But the average and median are right at 1.00 indicating that on balance the turnout is the same for those two issues with a fairly symmetric distribution around that.

For the 36 presbyteries that have recorded votes on both 10-A and Belhar there are, on average, 12% more commissioners voting on 10-A than Belhar with the range from 75% higher to 13% lower.  The comparison of nFOG to 10-A for those 45 presbyteries is very similar with the average 13% higher for 10-A and the range from 63% higher to 12% lower.  With medians at 7% and 5% respectively, the distributions are clearly not as symmetric, having extended tails at the higher end.

I am sure that several of you have already started complaining about the problem with the analysis that I just did – the three votes are not always three independent events but in many cases multiple votes are taken at the same meeting and so, with the exception of a few commissioners who only come for the one vote they are interested in, the total number of votes cast should be, and in several cases are, nearly identical.  (The other thing that could cause minor fluctuations is the fact that I don’t include abstentions.)

So, my first point is that in spite of not accounting for independent events the numbers are so robust that the upward shift is visible in this mixed data set.

Well, as much as I would like to separate these out into independent data sets, I have not personally kept a time history of the voting to be absolutely certain of which votes were take at the same meeting and which were not. (If any of you have that information please do the analysis of independent events and let me know how far off I am.)  I can tell you several votes were taken at the same meeting and in fact these are very obvious in the posted spreadsheet having only a vote or two variation in the numbers.  But let me try to separate out the different votes using my usual criteria that a 4 vote difference or a 4% difference is normal fluctuation and vote totals within this range will be treated as having happened at the same meeting.  Also, from here on I will only consider the comparison of the Belhar and 10-A votes for two reasons: 1) My earlier work showing the closer correlation of these two votes still holds, and 2) it is my impression, and only my impression, that presbyteries are tending to do these votes at different meetings more than splitting nFOG and 10-A. After the voting is over I’ll revisit this topic with the final data set and I suspect that we will find a bimodal distribution to help us answer this question.

So, of the 36 presbyteries with recorded votes on both Belhar and 10-A , 20 have noticeable differences in the number of votes.  Eighteen of those are higher for 10-A and two are higher for Belhar.  Of the ones higher for 10-A they range from 7% higher to 75% higher and have an average increase of 24% with a median increase of 18%.  While tempting to do the full frequency distribution analysis at this point, I will save that for a while until there are more data.

Now, accepting the fact that one of my analyses certainly includes dependent events and the other probably has unfairly eliminated independent events, it is still clear that a vote on “fidelity and chastity” brings out the commissioners more than a vote on changing the Book of Confessions.  Like it or not, we have to accept the premise from the Fellowship PC(USA) letter that there is a “flashpoint” or “lightning rod” in the denomination.

Before bringing this exercise to a close, let’s ask the obvious question – “Was the increase in commissioners who voted yes or voted no?”  The answer is both, but while there is significant variability between presbyteries, it was the no voters who tended to show up for the vote on 10-A.  And yes, this is based on the presumption that a commissioner that voted one way on Belhar was going to vote the same way on 10-A so the other way to look at this is that there was a trend for more uniform commissioner turn-out with some commissioners that voted, or would have voted, yes on Belhar to vote no on 10-A.

In terms of the specific numbers, the average number of yes votes increases 7% while the number of no votes more than doubles, rising 102%.  However, these are influenced by a couple of presbyteries with a small number of votes in a given column that when they pick up just a few more votes becomes a large ratio.  For example, North Alabama had 3 no on Belhar and 28 no on 10-A giving a nine-fold increase.  Another case is Central Washington which went from 7 yes on Belhar to 12 yes on 10-A for a 71% increase.  With the extreme values present considering the median value of each data set (the value for which half are above and half are below) is more reasonable.  Still, the median number of yes votes is up 4% and the median of the no vote increase is 28%.

So when presbyteries have important issues to discuss it appears from this data that commissioners are more likely to show up when the issue is G-6.0106b.  I have to agree that for the last few decades the “issue de jour” for the mainline Presbyterians has been sexual orientation and practice, particularly as it applied to those who hold ordained office.  But throughout the history of Presbyterianism other issues, such as church-state relations and confessional subscription and standards, have been the flashpoint over which we have debated, and divided. (It would be interesting to know if presbytery meeting attendance increased for votes on modifications to the Westminster Standards earlier in our history.)  It also leads to the interesting question of what will become the “issue de jour” if 10-A passes.  I think many would see the denomination moving on and rather than staying with modifications to G-6.0106b the next discussion point will probably be the definition of marriage (W-4.9001).  But maybe it is something else that does not come to my mind at the moment.  And the question of whether we Presbyterians need an issue as the focus of our debate is a topic for another time.  We will see what develops over the next few years.