It should be said at the outset that the new poll released today by the Bliss Institute and Public Religion Research concerning religious activists (on both the left and the right) contains very little that will surprise anyone who has studied religion and politics in recent years.
That should not be taken to mean that there is nothing of worth in the poll results. Far from it. It confirms, for example, much that observers have had to intuit or scratch out from other data. The religious right—pardon me, conservative religious activists—is mostly evangelical (54%), with lesser contingents of Catholics and mainline Protestants. If you’re not standard-grade Christian, however, you’re probably not a part of the demographic: only 1% were Mormon, Orthodox, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and less than 1% were non-Christians.
Progressive believers were a much more diverse group, which is also not a surprise: 44% mainliners, 17% Catholics, 12% Unitarians/mixed faith, and so on down the line. Only 10% claimed to be evangelicals, a point we’ll come back to in a moment.
More not-shockers: conservative activists are focused like laser beams on abortion and homosexuality, while progressives are interested in poverty, health care, the environment, the economy in general, and ending the war in Iraq. Conservatives love them some individualistic ethics and free-market economics, progressives want to see structural reform. Cons are for torture and progs are against it (if that makes any sense). And the two sides have very different views about church-state relations, though interestingly enough, they both agree that faith should play a role in the public square in roughly equal numbers. [For an in-depth analysis of progressive attitudes on church-state issues see Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State—Ed.]
One last result that should not come as a surprise if you stop to think about it: conservatives report attending church far more frequently than their liberal counterparts. 52% of conservatives are in the pews more than once a week, compared to 25% of progressives. Once-a-week numbers are a little more balanced: 37-36. Does this mean that conservatives are more religious than progressives, or that there’s something about church that makes one a conservative? Nope: evangelical and Catholic churches typically offer more than one service a week. Mainline congregations, which tend to be smaller, are open for business only on Sundays.
As for the surprises, such as they are: although evangelicals are concentrated in the deep South, their activists aren’t, particularly: 26% of them live in the Midwest, while 29% of them call Dixie home. Also surprising is the rough regional parity: 27% of religious progressive activists live in the South, 20% in the Midwest, while the West splits 21-24% in the progressives’ favor. The Northeast holds 16% of progressives, and 11% of conservatives; so the religious right is somewhat more concentrated in the South, while the religious left is more distributed.
Religious lefties are upbeat about their prospects. The study says:
Progressive activists most frequently mentioned being visible and publicly influential (33%); including speaking out, organizing, reclaiming the faith from the right, or serving as an example. One thing that stood out among responses in this category was the widespread use of active verbs like “continue,” “keep on,” “maintain,” and “remain”—which indicate that progressive activists have a strong sense that they are already experiencing some visible success. One typical comment in this area was the following: “continue to network and fundraise and get the word out about progressive religious values.” Another activist called on activists to “advocate a progressive agenda while standing as people of faith; we can’t surrender the label of ‘religious values’ to fundamentalists.”
Apparently religious progressives don’t share their secular friends’ despair of finding a suitable counterweight to the religious right.
This study generated its sample by surveying members of national activist organizations, and its authors are frank about the limits of their approach. That’s remarkable given the approval ratings progressives give their organizations:
If I were Jim Wallis, I’d want to know what was behind that disappointingly low 49% approval, pronto.
Some of my friends and colleagues wonder about the concept of polls like this one. It’s true that they can be used to push a false equivalence between right and left. Objectively, the religious right has been much more effective than the religious left in recent years, despite its small numerical advantage.
I haven’t heard how this particular poll is being spun yet, but from the looks of it, my friends’ and colleagues’ concerns are somewhat misplaced. It says little if anything about the relative position of either group, preferring to describe their characteristics instead. And inasmuch as those characteristics include a committed, even passionate, constituency on the left, there’s some reason for hope here.
That hope is probably to be found outside the usual suspects on the religious left. Jim Wallis or “freestyle” evangelicals only make up 10% of the cohort, by this survey’s measure, and social Catholics only 17%. That doesn’t mean that their views should be disregarded, but journalists and others reading the latest quotes from “prominent progressive faith leaders and organizations” may want to ask some questions about how representative they are of the movement as a whole, and why they exert as much influence as they do.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the death of the mainline has been exaggerated. An interesting but perhaps impractical follow-up to this study might track the two groups through church and para-church organizations. That’s where the grassroots action is. My suspicion is that such a study would discover that outside-the-Beltway activists are far more influenced by their local leadership than the activist groups studied here. But you never know. We might be surprised.
Tags: abortion, evangelicals, jim wallis, polls, public religion research, torture
For abortion, its symptom vs. cause. Conservatives mistake a symptom for the problem and focus on "treating" (i.e., outlawing) the symptom - abortion - while progressives want to "heal" (i.e., reform) the cause - poverty, health care, jobs/economy. Which is more Christ-like?
Conservatives, or more correctly reactionaries,
generally have less effective educations being limited to a literal understanding of their scriptures. Liberals generally have had more effective educations or at least have the reasoning power to understand that primitive stories are written or generally illiterate populations. Mohammad and Joseph Smith were illiterate. Other books have questionable histories. If Moses wrote part of the Bible it was undoubtedly written in his native tongue, Egyptian. But since the earliest documents date from the Dead Sea Scrolls a thousand years later itis impossible to tell if they were written originally by Moses in 1200 BC or if they were merely handed down orally. The books to be included in the New Testament were likewise written after Jesus lived so their authenticity might be questioned. The Koran was lost in printed form for a couple of hundred years until it showed up in Venice.
Liberals are likely to know these things so they can emphasize the message of love that is found in their scriptures without emphasizing the hate and fear that is also evidenced in their holy books.
I've worked in progressive faith communities all my life. In the Central America solidarity movement, for example, the meaning of the gospels came alive for many US Americans as they entered into war zones and refugees camps, visited human rights groups, etc., and encountered the deep faith of the people. As some said, it was like "discovering Jesus still walking the streets of Nazareth."
They weren't finding the gospels by going to church but by being where Jesus was/is and following his example.
But this commitment to being 'in the streets' or in 'the world' expanded beyond narrow interpretations of religion. Just one example, women in the Catholic Church working for justice could not miss seeing that the church itself contained within it similar structures of injustice in regard to its treatment of and attitudes towards women, gays and lesbians, or anything that threatened privileged male hierarchy.
Male leaders of many communities should take a hard look as to why their approval ratings may not impress. Deeply spiritual progressive people are moving away from male-dominated leadership, to more inclusive and diverse expressions of spirituality and religiosity, to more collaborative models of leadership-among-equals, with a whole lot less emphasis on star power of individual leaders or pastors.
One reason why progressive faith communities have less visibility is because they tend to wander away from hierarchical or doctrinally self-defined religious institutions as they engage the enormous transitions and transformations in the human journey that are evident everywhere. Old frameworks of meaning are not holding as the new breaks through.
Margaret
www.ecologicalhope.org
So the good side of the church is when the people in the church ignore the church authority and its teachings, and act like human beings.
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