I had the privilege of presenting the findings of a poll conducted by our firm, Public Religion Research, at A National Summit on Torture: Religious Faith, Torture, and our National Soul. The poll was commissioned by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University and demonstrates the conflicted attitudes on torture among white evangelical Christians in the South.

The press conference included remarks by Katie Barge of Faith in Public Life, David Gushee of Evangelicals for Human Rights, and Tyler Wigg Stevens of Two Futures. You can download the polling memo here, and see a video of the press conference releasing it here.

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Close to six-in-ten white evangelicals in the South say that torture can be often (20%) or sometimes (37%) justified in order to gain important information. This compares to roughly half (48%) of the general public who believe that torture can be justified, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll (02/2008).

Despite high levels of religiosity, white evangelicals in the South are significantly more likely to rely on life experiences and common sense (44%) than Christian teachings or beliefs (28%) when thinking about the acceptability of torture. And only about one-in-twenty white evangelicals rely on the advice of government leaders when it comes to torture. These different sources of moral thinking lead to strikingly different attitudes.

Among those influenced by Christian teachings, a majority (52%) oppose torture—14 points higher than white evangelicals in the South overall. In contrast, among those who rely most on life experiences and common sense, less than one-in-three (31%) oppose torture.

A majority (52%) agree with the Golden Rule argument against torture—that the U.S. government should not use methods against our enemies that we would not want used on American soldiers. This movement represents a 14-point increase from the 38% of white evangelicals who initially said that torture is rarely or never justified. Appeals to three other moral and theological frames did not significantly influence views on torture.

An appeal to the Golden Rule increases opposition to torture among every subgroup of white evangelicals. For example, only about one third (34%) of white evangelicals who attend worship services more than once a week say torture is never or rarely justified, but a majority (50%) of this group was persuaded by the Golden Rule argument against torture. This represents a 16-point shift in opinion among the most frequent attending white evangelicals in the South.

Other Findings
A majority (53%) of white evangelicals in the South believe that the government uses torture as part of the campaign against terrorism, despite repeated claims made by government officials that the U.S. does not engage in torture. Only about one third (32%) say that the U.S. does not use torture as a matter of policy.

Among white evangelicals in the South who are registered voters, 65% support Republican John McCain, 14% support Democrat Barack Obama, and 21% remain undecided. These findings are consistent with the recent Time Magazine poll (08/04/2008) that showed 66% supporting McCain, 17% supporting Obama, and 17% undecided among white evangelicals nationwide.

Two thirds of John McCain’s supporters say torture can often or sometimes be justified, compared to only 46% of Obama supporters and undecided voters.

About the Survey
This survey was commissioned by Mercer University and Faith in Public Life and conducted by Public Religion Research. Results for this survey were based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Opinion Access Corporation among a sample of 600 white evangelical Christian adults, age 18 years or older in the southeastern United States. This region includes the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. The survey was fielded from August 14-22, 2008.

The margin of error for the total sample is +/- 4.5% at the 95% confidence interval. In addition to sampling error surveys may also be subject to error or bias due to question wording, context and order effects. The data was weighted using demographic weighting parameters derived from the Religious Landscape Survey. Conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life from May 8 – August 13, 2007, the Religious Landscape Survey is a national survey of 35,000 adults with detailed information on religious affiliation and identity.

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.