US public deplores too secular liberals and too dominant religious right

From Ekklesia - 26/08/06

An authoritative annual survey on attitudes to religion in the United States, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, has found that 69% of respondents believe that liberals are too secular, while 49% believe that religious conservatives are too assertive. A majority of those polled also expressed concern about religion's declining influence in the USA, and half of those identifying this trend are worried about the perceived decline. Other analysts argue that the religious right, in particular has far too great a shaping role on public policy.

The relationship between religion and politics remains a controversial one, says the Pew Forum. In the summary of its new report it declares: “While the public remains more supportive of religion's role in public life than in the 1960s, Americans are uneasy with the approaches offered by both liberals and conservatives.” The summary continues: “Fully 69% of Americans say that liberals have gone too far in keeping religion out of schools and government. But the proportion who express reservations about attempts by Christian conservatives to impose their religious values has edged up in the past year, with about half the public (49%) now expressing wariness about this.”

It goes on: “The Democratic Party continues to face a serious ‘God problem,’ with just 26% saying the party is friendly to religion. However, the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion, while much larger, has fallen from 55% to 47% in the past year, with a particularly sharp decline coming among white evangelical Protestants (14 percentage points).” Thinker and activist the Rev Jim Wallis, of Sojourners/Call to Renewal, has argued in his recent best-selling book God’s Politics that the right has “got it wrong” and the left “doesn’t get it” as far as religion is concerned. He has called for as less sectarian and more open approach by believers.

The national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted 6-19 July among 2,003 adults, finds that most Americans (59%) continue to say that religion's influence on the country is declining, and most of those who express this view believe that this is a bad thing. However, the public is more divided on the question of whether religion's influence on government is increasing (42%) or decreasing (45%). And in contrast to views of religion's influence on the country, most of those who think that religion is increasing its influence on government leaders and institutions view this as a bad thing.

The survey finds that religious conservatives, and white evangelical Christians specifically, have no equal and opposite group on the religious left. About 7% of the public say they identify with the ‘religious left’ political movement. That is not much smaller than the 11% who identify themselves as members of the ‘religious right,’ but the religious left is considerably less cohesive in its political views than the religious right. The survey traced the spiritual roots of the religious right and left to two broader faith communities. On the right, white evangelical Christians comprise 24% of the population and form a distinct group whose members share core religious beliefs as well as crystallized and consistently conservative political attitudes.

On the left, a larger share of the public (32%) identifies as ‘liberal or progressive Christians.’ But unlike conservative evangelicals, progressive Christians come from different religious traditions and disagree almost as often as they agree on a number of key political and social issues. These differences in the makeup of the religious left and right are an important reason why white evangelicals remain a more politically potent force. On issues ranging from the origins of life to the end of the world, evangelicals express distinctly different views from those held by the rest of the public and also other religious groups.

The religious left has been trying to galvanise and cohere its support base recently, through projects such as Faithful America. The aim is to build alliances with secular groups and to challenge the hegemony of the religious right and its claim to ‘biblical values’. Some radical Christians, including those influenced by the Anabaptist and peace church traditions, argue that the issue of how to engage in political issues is as important as the stances taken. They say that the ‘control’ model of Christendom needs to be challenged, with non-coercive witness, collaboration with non-faith groups on common causes, and the generation of attractive alternatives within the church community being core elements of a new strategy.

In the UK, the Christian think tank Ekklesia has recommended this kind of ‘new approach’ to the faith and politics standoff, suggesting in a recent discussion document and a book on post-Christendom that violent and coercive religion needs to be challenged and ‘redeemed’ from within as well as without, and that public policy towards religion needs to be in the style of ‘interested neutrality’.