Views on God may affect voting

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Sep 12, 2006 | by Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News

Forget the red states/blue states explanation. The real measure of how Americans vote -- and buy and think -- has less to do with geography and more to do with how people imagine God.

That's one of the conclusions of an exhaustive study by Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion released Monday but first reported at the Religion Newswriters Association conference held last week in Salt Lake City. The study, conducted by The Gallup Organization, asked 1,721 Americans more than 350 questions about how they worship, pray and tackle political issues.

The researchers concluded that Americans imagine God in one of four ways: authoritarian, benevolent, critical or distant.

The Authoritarian God is highly involved in daily lives and world affairs, and also capable of meting out punishment to the unfaithful and ungodly. The Benevolent God is a positive influence in lives and in the world, and less willing to punish. The Critical God does not interact with the world, and views the current state of the world unfavorably. The Distant God is neither active nor angry but simply a cosmic force that set the laws of nature in motion. And of course atheists are certain that none of these gods exist at all.

Researchers then correlated these categories with Americans' views on issues such as abortion, the environment and capital punishment, and with their party affiliations, church affiliations and church attendance.

Some of the conclusions:

-- Women tend to believe in an engaged God (Authoritarian or Benevolent), men in a distant God.

-- Easterners tend toward belief in a Critical God.

-- Believers in either an Authoritarian or Benevolent God are more likely to attend church weekly and pray several times a day.

-- God's anger alone (Critical God) does little to inspire religious participation or prayer.

-- Catholics and mainline Protestants tend toward belief in a more Distant God.

-- Believers in an Authoritarian God are nearly twice as likely to believe that abortion is always wrong than the American public as a whole.

-- Eighty percent of believers in an Authoritarian God believe gay marriage is "always wrong," compared to 30 percent of believers in a Distant God.

-- Believers in an Authoritarian God are more than twice as likely as believers in a Distant God to agree that the Iraq War is justified.

The researchers also found that more than four-fifths of Americans believe that God does not favor a political party. And "paranormal" beliefs (including astrology, communicating with the dead and UFOs) are more prevalent in Eastern states, least prevalent in the South.

The researchers report that fewer Americans are in the "none" category when it comes to religious affiliation, compared to results from other studies. The growth in "nones" -- 14.3 percent in 2004 compared to 8 percent in 1988, according to the General Social Survey -- "is often used by academics and the press to indicate growing secularization in the United States," the Baylor study noted.

But the Baylor researchers found that only 10.8 percent of their survey respondents report they are unaffiliated with a religion. The lower number, they said, results from the fact that their study asked respondents to name not only a religion and a denomination but also the name and address of their current place of worship. Oddly, some people who listed no religion or denomination did list a congregation and address.

Nearly 63 percent of Americans not affiliated with a religious tradition say they believe in God "or some other higher power." Almost a third of the unaffiliated pray at least occasionally.

According to the survey, 33.6 percent of Americans are evangelical Protestant (although only a third in these denominations refer to themselves as "evangelical"), 22.1 percent are mainline Protestant, 21.2 percent are Catholic, 5 percent are black Protestant, 4.9 percent are "other," and 2.5 percent are Jewish. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was counted in "other."

The survey found that persons 18 to 30 years old are three times more likely to have no religious affiliation than are persons 65 or older; and that the Western United States has the highest percentage of religiously unaffiliated people.

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com