Thursday last week the Public Religion Research Institute and
the Brookings Institution released
a new survey on
the intersections of religion, values, and attitudes toward capitalism,
government, and economic policy.
On July 18, the religion, policy and
politics project at Brookings co-hosted an event with
the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) to release the new survey and
accompanying report co-authored by Brookings Senior Fellows E.J.
Dionne and William Galston and PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones,
PRRI Research Director Daniel
Cox, and PRRI Research Associate Juhem Navarro-Rivera.
The 2013 Economic Values Survey tackles
a range of topics, including perceptions of economic wellbeing and upward
mobility, the role of government, how well capitalism is working, the
importance and availability of equal opportunity, values that should guide
government policy on economic issues, and specific economic policies.
With its large sample size, the survey explores a range of fault lines on
these issues, including racial and ethnic or generational divides.
Additionally, the survey takes up the question of the existence and
vitality of religious progressives, compared to religious conservatives, and
examines the relationship between theological beliefs and the views of both
groups on capitalism and economic policy.
Nearly six out of 10
Americans (59 percent) say that being a religious person “is primarily about
living a good life and doing the right thing,” as opposed to the more than
one-third (36 percent) who hold that being religious “is primarily about having
faith and the right beliefs.”
Religious
conservatives are far more likely than religious
progressives to say religion is the most important thing in their lives.
“Among people of faith in general there is a
strong consensus on the need for compassion and fairness for those in need,”
Dionne said, even among conservatives. He said that more than 60 percent of
both theological conservatives and social conservatives “support increasing the
minimum wage to $10 an hour.”
Both groups also by large margins see the gap
between the rich and poor as growing, and see a role for government in taking
care of people who can’t take care of themselves.
While Dionne said that this pattern is not
consistent — three in five Americans, for example, think that government has
“gotten bigger because it has gotten involved in things that people should do
for themselves” — he suggested there was at least an opening to use religion as
a bridge across the ideological divide.
Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI, said that Americans’ two views of what
makes a person religious harken back to the Protestant Reformation and
to the Bible itself.
“This has been a perennial debate through the ages in Christianity,”
said Jones. “The Pauline literature, especially in the Book of Romans, makes the case for religious justification by faith alone, while
the Book of James seems to state the very opposite — ‘faith
without works is dead.’”
The religious conservatives are holding an advantage over religious
progressives in terms of size and homogeneity. “However, the percentage of
religious conservatives shrinks in each successive generation, with religious
progressives outnumbering religious conservatives in the millennial generation.
“Religious progressives are significantly younger and more diverse than their
conservative counterparts,” Jones said.
Forty-seven percent of the Silent Generation (ages 66 to 88) are religious
conservatives, compared with 34 percent of Baby Boomers, 23 percent of Gen Xers
and 17 percent of Millennials.
While the Christian right makes up 28 percent of the population and
garners more cultural attention — Jones found that there are 27,000 global
monthly Google
searches for “Christian Right” compared with just over 8,000 searches for
“Christian left” – religious progressives are only 9
percentage points behind, with 19 percent of the population.
“What we see is not a one-to-one replacement of religious conservatives
with religious progressives,” Jones explained. Instead, the ranks of religious
conservatives over time are declining, while religious progressives maintain
their share of the population. “But there’s also this growing number of
non-religious Americans.” If the trends continue, religious progressives
eventually will outnumber religious conservatives.
The report, dubbed the “Economic Values Survey,” uses respondents’ views
on everything — from God to the Bible to the role of government in the economy
— to create a new scale of religiosity that divides Americans into four
groups: religious conservatives (28 percent), religious moderates (38 percent),
religious progressives (19 percent) and the nonreligious (15 percent.)
According to the survey, white evangelicals are
more likely to say the free market and Christian values are at odds than
black Protestants,mainline Protestants, Catholics, and
religiously unaffiliated Americans. Strangely enough lots of white Americans give a lot of
attention to the attachment to objects and like to have many gadgets from the
first hours.
Please do find:
Materialism, would be life, and aspirations
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