The myths: (1)”Moral values” determine who wins elections. (2) Americans have broadly rejected “traditional values.” (3) Americans are polarized and fighting a culture war over values. (4) Traditional values are “family values” or “moral values.” (5) Basic values, properly understood, are compatible and harmonious.

In support of myth #2, the Post draws upon the work of sociologist Wayne Baker. MYTH #2: “Americans have broadly rejected ‘traditional values.’ – Actually, Americans retain our traditional values more than just about any other developed country in the world.”

That’s what University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker found in his 2005 book, “America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception.” Baker uses the World Values Surveys to look at American values from a broad, global perspective. He describes human values on two planes. The first is a scale of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. Societies with more traditional values emphasize the importance of God and religion, family and parenting, national identity and pride and absolute standards of morality, not relative ones. Secular-rationalist values are pretty much the opposite: nonreligious, open to abortion and euthanasia, skeptical of national pride or patriotism and evolving away from family, duty and authority.

The second range of values runs from survival values to self-expression ones. In less developed and safe societies, survival values reign. Procuring physical security and meeting basic material needs dominate; foreigners and ethnic diversity are seen as threatening; intolerance is exaggerated. Self-expression values concern creativity, self-fulfillment and lifestyle.

Fascinating. Read more about the other myths here.

In a poll of 1,700 adults, 55 percent answered yes to the statement, “I was protected by a guardian angel,” and 45 percent said they had at least two spiritual encounters in their life.

“I would never have expected these numbers. It was the biggest surprise to me in our findings,” sociologist Christopher Bader of Baylor University said. Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion conducted the study, which concluded that Americans’ religion is “remarkably stable.”

The Institute at Baylor University conducts this survey every two years and some changes have emerged since it was last administered.

In 2005, surveys showed that about 84 percent of Americans believe in Heaven or that Heaven could exist. Their most recent poll revealed about the same, but it also showed that 73 percent believe Hell absolutely or probably exists. About 46 percent said they were “quite certain” they’d go to Heaven, and 71 percent felt even the “irreligious” or non-believers had a chance at Heaven.

Read more.

“The large majority of Muslims tinker,” said Franck Fregosi, a sociologist who has written extensively on Islam in Europe. “The girls will try to go out with boys but hide it from their families. And most of them have a normal life. Some will have sexual relations before marriage. But they will still try to preserve appearances so their families won’t know.”

 

Young women, Fregosi said, also struggle to break free from the cultural traditions of their immigrant parents, including shunning arranged marriages.

“Their priority is to have a pious husband, not a cousin or another man chosen by the family,” he said. “And that is something new.”

 

And additional commentary from an anthropologist…

Religious anthropologist Dounia Bouzar sees two factors at work: a “return to belief” but also a “questioning of the Western model, of the woman who knows what she wants with her body. A lot of young girls are wondering whether that really means more liberty.”

Read the full story.

Americans of every religious stripe are considerably more tolerant of the beliefs of others than most of us might have assumed, according to a new poll released Monday. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life last year surveyed 35,000 Americans, and found that 70% of respondents agreed with the statement “Many religions can lead to eternal life.” Even more remarkable was the fact that 57% of Evangelical Christians were willing to accept that theirs might not be the only path to salvation, since most Christians historically have embraced the words of Jesus, in the Gospel of John, that “no one comes to the Father except through me.” Even as mainline churches had become more tolerant, the exclusivity of Christianity’s path to heaven has long been one of the Evangelicals’ fundamental tenets. The new poll suggests a major shift, at least in the pews.

The Religious Landscape Survey’s findings appear to signal that religion may actually be a less divisive factor in American political life than had been suggested by the national conversation over the last few decades. Peter Berger, University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University, said that the poll confirms that “the so-called culture war, in its more aggressive form, is mainly waged between rather small groups of people.” The combination of such tolerance with high levels of religious participation and intensity in the U.S., says Berger, “is distinctively American — and rather cheering.”

Less so, perhaps, to Christian conservatives, for whom Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay suggests the survey results have a “devastating effect on theological purity.” An acceptance of the notion of other paths to salvation dilutes the impact of the doctrine that Christ died to remove sin and thus opened the pathway to eternal life for those who accept him as their personal savior. It could also reduce the impulse to evangelize, which is based on the premise that those who are not Christian are denied salvation. The problem, says Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is that “the cultural context and the reality of pluralism has pulled many away from historic Christianity.

Read more.

Washington Post staff writer, Michelle Boorstein writes,

“First it was Republicans, and now Democrats, scrambling in recent presidential elections to snuggle up closely to men of the cloth, seeking the endorsement of well-known clergymen and campaigning with preachers, all in an effort to demonstrate how godly they are.”

“But a curious thing has happened in this year’s contest for the White House. Candidates are having to distance themselves from preachers, almost as quickly as they had sought their embrace. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) denounced his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who was videotaped asserting that the federal government had brought the AIDS virus into black communities and that God should “damn” America.

Sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau weighs in…

“The chickens are coming home to roost,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, a Georgetown University sociologist who writes a religion and politics blog called “The God Vote.” A post that got 50,000 hits called “Huckobama” asked why Democrats who have criticized President Bush’s overt faith expressions aren’t more critical of Obama.

“That’s the new Faith-and-Values friendly liberalism of the Democratic Party in 2008. And that’s something that might make it hard for secularists to live their lives in peace,” he wrote.

Among the speeches Berlinerblau cited was one Obama made in February, preaching at length about Jeremiah 29, saying, “God has a plan for his people.” The separationist group Interfaith Alliance has been sending out alerts about candidates for months, including when Clinton said last June that she’d like to “inject” faith into policy and when McCain said in September that the Constitution established “a Christian nation.” The group also included an Obama speech in October in which he told an audience that, with prayer and praise, “I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on Earth.”

The project was born out of a concern that intellectuals look down on evangelicals and that the evangelical community’s influence has been largely absent from sociological study, a significant concern given that nearly 75 million Americans identify as evangelicals.

The Associated Press reports:

“Educated people have the notion that evangelicals are ‘barefoot people of Tobacco Road who, I don’t know, sleep with their sisters or something,’ Berger says. It’s time that attitude changed, [Berger remarks]. ‘That was probably never correct, but it’s totally false now, and I think the image should be corrected,’ Berger says in a recent interview… ‘It’s not good if a prejudiced view of this community prevails in the elite circles of society,’ says Berger, a self-described liberal Lutheran. ‘It’s bad for democracy and it’s wrong.’”

Sociologist Omar McRoberts weighs in…

“Associate sociology professor McRoberts argues that the neighborhoods and the religious groups need to avoid vilifying each other. Communities should recognize that churches can contribute to the civic needs of the neighborhood. And pastors, he said, should work to make their churches community institutions, not just places of worship a few hours a week.

“It’s not that churches have to be at odds with the goals of development,” McRoberts said, adding that he often heard Four Corners residents say they wanted more places to eat nearby.

“What better incentive for a family restaurant than the fact that every Sunday hundreds of people descend on your neighborhood to go to church?”" -Boston Globe

News reports on the Religious Landscape Survey highlight:

Faith is fluid: 44% say they’re no longer tied to the religious or secular upbringing of their childhood. They’ve changed religions or denominations, adopted a faith for the first time or abandoned any affiliation altogether.

“Nothing” matters: 12.1% say their religious identity is “nothing in particular,” outranking every denomination and tradition except Catholics (23.9%) and all groups of Baptists (17.2%).

Protestants are fading: 51.3% call themselves Protestant, but roughly one-third of this group were “unable or unwilling” to describe their denomination.

Immigrants sustain Catholic numbers: 46% of foreign-born U.S. adults are Catholics, compared with only 21% of native-born adults. Latinos are now 45% of all U.S. Catholics ages 18-29.

Read more…

The Miami Herald reports the recent recommendation from sociologist Michele Dillon to use lent as a time of financial sacrifice.

“Lent is traditionally a period of self-denial, so this might a good time to also focus on economic austerity, said Michele Dillon, a University of New Hampshire sociology professor who studies religion, particularly Roman Catholicism.

‘What’s different this year is many people who feel under economic pressure to give up things can at least use the season of Lent as an opportunity,’ Dillon said.

‘They can think, “I’m also doing this for religious purposes as well as lifestyle and economic purposes.””’

The Obama campaign announced the debunking effort with an e-mail barrage from John Kerry of Massachusetts, in which the former presidential candidate urges supporters to “e-mail the truth” to everyone on their address books, to print out the facts about Obama’s background and post them at work, and to call local radio stations and talk to neighbors.

Wired talked to Gary Alan Fine about whether this strategy would work and Fine was skeptical. “It underlines the attack,” Fine says. “Sometimes defenses against rumors work; sometimes they backfire…What you want to do, when you deny the rumor, you only want to deny it to the people who originally heard it.”