{"id":1274,"date":"2013-08-05T09:31:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T09:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/08\/religion-challenges-left-and-right.html"},"modified":"2013-08-05T09:31:00","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T09:31:00","slug":"religion-challenges-left-and-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/08\/religion-challenges-left-and-right.html","title":{"rendered":"Religion Challenges Left and Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Whenever I write sympathetically about religion, I get bombarded by tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea that religious belief should be seen as intellectually serious.<\/span>

<\/span>And because I have written favorably about Pope Francis, I get more than my share of angry comments about the Catholic pedophilia scandal, which continues to haunt the church and troubles even its most loyal members.<\/span>

<\/span>Getting lambasted doesn\u2019t bother me. On the contrary, citizens talking back to the purveyors of opinion is a glorious aspect of free speech. But my correspondents underscore the existence of a strong anti-religious current within a segment of the liberal community that is both an important political fact and a potential problem for progressives.<\/span>

<\/span>Here\u2019s the challenge: Americans who are left-of-center are far more religiously diverse than their opponents on the conservative side. When it comes to matters of faith, liberals and Democrats have a far more complicated task of coalition management \u2014 although religion also raises some serious difficulties for the right.<\/span>

<\/span>Consider the findings of a survey (in which I was involved) released last month by the\u00a0Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution<\/a>. Using the answers to a wide variety of questions, we created a scale that broke our respondents into four groups: Religious conservatives, moderates, progressives and the nonreligious.<\/span>

<\/span>Overall, we found that 28\u2009percent of Americans could be classified as religious conservatives, 38\u2009percent as religious moderates and 19\u2009percent as religious progressives. An additional 15\u2009percent were nonreligious.<\/span>
Among supporters of the two parties, Republicans were far more cohesive. The analysis found that 56\u2009percent of Republicans were religious conservatives and 33\u2009percent were religious moderates. Only 5\u2009percent were religious progressives and just 6\u2009percent were nonreligious.<\/span>

<\/span>Democrats, by contrast, were all over our analytical map: 28\u2009percent were religious progressives, 13\u2009percent were religious conservatives, 42\u2009percent were religious moderates and 17\u2009percent were nonreligious.<\/span>
Among self-identified political liberals, the proportion of nonreligious \u2014 essentially, the folks sending me those messages \u2014 was even larger: 31\u2009percent of liberals were nonreligious, 33\u2009percent were religious progressives, 30\u2009percent were religious moderates and 6\u2009percent were religious conservatives.<\/span>

<\/span>Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I write sympathetically about religion, I get bombarded by tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea that religious belief should be seen as intellectually serious.And because I have written favorably about Pope Francis, I get more than my share of angry comments about the Catholic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nReligion Challenges Left and Right<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Whenever I write sympathetically about religion, I get bombarded by tweets and notes from readers who normally agree with me but cannot abide by the idea\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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