{"id":75,"date":"2010-09-22T12:13:57","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T12:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/pew-religion-doesnt-much-matter.html"},"modified":"2010-09-22T12:13:57","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T12:13:57","slug":"pew-religion-doesnt-much-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/pew-religion-doesnt-much-matter.html","title":{"rendered":"Pew: Religion doesn’t much matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week’s Pew survey<\/a>
\non the influence of religion on Americans’ policy views is notable for
\nrevealing how little influence there is. The only areas where religion
\nappears to play a significant leading role in influencing opinion are
\nsame-sex marriage, abortion and the death penalty. Sixty percent of
\npro-lifers and 45 percent of those opposed to same-sex marriage cite
\nreligion as the most important reason for their position, while 32
\npercent of those opposed to the death penalty do the same. But only 12
\npercent of those who support additional government assistance to the
\npoor cite religion as the most important reason.<\/p>\n

Dan Schultz has a good analysis<\/a>
\nof what this glum news means for pastors who would like to think that
\nwhat they have to say about the issues of our time. What I’d like to
\nhave seen included in the poll is a question on tolerance of other
\nfaiths. What’s striking is how little difference religion seems to make
\nin Americans’ positions on anything but abortion and same-sex marriage.
\nOn other issues, its race and ethnicity that make for the differences
\n(check out black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics). <\/p>\n

P.S. The poll shows an uptick in pro-choice views since last year, from
\n47 percent who believe that abortion shout be legal in all or most case
\nto 50 percent. (Those who believe it should be illegal in all or most
\ncases slipped from 45 percent to 44 percent). This is a regression to
\nthe norm for this decade–and possibly also a reflection of popular
\nsense that the GOP (pro-life) is in the ascendancy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s Pew survey on the influence of religion on Americans’ policy views is notable for revealing how little influence there is. The only areas where religion appears to play a significant leading role in influencing opinion are same-sex marriage, abortion and the death penalty. Sixty percent of pro-lifers and 45 percent of those opposed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nPew: Religion doesn't much matter - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/pew-religion-doesnt-much-matter.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pew: Religion doesn't much matter - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last week’s Pew survey on the influence of religion on Americans’ policy views is notable for revealing how little influence there is. The only areas where religion appears to play a significant leading role in influencing opinion are same-sex marriage, abortion and the death penalty. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}