WASHINGTON (RNS) A slim majority of evangelicals favor government shutdown over a budget compromise, according to new research by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.<\/p>\n
The U.S. government will shutter all non-essential services at midnight, Friday (April 8th) if congressional Republicans and Democrats cannot reach an agreement on the U.S. budget for the 2011 fiscal year.<\/p>\n
With a potential shutdown imminent, 51 percent of evangelicals want lawmakers to “stand by their principles” while 39 percent favored a compromise, according to poll data analyzed by Christianity Today<\/em>.<\/p>\n Overall, 55 percent of Americans favored a compromise while 36 percent are opposed.<\/p>\n Evangelicals are the most supportive of all major Christian groups for a government shutdown, with other religious groups closer to the national average.<\/p>\n More than 70 percent of black Protestants want lawmakers to compromise, along with 63 percent of Catholics and 52 percent of mainline Protestants. <\/p>\n White Protestants overall prefer a compromise even if respondents disagreed with the budget eventually passed, according to Christianity Today<\/em>.<\/p>\n The survey also found that the majority of Republicans supported a shutdown, while 69 percent of Democrats want their lawmakers to choose compromise.<\/p>\n The overall sample of 1,507 adults had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, with larger margins for individual sample groups.<\/p>\n – RICHARD YEAKLEY<\/strong>, Religion News Service<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WASHINGTON (RNS) A slim majority of evangelicals favor government shutdown over a budget compromise, according to new research by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The U.S. government will shutter all non-essential services at midnight, Friday (April 8th) if congressional Republicans and Democrats cannot reach an agreement on the U.S. budget…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,5,3,9],"tags":[315,317,313,25,316,46,2202,314],"class_list":["post-2820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-news","category-politics","category-research","category-rns","tag-budget","tag-evangelicals","tag-government","tag-law","tag-pew-research-center","tag-research-2","tag-rns","tag-shutdown"],"yoast_head":"\n