What do Americans think about religious diversity?
Two recent surveys offer food for thought on this question.
Based on responses to a telephone survey, the Gallup Organization suggested that Americans fall into three categories on a Religious Tolerance Index: Isolated, Tolerant, and Integrated.
Isolated Americans, 17 percent of the population, “tend to believe that their religion is right or true and all other religions are wrong or false. They don’t know much about other religious faiths, nor do they want to.”
Tolerant Americans, 46 percent, have a “live-and-let-live” attitude about religion. They say they are respectful of other religions, but they don’t take any initiatives to learn about them.
Integrated Americans, 37 percent, actively seek “to learn more from others of different religious traditions.”
Sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s Religion and Diversity Survey complicates Gallup’s picture. Eighty-four percent of Wuthnow’s respondents thought that everyone should “learn something about” America’s new religious groups. This suggests that more Americans fall into the Integrated category than Gallup allows (although there is a difference between favoring integration and actually doing something to further it).
Fifty-eight percent of Wuthnow’s respondents felt that “Christianity is the best way to understand God,” again suggesting that Gallup underestimated the number of Isolated Americans who “tend to believe their religion is right or true.” (Although Gallup did not break out its respondents by religious identity, it is safe to assume that a majority were Christian.)
But 54 percent of Wuthnow’s respondents also agreed with the statement, “All major religions are equally good ways of knowing about God.” One wonders about the math here, where more than half of the respondent pool can believe both that Christianity is the best way to understand God and that all major religions are equally good at understanding God.
So, what do Americans, especially Christian Americans, think about religious diversity? If survey data can be believed, then, as Wuthnow concludes, “popular notions of how to think about Christianity in a pluralistic world are up in the air.”
Sources: http://www.gallup.com (details about the Religious Tolerance Index are available by subscription); Robert Wuthnow, “Presidential Address 2003: The Challenge of Diversity,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43,2 (June 2004): 159-170.