As one who formally worked in the housing projects of Washington D.C., the major piece missing from this picture would be banking/credit union stats for the areas noted on the map (they should have included it on their graph since they gathered the data). In low income and poverty stricken neighborhoods, few banks will venture in and offer banking services. So, an individual in such a neighborhood has difficulty with something as simple as cashing a check. If there is a bank, many have a difficult time just saving a minimum amount of cash needed to open an account in order to have the ability to cash checks. Many of the payday centers “sold” themselves to “risk” and low middle class neighborhoods through the service of check cashing. Then they introduced the idea of “getting your $$ earlier” to make ends meet. Locally owned businesses LOVE PayDay centers because of the increase in cash flow to their businesses. Yet, a community does not get stronger with the presence of a PayDay center because no one can begin to start saving money. Savings which could help stabilize “at risk” neighborhoods.

Often times the only way a bank makes it’s way into a “risk” area is through the formation of non-profit banks organized by local neighborhood coalitions. This can be a difficult process; although, there are some “bright lights” of successful examples around the country -especially the South Bronx.

Now, as for the relation of evangelical churches. The churches providing the most outreach in the neighborhoods I worked in happened to be evangelical churches followed by the Catholic, Mennonite, Lutheran, American Baptist, AME Zion, and Episcopal Denominations.

The large evangelical mega churches would sink vast volunteer and material resources into the neighborhoods I worked in often partnering with a “store front church” only to lead to the opening of an urban mega church. The unfortunate aspect of all of this is that the churches focused on education and many aspects of urban development but were slow to addressing financial institutions in regards to urban development. In the meantime, the PayDay loan centers grew fast in such regions, when the greatest services which outreaches could have focused on would have been community development banks. Additionally, the theology of “abundant living” through faithful living is a dangerous theology to pitch in at risk neighborhoods – a pitch often heard from evangelical leaders. When one lacks basics, the language of “abundant living” gets interpreted as material abundance and not the spiritual/internal import of “abandance.”

As for making the relationship between the data the researchers posted and politics, I have difficulty with their premise. Yes, Reps take a more proportional amount of $$$ from PayDay lobby groups but Dems still take some $$$ too…and both help set lending policy on the state and federal level…

You might enjoy this blog post:

http://heartlandofvirginia.wor…..companies/

And the National Institute on Money In State Politics has this:

http://www.followthemoney.org/…..1940d1e413

This study aside, we as citizens really need to put pressure on the Dem candidates to refuse $$$ from ANY preditory lending lobby of any kind. Especially, payday lenders.

My comments are not the result of analysis of this study or any stats I have gethered. Simply my experience in urban development and working with churches in such efforts.

If Sen. Obama was smart, he would tap his own urban development experience and shut down payday and preditory lending and focus on urban development banking organization…

Also, the data in the paper does not show that the payday lenders victimize members of the movement. They do show that in states where the federal delegation gets a high rank on conservative social issues (from several sources) that those states have permissive regulation of lenders. However, the majority of districts most affected by those lenders are represented by Democrats. That suggests the voters who are targetted by payday lenders do not support the Christian conservative political agenda, because they in fact elect Democrats in those districts, even if the state as a whole has a Republican majority.

But watch, as people with better education (and a more tolerant and enlightened version of Christianity) move into those states as the trend reverses itself.

I give them some credit for the way they handled the history of Christian theology on usury. The truth is their history stopped where it did because the issue became largely irrelevant. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who discusses the issue outside the context of the viewpoints Bentham laid out in 1787. The traditional view won the day and the issue faded.

On the surface, it really is surprising that a political movement partakes in the mythology of an explicitly Christian founding of the country would allow the repeal of usury laws supported by the founding fathers and the Bible, especially if the payday lenders victimize the members of that movement (something the data suggests, at least). I pointed to the other paper because I think it’s more important than the statistical analysis. The deceit with which the usury laws were undermined in the “Bible belt” is telling.

EW, rotl, and WO, I agree with all of you that their choice of Christian groups of interest is frustrating. The blurring of terms as they get filtered through the media from the groups to whom they have real meaning is lost on those unfamiliar with such terms.

For example, when I was a kid, my dad always made a very clear distinction between conservative Christians and fundamentalists. At that time, evangelicals were a different group entirely. Yet, political operatives managed to make all three one and the same in the media, which has led to a tremendous distortion in the public imagination of not only those groups, but Christianity as a whole. Mainline Protestants might just as well not exist from the media depiction of people of faith, while Catholics have simply been pushed aside by the “Religious Right” juggernaut. Yet, I really think this simplistic narrative is wildly inaccurate.

To some degree I think the premise of the paper here is misguided because of the muddled view of the distinctions between mainline Protestant Christian theology with respect to historical attitudes toward usuary and the expectation of the modern political “Religious Right” movement to share those historical attitudes. As rotl pointed out quite eloquently there are profound distinctions between traditional evangelicals and the modern political evangelicals, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg in wildly varying religious interpretations and values, all of which influence Christian voters as a whole.

As to the Mormons–that’s a choice they simply have to defend. It means that they’ve demonstrated not a “correlation between payday lending and mainline christians” but a “correlation between payday lending and a particular linear combination of mainline christians and Mormons.” As far as I can see there’s nothing statistically invalidating in it, but merely something that muddies the interpretation.

To me the biggest interpretation question comes in their failure to control for poverty and non-white populations, two quantities already well-known to correlate to payday lending. The question really is, once you control for those, is there a statistically significant residual correlation? Their response to this is that their CPI is a better predictor than either one of those. That response isn’t really sufficient, leaving unanswered two specific questions: (1) is it still better than the combination of the two? and (2) is the amount by which it is better statistically significant?

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem tells you that combining ranks is a dangerous thing to do, whether it’s voting preference or christianty you’re trying to rank.

The statistics of the paper all boil down to the result that the correlation between CPI and payday lending is 0.56. Everything else is interpretation.

The correlation coefficient they report, 0.56 (Spearman, not Pearson!), comes with an uncertainty (standard deviation) of about 0.1. That is, with 68% certainty it’s between 0.46 and 0.66 . As EW points out they also observe lesser correlations with quantities such as poverty, but never give the magnitude of those correlations. If those others are in the neighborhood of, say, 0.46, then it’s impossible to conclude that the correlation to the CPI (Christian Power Index) is really larger.

Furthermore, to isolate the purely christian component, they really ought to control for obvious known correlators–in this case, poverty and percent-non-white–to really measure the christian component.

As phred mentioned, their CPI is made up of three components. There should really be a discussion of (a) how they chose the weighting (equal, in their case) and (b) the correlations to the three individual components of the index. Sometimes you think you’re correlating to some combination of things, but in fact you’re mostly just correlating to one thing. The correlations among the three factors themselves should also be mentioned.

A couple of things in presentation would never get by me if I were a referee. First, they show an amusing plot of # of McDonalds – Payday lenders. They should really normalize the total number of one to the other. Not a serious mistake, but kind of an amateur one.

More serious is that Figure E is the key one to demonstrate the correlation. If you look at it (and have some experience looking at such things), you will instantly say to yourself, “there’s NO WAY that correlation coefficient is 0.56!” It turns out they plot rank vs rank rather than payday lending concentration vs CPI. Given that they measure Spearman and not Pearson correlations, it’s actually the right thing to do. But it begs the question: why measure correlation from ranks and not simply the quantities they have? Visually, ranks generally expand the central portion and compress the ends of a distribution, making it nearly impossible to judge in a figure whether they’ve actually measured the correlation correctly. (Put another way: that plot would be practically visually indistinguishable if the correlation were 0. That’s not the case for Pearson correlation.)

I do have to say–normally when I read a paper like this, I find at least one absolute howler of a mistake that just makes me stop reading and conclude it’s all garbage. That didn’t happen with this paper–there are questions and some important things left out, but nothing made me think that their correlation of 0.56 +- 0.10 was wrong. The lack of controlling for other known correlators does, however, make me think the interpretation of that coefficient may be overdone.