George Gallup, Jr. (1930–2011)

In the early 1980’s, the Galup Poll conducted several national surveys to ascertain the attitudes held by Americans eighteen and older regarding immortality. A special focus of this process pertained to “near death” and “verge of death” experiences. This book, written by George Gallup, Jr. with William Proctor, flows out of those poll results. Gallup attempts to organize information gleaned from the poll results and the accounts of “near death” experiences, in order to form a sense of what an afterlife might look like if these people actually had a true glimpse of the “other side.” He also has chapters detailing the responses of scientists & physicians (these groups differ somewhat from each other), clergy/theologians/religious traditions, and psychologists/psychiatrists to “near death” stories. A lengthy appendix presents poll data, broken up into different groups by various factors (age, gender, religion, education, income, rural/urban, etc.).

The accounts themselves are interesting; some are utterly fascinating. They can even be quite moving when contemplating loved ones who are gone before, or one's own eternal future. There are some statistics I found surprising. For instance, one often hears about clinically-dead people going “through a tunnel” “toward a bright light,” but such scenes occurred only a small fraction of the time in the poll findings. However, I find it odd that Gallup chose to include accounts for crisis “out of body” experiences where there is no indication that death was even near.

Gallup endeavors to appear neutral in recounting the results. However, IMO, certain biases seem to come through -- surprising, for such an experienced pollster. For instance, the religious analysis mainly deals with Judeo-Christian concepts. The survey data for the 1980’s-1981 polls breaks down religious groups only into Christian subsets; curious, since data for polls from the 1950’s and 1960’s (when our nation seemed much less diverse) at least had categories for those identified as Jewish and “None/other.”

Gallup’s analysis of the stoires compared to religious traditions does include a section on Judaism, as well as the categories “Evangelical,” “Traditional Catholic,” and “Liberal Protestant and Catholic.” But his biases seem most evident as he comments, “We won’t consider any of the non-Western religions, because, perhaps because of the demographics of our surveys or for some other reason, there is relatively little correlation between their views of the afterlife and our specific near-death reports.” Also, his treatment of the “Liberal” category leaves a lot to be desired, dismissing them as simply picking out the parts of the Bible and dogma that they want to believe. At one point he quotes “Liberal” theologian Paul Tillich in a way that is totally out of context and utterly distorts his meaning. (I can’t fault Gallup for finding Tillich difficult to understand; but perhaps he should have allowed someone with theological knowledge to explain what Tillich meant by the statement cited.

Though Gallup clearly gives science it’s due in stating the possible non-mystical explainations for the events described in the “near death” accounts, I strongly feel that the book would have benefitted from a more even-handed, pluralistic treatment of the subject matter on the religious side.… (meer)