We are tolerant, dammit!

Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance

I posted just the other day about misconceptions about Americans' beliefs. Here's another survey showing that Americans are not the religious dogmatists we are often portrayed as by the traditional media. Pew just came out with a survey contradicting many long held beliefs regarding religions and spiritual attitudes. From the NYTimes article:

"...The report, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of their professed faiths..."

So people have a healthy attitude when confronting contradictions in their one faiths. But it gets better:

...70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including majorities among Protestants and Catholics...

Now wait a second! Next they're going to claim that vast majority of us are not breathers of fire and brimstone...

...The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who reviewed the survey said...

I wonder who is responsible for shoving that 'conventional wisdom' down our throats for the last couple of decades? Could it be...the traditional media!

“...It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists...”

Wow, that's a truly refreshing factoid. It's hard for me to believe that this is something new. I know that the last George Bush presidency has been a hard lesson in proving the titanic mistake of letting theo-cons run this country. Yet, changes in religious attitudes tend to morph slowly. I just have the strong suspicion, that whenever the traditional media has claimed to be surveying our religious and spiritual attitudes--everything from Creationism to 'separation of church-state' issues--what they have really been doing is 'push polling'. No! The traditional media pushing a dominionist right-wing agenda! Who'd a thunk?

Now here's a part that might have some bearing on all us Wiccans, Pagans, Atheists, and Scientists out there:

...According to that report, more than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion. The survey indicated that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated, accounting for 16 percent of American adults...Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as atheist and more than half of those who identified as agnostic.


So, 1 in 5 people who call themselves 'Atheist' believes in God! OK, now I'm confused! Maybe I need a refresher course in what being an Atheist means:

“..What does atheist mean? It may mean they don’t believe in God, or it could be that they are hostile to organized religion,” Mr. Green said. “A lot of these unaffiliated people, by some measures, are fairly religious, and then there are those who are affiliated with a religion but don’t believe in God and identify instead with history or holidays or communities...”

It's fascinating how Atheism is evolving. It may not necessarily imply (or require) a disbelief in God. A healthy "hostility to organized religion" is all it takes. I think that's something that many Wiccan's and Pagans can get behind.

Here's the direct Pew link: US Religious Landscape Survey.