SALT LAKE CITY — Most Americans believe the law should offer broad protections to churches, religious organizations and people of faith. But when they’re asked to weigh in on the relationship between religion and government, this consensus begins to fall apart, according to new research from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
The survey, which aimed to offer a “30,000 foot view” on the public’s relationship with religious freedom, still holds plenty of good news for supporters of this First Amendment right. Amid contentious legal and legislative battles over how to balance protections for people of faith with protections for the LGBTQ community and other groups, the majority of U.S. adults support the principles underlying religious freedom law.
“We saw public support well above 70% on many issues, indicating that the concept of religious freedom maintains its place as a core American cultural value,” Becket reported, noting that support is, for the most part, consistent across age groups, political parties and education levels.
On the 16 survey questions querying what religious freedom laws should guarantee, results only dropped below this 70% threshold twice. Americans are slightly more divided over what role religion should play during election season and in the workplace than they are about the importance of, for example, ending faith-based discrimination or allowing people of faith to evangelize to others, researchers found.
However, public support for allowing religious organizations to discuss political topics and endorse candidates (65%) and allowing people to practice their faith at work even when it inconveniences others (63%) is still well over 50%, the survey showed.
Results are based on responses from a nationally representative sample of 1,000 U.S. adults. The survey was conducted online in October.
High levels of support are evidence that “religious freedom has survived the culture wars,” researchers said, noting that media coverage of related debates rarely acknowledges its enduring popularity.
“America has a natural seed of pluralism,” said Tim Carney, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, during a Wednesday panel in Washington, D.C., tied to the survey’s release.
Religious freedom from 30,000 feet
The new analysis comes at a time when Americans’ involvement in religious organizations is dropping and political polarization is on the rise. Religious freedom is increasingly presented as a license to discriminate rather than a shared value, especially in battles over access to birth control, abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Leaders at Becket, a law firm that’s defended the rights of religious Americans in many controversial religious liberty cases in recent years, set out to see if and how these demographic, political and legal trends affect Americans’ relationship with religious freedom. We’re missing a big picture view on this constitutional right, they said.
“When it comes to religious liberty, it has been nearly impossible to assess whether, or how, American opinion has changed,” the report noted.
This year’s survey is the first step in what Becket said will be a multi-year journey. The organization plans to repeat the analysis each fall.
“Future results will show whether religious liberty will remain a unifying value at the core of American cultural identity, or shift to a partisan and controversial topic like so many others,” researchers said.
For now, it’s fair to say that Americans are supportive of most types of protections for people of faith, at least in the abstract. Large majorities of U.S. adults want religious individuals and groups to be free to believe what they want to believe and practice what they want to practice, the survey found.
Partisan, religious and generational divides typically emerge when surveys ask about more specific religion-related conflicts. For example, Public Religion Research Institute recently found that Democrats and Republicans respond very differently to questions about whether business owners have a right to turn away gay or lesbian customers for religious reasons or whether faith-based adoption agencies should have to work with LGBTQ couples.
“While any individual religious freedom topic may be polarizing, Americans still accept and support a broad interpretation of religious freedom,” the Becket report said.
In addition to highlighting responses to individual questions, researchers used statistical tools to create index scores for Americans’ feelings about religious freedom overall and its various components.
On a 100-point scale, with 0 indicating strong opposition and 100 indicating maximum support, the score for religious freedom as a whole is 67. This figure will mean more in future years, when Becket repeats the analysis, but it’s possible to conclude that religious freedom is a widely shared American value, rather than the domain of one political party or generation.
“That score of 67 represents a pretty significant, positive support for the principles of religious freedom,” said Dee Allsop, CEO of the research firm, Heart+Mind Strategies, that conducted the survey, during the Wednesday panel.
However, certain dimensions of religious freedom law are less popular than others. While the index scores for protections enabling people to worship and talk openly about their faith are above 70, the score for policies enabling more overlap between church and state is only 58.
“There is an idea of separation of church and state that is widely held in this country that says ... the government shouldn’t touch religion,” Carney said.
The “church and state” section of the survey included questions about government funding for faith groups and religious symbols on public property. Although the question text didn’t reference specific lawsuits or policies, the queries directly relate to recent legal and legislative debates.
Just last month, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would ensure faith-based social service organizations, like homeless shelters or soup kitchens, could take part in federal grant programs even if they refuse to work with LGBTQ clients. Two-thirds (66%) of U.S. adults believe such organizations should be just as eligible to receive government funds as other organizations, according to Becket.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that a 40-foot-tall, publicly funded cross could remain standing in Maryland despite concerns that it implied a government preference for Christianity. Just over half of U.S. adults (56%) said such displays are OK, the survey showed.
Christians are 16 percentage points more likely than non-Christians to agree that religious freedom laws should enable the government to use religious symbols or language in public displays, researchers noted.
The index score was also relatively low for questions about what religion contributes to society (63.) More than 4 in 10 U.S. adults believe people of faith and religion are part of the problem when it comes to issues affecting our country today, the survey showed.
Despite these points of tension, religion experts said the survey supported their general sense that America will carry its longstanding commitment to religious freedom into the future.
“I think we are moving towards an idea of America as a mosaic” of unique practices and beliefs, said Asma Uddin, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum Institute in Washington, D.C., during the panel. “We understand the distinctive contributions” of different religious groups.