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there’s a lovely serendipity to the news sometimes. you absorb one mildly interesting bit of information, begin to digest and draw conclusions from it. then you notice another meme floating by, distinct from but related to the first, that complements and contextualizes what you were already thinking. then something else happens, something that harmonizes the whole thing in an immensely satisfying way.

for the last few weeks, newspapers and blogs have been peppered with little sidebar items about obama’s outreach to religious voters, including some mild expressions of surprise and curiosity at the possibility that he may actually be making inroads among evangelicals, of all people. punditical analysis has mostly been limited to the notion that jesus folk are pissed off at bush and looking to punish republicans for their failure to implement full-on theocracy; hence, they’re turning to obama the way clinton democrats were supposedly turning to mccain (so much for that theory). a secondary competing hypothesis held that evangelicals are merely susceptible to that obama magic just like everybody else — they grudgingly respect him, and even if they won’t vote for him, they’re not galvanized against him the way they were against john kerry.

there seemed to be some truth in both explanations, but there was still a piece missing. what does the obama campaign know that we don’t, that led them to court religious communities as their first step toward transitioning into general-election mode? perhaps more importantly, why does it seem to be working, without obama having to back off his socially progressive positions or cozy up to agents of intolerance?

that’s when i read about the new pew survey on religion and politics, which confirms something i’ve suspected for a while: faith and religious affiliation are fairly worthless as predictors of political behavior. in a study based on interviews with 36,000 religious americans, researchers learned the following:

- a plurality are Democrats or lean Democratic
- almost 3/4 self-identify as moderate or liberal
- a majority favor legal access to abortion in all or most cases
- a majority favor acceptance of homosexuality by society
- a majority feel that “government is too involved” in policing morality
- a majority, including 54% of evangelicals, take a dim view of adventurist foreign policy and want the government to focus on domestic issues
- a resounding 61%, again including 54% of evangelicals, favor tougher environmental regulation

in other words, the ideological views of the devout mostly mirror those of society at large — not so surprising in a country where 95% claim some form of religious or spiritual belief, including 78% who follow a christian tradition. the study goes on:

[M]ost Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States.

if these findings seem counterintuitive, especially to those of us whose politics over the last generation have been formulated more or less in diametric opposition to the brutal insanity of the religious right, it’s because we’ve been force-fed a false image of christianity and christians. and in our own way, we’ve been complicit with the robertsons and dobsons in propagating the view that christians are, by definition, backward and bigoted. this is the great crime and the great tragedy of our generation in the american political left: they told us that ‘faith’ was incompatible with science and equal rights and reproductive freedom, synonymous with imperial aggression and environmental destruction, and we believed them. to barack obama’s great credit, he didn’t…