Nearly half of American adults imagine the U.S. ought to be a “Christian nation,” in accordance with a latest Pew Research Center survey, although the evaluation finds widely divergent views on what the phrase means.
In a report in regards to the survey released October 27, the Pew Research Center said 45 percent of adults—slightly below two-thirds of whom are Christians—say the U.S. should be a Christian nation, while a 3rd of the respondents imagine it already is one.
Conducted September 13-18 this 12 months, amongst 10,588 respondents, the web survey is a component of Pew’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative group of respondents created in 2014 for long-term participation in recurring surveys aimed toward gauging public perceptions and attitudes in regards to the role of faith in public life.
Listed below are some key highlights of the survey:
• Overall, 60 percent of respondents said they imagine America’s founding fathers intended the country to be a Christian nation.
• 51 percent of respondents said they think the U.S. shouldn’t be a Christian country.
• Even amongst supporters of a Christian nation, most individuals (52 percent) say the federal government shouldn’t declare any single faith as an official state religion and that the federal government should as an alternative encourage moral values shared by multiple religions.
• Among the many 45 percent of adults who back the concept of a Christian nation, well over half (28 percent) actually want Christianity to develop into America’s state faith—and barely over half (24 percent) of your entire “Christian nation” cohort want the federal government to advocate exclusively for Christian values.
• 67 percent of respondents said religious institutions should keep out of politics as an alternative of discussing day-to-day social or political issues. This finding backed an October 2021 Pew survey through which an amazing majority of respondents expressed support for the long-running official U.S. policy of church-state separation.
• Only 31 percent of the respondents within the 2022 survey favored the concept that faith groups should espouse sociopolitical issues.
• Fully 77 percent expressed opposition to the widespread practice whereby churches and other places of worship endorse candidates for political offices.
“While some individuals who say the U.S. ought to be a Christian nation define the concept as one where the nation’s laws are based on Christian tenets and the nation’s leaders are Christian, it’s rather more common for people on this category to see a Christian nation as one where individuals are more broadly guided by Christian values or a belief in God, even when its laws aren’t explicitly Christian and its leaders can have quite a lot of faiths or no faith in any respect,” points out the Pew Research survey.
The brand new survey also reveals that almost 80 percent of people that back the concept of the U.S. as a Christian nation also want the Bible to have some influence on the country’s laws. Actually, nearly six out of 10 such adults (54 percent) say they think the Bible should prevail over the desire of the people in cases of conflict between the favored view and the holy word.
A full 32 percent of American adults who want the country to be no less than nominally Christian also think that U.S. society is weakened by its being a religiously diverse nation. “Those that want the U.S. to be a Christian nation are much more inclined than those that don’t need the U.S. to be a Christian nation to specific this negative view of spiritual diversity,” notes the Pew report.
“Still, amongst those that say the U.S. ought to be a Christian nation, there are roughly as many individuals who say the country’s religious diversity strengthens American society as there are who say it weakens society,” says the report, referring to the 28 percent of respondents who support a Christian nation but additionally view its religious pluralism as a source of vitality and robustness.
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