Taking America's religious temperature seems to be all the rage as 2001 winds down, with at least four different polls gauging public opinion on faith-related issues released within the past month.
The mixed bag of numbers and approaches offers up a potpourri of information, but there are two conflicting headlines that seem, at first blush, to muddy the water. While one survey shows that Americans say religion is a more important factor in society than at any time in the past 40-plus years, another says a hefty number of U.S. adults have no religious affiliation.
Go figure.
Diana Eck, anthropologist of religion at Harvard University, has said that Americans "now form the most profusely religious nation on Earth." It also seems to be the most provocatively puzzling, with disagreements even among the religious themselves about what constitutes true "religion."
But back to the numbers.
When asked in November, a whopping 78 percent of respondents said religion's influence in American life is growing, up from 37 percent eight months earlier. Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the survey includes Gallup Poll numbers dating back to 1957, which show the most recent reading at its highest point since that year.
At the same time, the American Religious Identification Survey 2001, shows 81 percent of Americans identify with a particular religious group, down from 90 percent in 1990. In sheer numbers, that means 29.4 million adults represent "the secular, the unchurched, the people who possess no faith in any religion," according to the survey.
While the numbers seem contradictory on the surface, some would argue they are played out daily in the headlines. Battles over nativity displays, Christmas carols, school prayer and the place for the Ten Commandments continue to rage in what have come to be known as the "culture wars." Yet the complexity of our society belies attempts to corral all the "religious" into one camp and the "secular" into another. We are too variously "religious" and "secular" to weave black and white cloth from America's religious tapestry.
Still, attempts to take America's religious temperature will continue, as if by measuring the mercury's rise and fall enough times, we might be able to predict the future of faith.
Sept. 11 has shown us that just isn't so.
The Pew survey was conducted two months after that fateful day, while the the Religious Identification numbers were put together from February through June. To say the terrorist attacks — and the unprecedented number of people flocking to church in the weeks following — would not have changed some of those opinions seems naive.
Now the most vexing question many researchers want to get a handle on: how pervasive and long-lasting was Sept. 11th's impact on our collective religiosity, and will it become the "turning point" that many conservative Christians have made it out to be, or just another blip on the tachometer of what seems to be America's ever-evolving dance with the divine?
Reports by various media in recent weeks have suggested that most Americans have returned to "pre-attack" patterns of church attendance: if you didn't go before, you probably don't go regularly now, and if you did you still do. Yet even researchers will acknowledge there is no reliable gauge of a person's ability to turn either toward or away from the divine — or, for that matter, those who seem to be "the enemy."
Consider two other polls released just this week that survey the attitudes of those who profess belief in the two faith traditions considered most relevant to the current question of how to deal with terrorism.
The numbers bear out some "predictable" attitudes, but highlight others that clash with larger public perception.
In what was billed as "the first ever systematic poll of American Muslims," released Wednesday, two-thirds said a change in America's policy in the Middle East is the best way to wage the war against terrorism. The same poll said 58 percent of those surveyed approved of the way President Bush handled the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, and two-thirds agree with the Bush Administration's assertion that the war is being fought against terrorism, not Islam.
Project MAPS was coordinated through Georgetown University's Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, and also measured American Muslim sentiment regarding government and social issues. Respondents "favor big government solutions to issues like health care and poverty but are conservative on other social issues like the death penalty, gay marriage, abortion, and pornography," organizers said. They also report "significant involvement in the broader community through donations to non-Muslim social service programs and participation in the American political process."
The American Jewish Committee's 2001 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion shows 85 percent of American Jews approve of President Bush's handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, and 91 percent support U.S. military action against Afghanistan. More than two-thirds believe the U.S. should mount a broader war against terrorist groups and the nations that support them.
"While there continues to be strong support for the Israeli government in its quest for peace, there also remains a high level of distrust, consistent with AJC surveys in recent years, regarding the Palestinian leadership and the Arab world's intentions," according to a summary of the survey.
Even so, U.S. Jews are "almost evenly divided in reacting to the assertion by some that Yasser Arafat is Israel's Osama Bin Laden. 50 percent disagree." Results also show that 53 percent favor the establishment of a Palestinian state.
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com