Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
October 9, 2004 Saturday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Column 2; National Desk; Beliefs; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 1088 words

HEADLINE: Under God, but divisible: Where different categories of Christians stand on social issues.

BYLINE: By Peter Steinfels

BODY:


Ever wonder where Bible-believing, church-attending evangelical Protestants stand on taxing the rich to help the poor? Or whether Latino Catholics have grown more or less favorable toward legal abortion over the last 12 years? Or what single religious group has grown more negative toward gay rights during that period?

For some time, the go-to guy for answers to such questions has been John C. Green, professor of political science at the University of Akron and director of its Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

Recently, Professor Green released a report, ''The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004.'' It stemmed from the Fourth Annual National Survey of Religion and Politics. The Bliss Institute and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life were co-sponsors.

Conducted in March, April and May, the telephone survey gathered information from a random sample of 4,000 adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Professor Green's report is rich in interesting findings. His survey found that traditionalist evangelical Protestants, 12.6 percent of the population, were the sole religious group to rank cultural issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage above domestic and foreign policy issues as the nation's leading problems.

As for the questions above, 46 percent of the same very conservative group said they favored additional government spending to fight hunger and poverty, even if that meant higher taxes on the wealthy, compared with 33 percent opposed.

Latino Catholics have become more supportive since 1992, by 10 percentage points, of legal limits on abortion. And African-American Protestants are the lone religious group whose backing for gay rights has dropped since 1992, by 19 points.

The greatest achievement of the report may simply be the map of the ''American religious landscape'' that had to be drawn up before tracking political attitudes.

Labels like fundamentalist, born-again, evangelical, religious right, regular churchgoer, progressive Catholic, mainline Protestant, New Ager and ''none,'' with no religious attachment, are frequently tossed around without much precision and despite some considerable overlap. Professor Green began by first sorting the denominational or religious self-identifications of his 4,000 respondents in 10 groups.

White non-Latino Christians fell in these three categories:

$(6$)Evangelical Protestants, 26.3 percent of the population, including Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Missouri Synod Lutherans and many smaller denominations, as well as independent nondenominational churches of similar outlooks.

$(6$)Mainline Protestants, the once dominant denominations of Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Lutherans and others, now constituting 16 percent of the population.

$(6$)Roman Catholics, 17.5 percent of the population.

Black Protestants, 9.6 percent; Latino Protestants, 2.8 percent; and Latino Catholics, 4.5 percent, were each grouped separately, because each displays a distinctive religious and political profile.

The Other Christians group, at 2.7 percent, included Eastern Orthodox, Latter-Day Saints, Christian Scientists and others, highly diverse theologically, but, Professor Green said, quite similar in political orientation. Other Faiths, also 2.7 percent, included non-Christian groups like Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians and New Agers, again religiously diverse and with a considerable political resemblance.

Jews, at 1.9 percent, were listed separately because of their distinctive politics. The 10th grouping was Unaffiliated, at 16 percent.

Professor Green did not stop there. The survey asked questions about belief in God, afterlife, biblical authority, the devil, evolution and truth of other religions. It asked about behavior like worship attendance, financial contributions, personal prayer and so on, and about the importance of religion in the respondents' lives. Finally, the survey asked respondents how they placed themselves religiously, as fundamentalists, conservatives, liberals, progressives or the like, and whether they stressed preserving tradition or adapting it to changing times.

This data let Professor Green break down his Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant and Catholic categories into subcategories of Traditionalists, Centrists and Modernists. Not surprisingly, among Evangelical Protestants, Traditionalists were the largest segment, at 12.6 percent of the population, but did not outnumber the combined Centrists, 10.8 percent, and Modernists, 2.9 percent. Among Mainline Protestants and Catholics, Traditionalists were fewer than Modernists, but Centrists well outnumbered both.

Data on belief and practice also let Professor Green refine his Unaffiliated category. Unaffiliated Believers, 5.3 percent of the population, did not consider themselves adherents of any particular religion but reported a high level of religious belief nonetheless. Atheists and Agnostics, at 3.2 percent, were quite clear about not believing, while Seculars, with 7.5 percent, expressed some modest degree of belief or practice while not claiming to belong to any faith.

With 4 of the original 10 categories subdivided into three apiece, that makes 18 groups altogether.

Objections will come, of course, from people who seeking further distinctions -- among non-Christian faiths like the different branches of Judaism -- or from people who would want the questions distinguishing Traditionalists from Modernists to be specific to a religion like asking Roman Catholics about papal infallibility. Professor Green tried some of these still-more-refined approaches and found that they made little substantial difference, at least for measuring political attitudes.

The greater objection to this map of the religious landscape is quite likely to be that it is simply too complex. Eighteen religious groupings! Who can expect reporters, commentators and public figures -- anyone but the academic experts, in fact -- to grasp something so complicated?

To which one can reply only that there are 30 professional baseball teams in two leagues and six divisions. There are 32 professional football franchises in the eight divisions of two conferences.

And there are millions of semiliterate 13-year-olds who manage to keep all that straight -- along with professional basketball and hockey teams and who knows what else. It's all a matter of expectations.