As the weather becomes colder, polls at Wilmington Friends have become a hot issue.  From the “Uniquely Weekly” polls to AP Statistics projects, hardly a week goes by without a link in the announcements to a series of questions that are part of a study.  One poll which many students eagerly filled out was entitled “The Whittier Poll of Religious Belief”.  The purpose of this poll was to discover the religious makeup of WFS, it asked students to identify what religions they follow—if any—and what holidays they celebrate.

The poll began by asking students which religions they practice or identify with. Graph 1 shows Christianity as the predominant religion, at 65.8%, followed by Atheism or agnosticism in second at 28.9%. This leaves Judaism coming in at a distant third, representing 5.2% of the student body.. The second graph also represents the religious denominations of Friends, however widens the spectrum to include; Presbyterian, Quaker, Methodist, and non-denominational Christian.

Looking further into the data presented, Graph 3 shows that 94.6% of WFS students celebrate Christmas. However, when this is compared to Graph one, it can be seen that only 65.8% of those who took the poll identify as Christian. This could indicate that many people celebrate Christmas as a holiday without strong religious connotation. It should also be noted that all students who identified as Atheist/ no religion celebrate Christmas. Graph 4 shows the holidays that students celebrate, broken down. 5.3% celebrate the specified Jewish holidays, which matches the percent of Jewish students. 15.8% of the students polled celebrated catholic holidays in addition to Christmas and Easter like Ash Wednesday and Lent, which is significantly less than the 27.8% of students who identified as Catholic, showing how many students who identify as Catholic do not celebrate the holidays associated.

What does this say about our school? Well, for starters, we are clearly not particularly diverse. The strong majority of the student body makeup is either agnostic or some branch of Christian, and the only other religion represented is Judaism. There are no students who identify with any Eastern religion (Hinduism or Buddhism) and no students following Islam. How aware are students of the lack of diversity of our school? Remy Davis-Tinnel ‘17 responded “I think that people are aware of the lack of diversity but I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it is just a matter of trying to get the people of our school to understand that this isn’t like the real world.”

The results of this poll point to the lack of religious diversity among the Friends students polled. While this is not necessarily something that can be changed, it is important to include the religions that are a minority at friends when acknowledging religion. The school already makes efforts to do so, with “Secret Snowflake” rather than “Secret Santa”, and “Holiday Break” rather than “Christmas Break”, but we can always do more to give representation to religions that are minorities within the school.