Public Religion Research has a new article out in Religion Dispatches about the recent measures passed by the Episcopal Church authorizing clergy to provide “generous pastoral response” to gay and lesbian couples and allowing the ordination of gays and lesbians. Using data from the Clergy Voices Survey we demonstrate that despite conservative criticism about the approval of these measures they are entirely consistent with the views of Episcopal clergy.

Episcopal clergy are highly supportive of the idea that “God has called and may call” to ministry gays and lesbians in committed lifelong relationships. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Episcopal clergy say that gays and lesbians should be eligible for ordination without special requirements. About 1-in-4 (23%) say that only celibate gay and lesbian people should be eligible for ordination, and only 5% say gay and lesbian people should not be eligible at all.

The views of Episcopal clergy are largely consistent with the views of clergy from most Mainline denominations. Among clergy in the seven largest Mainline Protestant denominations, all but two register majority or plurality support for ordaining gay and lesbian clergy with no special requirements. Episcopal clergy express stronger support than every other denomination except the United Church of Christ (UCC). Among the two denominational exceptions (two of the larger Mainline Protestant denominations), United Methodist and American Baptist clergy, only 33% and 28% respectively support ordination of gays and lesbians. Overall, 46% of Mainline Protestant clergy say that gays and lesbians should be eligible for ordination without any special requirements.

Tom Schaller over at fivethiryeight reviews our piece at Religion Dispatches.

The Obama campaign’s response to John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate was to argue that the Arizona senator had ruined his narrative of being the seasoned, experienced candidate by coupling himself with an unseasoned novice. An online article in Religion Dispatches written this week by Robert Jones and Daniel Cox confirms the Obama camp’s assertion that McCain ruined his story, but suggests that it had less to do with the Arizona senator’s experiential claims than his ability to present himself as a non-polarizing, post-partisan politician.

Using numbers from a post-election poll, Jones and Cox conclude that Palin damaged McCain’s brand because her style evoked the kind of polarizing politics that Americans had grown sick of–and to which, not coincidentally, Barack Obama offered himself as an antidote.

To read Schaller’s full take, click here.

Note: This article originally published at ReligionDispatches.org. Click here to read the full text.

There are different kinds of spiritual gifts, but they all come from the same Spirit. There are different ways to serve the same Lord, and we can each do different things…. If our bodies were only an eye, we couldn’t hear a thing. And if they were only an ear, we couldn’t smell a thing. But God has put all parts of our body together in the way that God decided is best. — I Corinthians 12: 4—6, 17—18 (CEV)

Third Way’s* recently released “Come Let Us Reason Together Governing Agenda” has sparked lively discussions about the policies it puts forward, but it has also cast in bold relief some tensions and factions in the growing chorus of voices that are politically progressive and religious. The two-year initiative set out to find common ground based on shared values between two groups that have traditionally been some of the fiercest political adversaries: political progressives and white evangelicals. Moreover, the project deliberately focused on some of the toughest issues that have been at the root of the worst political divisions of the last few decades (abortion and gay and lesbian issues) and more recent issues that have caused deep divides in the American electorate (torture and immigration).

Under the leadership of Rachel Laser, Director of the Third Way Culture Program, “Come Let Us Reason Together” has already accomplished two short-term goals: 1.) it has sparked serious conversations about the promise of this agenda to heal some of our nation’s deepest divides, including engaging in face-to-face conversations with members of congress in the Democratic Faith Working Group of the U.S. House of Representatives and with key members of the Obama administration; and 2.) it has highlighted an emerging evangelical center that is declaring its independence from the old Religious Right in important ways.

One unintended consequence of the project has been to highlight the existence of two streams in the left-of-center faith world. While these groups are not mutually exclusive, they flow from different sensibilities about public engagement and embody a significantly different spirit. On the one hand, some of the most vociferous critics of “Come Let Us Reason Together” have been constituted from a loose confederation of contributors to the recent book, Dispatches from the Religious Left, who generally portray a more ideological and confrontational public presence. On the other hand, the research for my own book, Progressive & Religious—based on interviews with nearly 100 religious leaders—identified a broader group of religious progressives who were largely uncomfortable with the “religious left” label and who are intentionally working to move beyond old ideological divides and build new coalitions.

Three differences between these streams are at the heart of the matter…

Click here to continue reading the full article from ReligionDispatches.org.

Note: This article originally published at ReligionDispatches.org. Click here to read the full article.

Rich Cizik. Out of Line?

The forced resignation of National Association of Evangelicals’ (NAE) vice-president Richard Cizik over remarks supporting civil unions for gay and lesbian couples sent shockwaves through the evangelical world last week. Cizik’s abrupt ouster from the NAE after 28 years of service is one more sign of the struggle for the soul of an evolving American evangelicalism.

Recent public opinion data points to the need for the current leaders to rethink their certainty about what constitutes “evangelical values”—especially if they care about not alienating the next generation.

Rich Cizik has been no stranger to controversy during his long tenure at the NAE. In early 2007, a group of Christian Right leaders called for his resignation because they claimed his work to broaden the evangelical agenda to include the environment diluted an exclusive focus on opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. At that time, the NAE board responded by reaffirming its confidence in Cizik and its commitment to a broader “biblically balanced agenda.”

But this time, with Cizik publicly saying that his views had been shifting toward supporting civil unions, NAE president Leith Anderson asked for his resignation, declaring that “there was a loss of credibility for him clearly espousing our positions and values.” Other evangelical voices on the Christian Right were more forceful, asserting that Cizik himself had become un-evangelical. Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family declared, “He no longer represents the view of evangelicalism.” Charles Colson of the Prison Fellowship claimed that Cizik was “separating himself from the mainstream of evangelical belief and conviction.”

But as I have argued elsewhere, evangelicals are not monolithic, and the question of whether Cizik’s positions represent evangelical positions, values, views, or beliefs is an empirical one. A quick appraisal of four of Cizik’s alleged departures from the evangelical mainstream in light of the data shows him clearly within the mainstream on most questions, and on the more controversial question of civil unions, in sync with the majority of younger evangelicals.

….

Click here to read the full article at Religion Dispatches.org, which includes the data showing Cizik’s views in sync with mainstream evangelical opinion, especially younger evangelicals.

Note: The complete version of this article can be found my “Dispatches from the Beltway” column at ReligionDispatches.org.

The release of the massive American Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life this week provides a new window into an old question that has preoccupied sociologists for more than a century: Can religious traditions, with their particularity and ancient roots, survive amidst the pluralism of the modern world?

The Pew Forum findings clearly cast an affirmative vote; Pew found that American religion is increasingly diverse, that most Americans have a non-exclusivist understanding of their religion (70% of the religiously-affiliated agree that many religions may lead to eternal life)—and that religion is alive and well under these conditions, with more than half of Americans continuing to say that religion is very important in their lives.

These findings cut against the grain of some of the dominant streams of sociological theory and recent public discourse. Sociologists have often tried to predict not whether, but how quickly religion might succumb to the alleged corrosive power of modern pluralism. More than a century ago, Karl Marx famously declared that religion’s last refuge was to be found in the sighs of oppressed workers as they toiled in the twilight years of a doomed capitalist system. And Max Weber lamented that amidst the tempest of competing value systems in the modern pluralistic world, trying to imitate the life of a religious exemplar like Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha was doomed for purely practical reasons.

More recently, secularization theorists believed the tumultuous atmosphere of the 1960s would finally kill off traditional religions. They too were convinced that the coexistence of so many competing belief systems in the same social space would ultimately prove destabilizing to all of them.

But despite the predictions, religion would not go quietly into that good night. By the 1980s, most of the world experienced not the decline but the resurgence of public religion, especially in literalist/fundamentalist forms that were explicitly anti-modern (and importantly, in many parts of the world, anti-colonial). Religious extremists across traditions hit the headlines so forcefully and often violently that they became the public face of religion through the 1990s.

Faced with insurmountable data, chastened theorists now allowed two tracks for modern religion: secularization/decline on the one hand or anti-modern retrenchment on the other. These basic assumptions have driven much of the contemporary public discourse about religion, from Samuel Huntington’s vision of a future marked by a “clash of civilizations” organized around monolithic religious identities to the more recent declarations by Christopher Hitchens and other neo-atheists that “religion poisons everything.”

But the recent Pew data, and my own research among progressive American religious leaders in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, demonstrate that decline and retrenchment are not the only options. A new public face of religion is emerging….
….

Read the rest of the article in my “Dispatches from the Beltway” column at ReligionDispatches.org.

You can read more about the emerging progressive religious movement in my forthcoming book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life. The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com and will be in bookstores nationwide in August 2008.

For much of the last two decades, voices that are both progressive and religious have been like the “the Whos” in Dr. Seuss’ classic Horton Hears a Who, yelling “We are here! We are here! We are here!” just to be noticed. This is how Rev. Tim Ahrens described it in an interview I conducted with him last year about the founding of We Believe Ohio in 2005 (for the full interview see my forthcoming book Progressive & Religious). But in just a few short years, the Whos have indeed been heard.

We Believe Ohio has grown from a few religious leaders responding to a single email into a broad organization that includes more than four hundred pastors, priests, rabbis, cantors, imams, and other religious leaders all over the state. These religious leaders have come together in an unprecedented way to reclaim a progressive voice for religion in the public square.

The growth of We Believe Ohio contrasts sharply with the fate of Rev. Russell Johnson, a fundamentalist megachurch pastor who had one of the biggest megaphones in Ohio in 2004. With his 2,000-member Fairfield Christian Church, Johnson ridiculed the early participants of We Believe Ohio, joking that their combined congregations could fit into a phone booth. Along with Rev. Rod Parsley—the movement’s bombastic mouthpiece who called on Ohio Christians (who he called the largest “interest group” in the state) to “lock and load” to defeat the “hordes of Hell”—Johnson was the force behind the so-called “Ohio Restoration Project,” an attempt to recruit “patriot pastors” to register one million “values voters.”

But by late 2007, Johnson had fallen. The pinnacle of Johnson’s work turned out to be supporting the failed bid of Kenneth Blackwell for governor in 2006. And he found himself in a swirl of controversy: the IRS placed a lien on him and his wife for failure to pay $22,269 in income taxes and penalties from 2002 to 2004; his church and the school and hotel it owns showed a net operating loss of $1.5 million for its fiscal year ending in June 2007; official complaints were filed against his church for violating its tax-exempt status in backing Blackwell’s campaign; and although neither he nor the church officially cited problems with his leadership, Johnson resigned his post as pastor in October 2007.

In the meantime, Ohio Christians clearly voiced their preference for a candidate that shared all their values rather than a candidate running on a narrow divisive platform of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Blackwell was handily defeated by Ted Strickland, a Methodist minister who stumped as a “Golden Rule Democrat” and who, as a senator, insisted on paying for his own health coverage as long as his constituents were not covered. According to the 2006 NEP exit polls, Strickland gained fourteen points among voters who attended religious services once per week or more, compared to support these voters gave Senator John Kerry in 2004. And voters, including a majority (fifty-one percent) of weekly church attenders, overwhelmingly supported a long-overdue ballot measure to increase the minimum wage.

Especially since 2006, I have been struck (and heartened) by the contrast in the energy, new ideas, and accomplishments among progressive religious groups and the flagging, tired efforts to trot out the same old lines among the religious right….

Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.

Note: The full text of this blog can be read in my regular “Dispatches from the Beltway” column on Religion Dispatches.

E.J. Dionne’s bold pronouncement that “the era of the Religious Right is over” has been the subject of much discussion and debate. Those who agree cite the growing support for broadening the evangelical agenda to include issues like the environment (a.k.a. “creation care”), poverty, and HIV/AIDS. They also point to the graying of the Religious Right, most prominently the deaths of Jerry Falwell and James Kennedy, and the virtual collapse of the Christian Coalition. Moreover, prominent old guard leaders like James Dobson and Pat Robertson have seriously damaged their credibility with many evangelicals by endorsing Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and Rudy Guiliani, a thrice-married, pro-choice New York governor, while passing over fellow-evangelical candidate Mick Huckabee. No one need ask for a more bald demonstration of prioritizing power over principle from the self-proclaimed leaders of “values voters.”

Skeptics of the decline of the Religious Right, on the other hand, cite the huge infrastructure, resources, and reach the Religious Right has built over the last few decades (to take just one example, James Dobson’s sprawling conglomerate has its own zip code in Colorado Springs and a larger monthly print circulation than the New York Times) and argue that it will not so easily wither on the vine. The most jaded on the left simply assert that the Religious Right is the truest expression of the heart of the evangelical community and is thus here to stay.

If the argument that “the era of the Religious Right is over” depended solely on what one might call the “graying and greening” argument—that the leadership is aging and out of touch and that a few issues like the environment have simply been attached to a persistent static core—I too would be skeptical. I want to argue, however, that the reason I believe Dionne is right is that a more thoroughgoing and measurable shift is happening within the evangelical community, one that represents not simply a broader agenda but also a significantly different spirit and worldview.

…

Read the rest of the article at Religion Dispatches.

Note: Cross-posted at Religion Dispatches.

As I noted in last week’s Dispatches from Inside the Beltway, the official exit polls sponsored by the media have been skewed toward the Republican party in terms of religion.  The exit polls have asked more questions about religion to Republicans in every comparable state so far, and nowhere have they asked Democrats if they were “born again or evangelical.” It is time for the media to jettison this outdated script about religion and fix this bias in the exit polls.

Faith in Public Life has taken the lead in identifying and publicizing this problem, and last week following the Super Tuesday primaries they fielded their own post-election poll in MO and TN–a poll that for the first time identified evangelical voters among both Republicans and Democrats. After the poll results were released yesterday, Katie Barge (Communications Director for Faith in Public Life), Rev. Jim Walls (CEO, Sojourners), and Rev. Joel Hunter (Pastor, Northland Church; former president of the Christian Coalition), and I participated in a press call with over 30 reporters to talk about how this bias distorts our understanding of both politics and religion. You can listen to the call here.

The post-election poll found the following important findings:

• Senator Hillary Clinton’s support from white evangelicals surpassed that of Senator Barack Obama’s (MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%).
• Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the GOP has a lock on white evangelical voters, 1 in 3 evangelicals voted in the Democratic primary, something the official exit polls could not tell us. To put that into perspective, that’s 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in MO and 182,000 in TN (a number greater than, for example, all African American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state).
• Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage to include ending poverty, protecting the environment, and tackling HIV/AIDS.

These important numbers are supported by findings from other research I and others have done over the last two years. Here are three lessons the media needs to learn in order to get the religion story right this year:

1. White evangelicals are an important constituency for both parties and are no longer a lock for the GOP.

• Evangelicals are an important part of the Democratic base. In both 2004 and 2006, Democratic candidates actually received slightly more votes from white Evangelicals than from Black Protestants, an important base group for Democrats. In 2004, 14% of John Kerry’s votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 13% from Black Protestants (Green 2004). In 2006, 11.3% of Democratic House Candidate votes came from Evangelicals, compared to 11% from Black Protestants (NEP Exit Poll, 2006).
• Young evangelicals (under 30). Since 2005, affiliation with the GOP has dropped 15 points, from 55% to 40% (Pew 2006).

2. White Evangelicals are not monolithic, even on hot-button social issues.

• The one-fifth, one-third, one-half formula: up to half of evangelicals are in play. In research I co-authored with Rachel Laser, Randy Brinson, and Joe Battaglia at Third Way, we found that evangelicals are actually 1/5 progressive, 1/3 moderate, and 1/2 conservative, a pattern that held up even over hot-button social issues. These evangelical progressives and moderates make up half of evangelicals, 52 million adults.

3. There is an emerging movement among rank and file evangelicals to move beyond the narrow political issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

• The American Values Survey (AVS 2006), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life at People for the American Way Foundation, found that 8 in 10 evangelicals thought issues like poverty and affordable health care were more important in the country today that issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
• The old Religious Right leaders who are clinging to the narrow agenda of abortion and same-sex marriage are increasingly out of touch and no longer calling the shots. AVS also found, for example, that a plurality (44%) of evangelicals said that James Dobson and Pat Robertson did NOT speak for them. Also, tellingly, nearly a quarter of young evangelicals (under 30) said they did not know enough about these leaders to answer the question.

The evidence has been stacking up for some time now, as Rev. Jim Wallis put it on the call yesterday, that “evangelicals are leaving the Religious Right in droves.” While there have been some important media stories that have gotten this admittedly complex story right, the skewed exit polling we have now is sure to fuel biased reporting. If the major media outlets that fund the exit polls want to keep wrapping themelves in self-congratulatory slogans such as “fair and balanced” and “best political team on television,” they need to let go of their old script, dig deeper, and give us the unbiased coverage of religion and politics we deserve.

Note: This originally posted 2/5/08 on Religion Dispatches, a new daily online magazine dedicated to the analysis and understanding of religious forces in the world today, highlighting a diversity of progressive voices. I will be writing a regular column, “Dispatches from the Beltway,” there in 2008.
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Old plotlines die hard, especially when they have the seductive clarity of binary divides: right vs. left, Republican vs. Democrat, us vs. them. Nowhere is this tendency truer than in stories about religion. We have witnessed a real sea-change in the relationship between religion and progressive politics since 2004, and some of these shifts have been noted in major news stories, such as the growing coverage of the complexity of the white evangelical community. But too often, the mainstream media is still trying to force the current complexities and realignments into an outdated script.

In my former life as a software designer, we lived by the mantra, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Media storylines about religion and national elections, and thereby public perceptions, are driven by two major factors: exit polls (controlled by the major media outlets) and the selection of sources for stories by reporters. There is mounting evidence that much of the mainstream media is operating with a perversion of this mantra, a kind of “garbage in, gospel out” approach that begins and ends with its own self-verifying, dated stereotypes about religion in American public life.

The heart of the old script was the mythology of the so-called “moral values voters”–voters who were highly religious, Republican, and supposedly cared about prohibiting same-sex marriage and abortion above all else. We now know that despite the hype, the single exit poll question upon which those conclusions were based in 2004 was deeply flawed.

In a New York Times Op-ed four days after the 2004 election, Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News and a dissenting member of the team that drafted the questionnaire, cautioned that the inclusion on the exit poll of “this hot-button catch phrase…created a deep distortion–one that threatens to misinform the political discourse for years to come.” A series of subsequent polls, such as the American Values Survey (AVS), which I directed at the Center for American Values in Public Life in 2006, showed how distorting these assumptions were. AVS found that Americans in fact think mostly about “the honesty and integrity of the candidate” when voting their values. Even among white evangelicals, the group that was supposedly synonymous with “moral values voters,” only 1 in 5 (19 percent) thought primarily about the hot-button issues of abortion and same-sex marriage when voting their values.

Since 2004, much of the mainstream media has unfortunately continued to reinforce the assumptions that religion is only relevant to conservatives and Republicans. A recent study by Media Matters for America, “Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media,” documented the continued bias in linking conservative politics and religion. The study found that while media coverage of religion has increased significantly since 2004, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

Despite these well-known problems, in the exit polling in the 2008 primaries so far, the major media news outlets have once again pulled out their dog-eared script on religion and politics as they constructed the exit polls. In Iowa and Michigan, voters weren’t asked about religion at all. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, more questions were asked of Republican voters on faith than Democratic voters. And nowhere have Democrats been asked if they were evangelical or born again, despite the fact that in 2006 white evangelicals made up 11.3 percent of the Democratic house vote nationwide, casting slightly more votes for Democratic candidates for example than black Protestants.

Even noting the source of objections to this practice is a testimony to the new religious landscape. Leah Daughtry, Chief of Staff of the Democratic National Committee (and herself an ordained Pentecostal minister) recently lamented in a Washington Post Op-ed that the biased exit polls drove media stories that

“often fail to acknowledge that people of faith are and can be Democrats.”

Similarly, a group of prominent evangelical leaders also objected to this prejudicial polling, declaring that these surveys

“pigeonholed evangelicals, reinforcing the false stereotype that we are beholden to one political party.”

As these leaders attest, this skewed coverage is damaging both to politics and to religion and diminishes our understanding of American public life. Hopefully the media will update their script with more equitable exit polling and balanced sources heading into Super Tuesday and through the home stretch of the election cycle.