A Wide-Ranging Religious Tolerance in America

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has published the second part of its expansive U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. (See blog entry February 26: "A Long Arc of Decline" for commentary on the first part of the survey.)

In this telephone survey of 35,000 persons, a majority of respondents claimed that religion was very important to them. Of that group nearly 75% believed faiths other than their own could effect salvation. This has been widely interpreted in two ways: 1) Americans of faith traditions are exceptionally tolerant and 2) Americans of faith traditions obviously don't adhere strictly to their faith groups' exclusive teachings. For example, 79% of Catholics agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life."

In my estimation surveys are like Rorschach tests. They reveal the interpreter's point of view. Traditionalists, rather than first seeing the virtue of tolerance, say this survey demonstrates a luke warm commitment and/or ignorance to doctrine and dogma. I'm somewhat of that mind, too, that commitment to and ignorance of professed faith traditions are at work. In this regard I further read that the seeming tolerance relates to that "long arc of decline" of traditional religion I wrote about in a February posting. Traditional religious forms are losing their hold in face of secularism and in what has become a familiar refrain by many, "I'm not religious, but I am spiritual." I read the results of this survey as evidence that doctrine and communal ritual are giving way to individual experience and personal practice.

Visit the Pew Forum at http://religions.pewforum.org/