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Think you know what Americans believe about religion? You might want to think again.

Seven in ten Americans who follow one particular faith believe many religions can lead to eternal life.

Despite the intense attention paid to evangelical and Catholic voters in a high-stakes election year, only half say they pay close attention to politics.

And more than a quarter of people who are not affiliated with a faith nevertheless attend religious services at least occasionally.

A new report released Monday, June 23, by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life demonstrates the myriad ways that faith in America is more variegated and nuanced than it may appear at first glance.

Researchers for Pew's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey analyzed the religious practices of more than 35,000 U.S. adults and found that they generally embrace their own faith while respecting — and sometimes even practicing — aspects of other religions.

"Many religions — maybe even most — can be perceived as having an exclusivity clause: We're right and therefore everybody else is wrong," said John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum.

"What we've found is that many Americans apparently don't invoke the exclusivity clause."

Researchers did not track which other faiths people might say lead to salvation, so a Protestant or Catholic might be thinking of, for example, fellow Christians like the Eastern Orthodox, or non-Christians like Jews or Muslims. Either way, respondents seemed more focused on pragmatism than conversion.

"While Americans may have firm religious commitments, they are unwilling to impose them on other people," Green said. "It may be a kind of attitude that works very well on a practical level in a society that is as diverse religiously as the United States."

Some highlights of that diversity include:

• More than half of evangelical respondents said that many religions can lead to eternal life, despite the central evangelical tenet that Jesus is the sole path to eternity with God.
• 12 percent of Orthodox Christians, who are known for their by-the-book liturgical worship, reported speaking or praying in tongues at least once a week — a practice most commonly associated with Pentecostal traditions.
• 29 percent of Catholics see God as an impersonal force, even though the Catholic Catechism teaches that "the faith of all Christians" rests on the belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• One in five self-described atheists, whose main tenet is to reject belief in God, say they believe in God or a universal spirit.

"I think it really underscores the sense that the issue with religion in America is not that Americans don't believe in anything, it's that they believe in everything," said Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University in Houston. "Religion is 3,000 miles wide, but it's only three inches deep."

One example of that, which doesn't surprise scholars, is that while the Bible has long been known as America's best-selling book, researchers found that 45 percent of U.S. adults say they never or seldom read Scripture.

"Lots of Americans will tell you faith is very important to them … but not everybody regularly acts upon their faith in a public way," said Green.

Beyond religious practices and beliefs, the survey delved into political views and how they are influenced by religion. Researchers found that about one in four evangelicals, and less than one-tenth of Catholics, said religious beliefs most influence their political thinking.

"I just think the media has created this idea that people vote based on their religious convictions, but a lot of us have felt that that's really never been true of a lot of people," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

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June (Web-Only) 2008, Vol. 52

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