Thursday, February 24, 2011

moral issues in Wisconsin

It's a fortuitous time for those nerds out there scanning the headlines for instances of religion in politics. (BTW, just read this morning in American Grace that there's more religion in politics than politics in religion. More on that later, maybe.) From the Department of the Obvious, we have abortion, the most religiously-charged political issue in the history of issues, with same-sex marriage coming a close second. I mention these two issues because according to Putnam and Campbell, authors of American Grace, they track most reliably with religious observance: Those people who identify themselves as "highly religious" oppose them more frequently than the rest of the population. (Specifically on abortion, the highly religious are five times more likely to oppose all or most abortions than the, uh, lowly religious.)

Other issues do not show such a dramatic difference. On immigration, for example, the religious share opinions with the irreligious. Even on issues of poverty & whether the government should confront inequality, the data show that it makes little to no difference whether or not you're a believer, even though 91% of respondents said they'd heard a sermon over the pulpit on hunger & poverty in the last year.

In God's Politics Jim Wallis argues that a Christian's spectrum of politics should cover more than just these two issues. It is fascinating, then, to see the outpouring of support for the Wisconsin unions from the religious establishment, as reported here by Religious Dispatches and here by Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel. Absent this list of Catholic, Episcopal, Jewish, and various mainline Protestant (Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians) supporters is an evangelical presence.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

smart people keep going to church

According to this study. Again this defies the eager hopes of those who believe Western Enlightenment must necessarily lead us on a Hegelian progressive march toward atheism.

The 2008 ARIS study shows that the educated elite (those with postgraduate degrees) church at near the same rate as the rest of the country, though there are interesting differences. For example, 19% of the elite are mainline Christian (Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.) whereas only 13% of the American population are. (In other news, mainline Protestantism continues to lose members.) In the category of "other Christian," which is probably too broad to be interesting, educated elites identify at 25%, the American population 38%. (I assume this last difference can be explained by the smaller percentage of the elite who identify as fundamentalist evangelical.) The elite identify as "nones"---i.e., no religious affiliation---only 2% more (17%) than the population at large (15%).

Interestingly enough, according to this study, educated elites have religious marriages (86%) more often than the rest of the population (72%). And yet, not surprisingly, they accept human evolution at a higher rate (48%) than the rest of America (38%).