Steinfels on "Religion and Political Attitudes"

Peter Steinfels's column in today's New York Times discusses a new report, "The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004," which stems from the Fourth Annual National Survey of Religion and Politics and which was co-sponsored by the Bliss Institute and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The report's most noteworthy contribution, it appears to me, is not so much the data it provides about what members of various religious groupings think about various issues (though this data certainly merits study). Rather, as Steinfels describes it, the report's real achievement is to highlight, document, and sort out the remarkable complexity of America's religious "landscape." Everyone knows that we in America are not, as was once thought, "Protestant, Catholic, Jew." But this report does more than note the passing of this myth; it documents and identifies 18 (!) different groupings, sorted not simply by denomination or tradition, but also broken down as "Traditionalists, Centrists and Modernists." Take a look.

Rick