UNDER GOD, BUT DIVISIBLE: Peter Steinfels

[Interesting in light of the "values voter" piece linked on Friday. --Eve]

Ever wonder where Bible-believing, church-attending evangelical Protestants stand on taxing the rich to help the poor? Or whether Latino Catholics have grown more or less favorable toward legal abortion over the last 12 years? Or what single religious group has grown more negative toward gay rights during that period?

For some time, the go-to guy for answers to such questions has been John C. Green, professor of political science at the University of Akron and director of its Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

Recently, Professor Green released a report, ''The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004.'' It stemmed from the Fourth Annual National Survey of Religion and Politics. The Bliss Institute and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life were co-sponsors.

Conducted in March, April and May, the telephone survey gathered information from a random sample of 4,000 adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Professor Green's report is rich in interesting findings. His survey found that traditionalist evangelical Protestants, 12.6 percent of the population, were the sole religious group to rank cultural issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage above domestic and foreign policy issues as the nation's leading problems.

As for the questions above, 46 percent of the same very conservative group said they favored additional government spending to fight hunger and poverty, even if that meant higher taxes on the wealthy, compared with 33 percent opposed. ...

And African-American Protestants are the lone religious group whose backing for gay rights has dropped since 1992, by 19 points.

The greatest achievement of the report may simply be the map of the ''American religious landscape'' that had to be drawn up before tracking political attitudes.

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posted by Eve at 10:43 PM VOTE

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