Answering Tough Questions About Promising Revelations
Summary: Since the release of our report “Promising Revelations,” we’ve received meaningful responses from readers. Their questions refer to difficult – and real – challenges within contemporary American religious life. Jason Mangone, US Executive Director, and Emily Gerdin, Research Fellow and co-author of the report, grapple with the toughest questions they’ve received.
A few months ago, we released the report Promising Revelations: Undoing the False Impressions of America’s Faithful. Since then, we’ve spoken with journalists, religious advocates, and university chaplains about the report. We’ve heard about the report sparking newfound conversations on the role of faith in American life. We’ve received some questions, too, some of which we’ve attempted to answer in this newsletter.1
1: Is Faith Really More Important than Politics? [answered by Jay]
The following comes from an email exchange with a pastor:
The summary of the report contains this statement: "Most religious Americans—Evangelical or otherwise—prioritize their relationship with God, their families, and moral values over their political identity.”
Based on my observation, I’d put it this way: "Most religious Americans—Evangelical or otherwise—have convinced themselves they prioritize their relationship with God, their families, and moral values over their political identity.” But to tell yourself, and others, that faith, family and moral values take precedent over political identity is different than saying those things actually do.
What I – and many other pastors and theologians I know – would say is that while many Christians would honestly say they believe their faith is most central to their core identity, in fact they often use faith to validate what they already believe, which has little to do with faith and a lot to do with family of origin, the communities they’ve been a part of, their educational background, the region of the country they’re from, the era in which they live, their emotional and psychological makeup, whether they’re drawn to conflict or peacemaking, and much more.
As one of my friends would say, "there seems to be a gap between people’s stated and revealed preferences.” That certainly tracks with what I’ve observed.
I agree with my provocateur’s point. The relationship between professed faith and real-world morality is not as linear as “I believe X, so I do Y.” And I especially agree with the point that there is a difference between stated belief and revealed preference—but I think there’s power in stated preferences, because they tell us what people want to believe about themselves. When people tell us that their faith identity is more important than political party, it’s an ideal that they are hoping to live up to.
All of that is to say: I’m certain that Americans are using faith to validate what they already believe. But even if faith is used to justify political beliefs, there are other, more human, aspects of faith that are important to its followers: family, community, and so on. Our polling may not indicate that faith is in fact superordinate to politics, but it does indicate that Americans want their faith to be superordinate to their politics.
By de-emphasizing politics as the lens through which we scrutinize belief, I hope our report is a step toward institutional renewal. On p. 25 of the report, you’ll see the following finding: “non-evangelicals estimate that 41 percent of Evangelicals say their political identity is their most important identity. Surprisingly, even Evangelicals are inaccurate in their estimates: Evangelicals think that 37 percent of their group would say that political identity is their most important identity. In reality, only four percent of Evangelicals say so.” What’s more interesting to me than the general public’s overestimation is Evangelicals’ own overestimation. I think this points to the ways in which politics corrupts even believers’ own relationships to their communities of faith.
Hopefully, by highlighting what Americans have told us about how they want to be, we will encourage Americans to reflect and adjust. It's why we hope pastors like the one who asked this question are sharing our work with their parishioners.
2. Faith might not be all about politics, but does that really matter when particular sects vote in partisan blocs? [answered by Jay]
Every time we present on Promising Revelations, we get asked some version of this question, usually asked directly—or obliquely—about Evangelicals. One of our report’s key findings was that only four percent of Evangelicals said being a member of a political party is their most important identity. Yet the general public estimates that 41 percent of Evangelicals hold this view. (Evangelicals typically report that being Christian is their most important identity.) Moreover, we found that every faith group reports how a person votes is not seen by most as a litmus test for whether or not they are a “good” Christian, Jew, or Muslim. Instead, their moral values, relationship with God, and the spiritual edification they experience as part of a faith community are seen as much more important.
Of course, white Evangelicals, 82% of whom voted for President Trump according to exit polls, essentially voted as a bloc in the 2024 Presidential election. And there are many stories of outspoken Trump opponents being ostracized from their communities of belief. I acknowledge the truth of these numbers. But I’d add that political options have greatly narrowed (i.e., where are the pro-life Democrats or pro-migrant Republicans?). When politics are reduced to nothing but a binary choice between two nationalized parties, bloc-voting is more convenient than it would be in a competition between two coalitional parties whose center-most factions overlap in interesting ways.
Additionally, it’s important to think about how some Democrats isolated themselves from some groups of believers. A generation of believers grew up in an environment of elite disdain for religion, and a culture that viewed faith as anachronistic—or even retrograde. Many believers were backed into a corner, where in the midst of a fight some were willing to prioritize choosing a leader who they saw would protect them, etc.
I don’t think there’s a clean-cut answer to the morally difficult question of how a believer in Christ might come to vote for a man whose moral character is as seedy as President-elect Trump’s, but I do think it points to the ways in which it’d be good for the broader culture to accept religiosity as an important aspect of our common heritage. And I see some hope here.
3. What of the rise of Christian Nationalism in the U.S.? [answered by Emily]
Soon after the report release, I spoke with a progressive pastor who struggled to believe our data on the number of Evangelicals who support religious pluralism. Here’s how he posed his struggle to me:
The New Apostolic Reformation is a Christian Nationalist movement, openly calling for eliminating separation of church and state and establishing the U.S. as a Christian nation. It is also the fastest growing Evangelical movement in the United States, comprised of around 33 million Americans, including Speaker Mike Johnson and high profile Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
How can it really be true that so many Evangelicals support religious pluralism and that the NAR is becoming so popular? To this pastor, things are not (metaphorically) adding up—our data show that over 7 in 10 US Evangelicals support religious pluralism (78%), but at the same time the NAR is becoming incredibly popular in Evangelical circles. He felt that this must mean that millions of Americans agree with statements like the one we showed participants (“The United States should be a place where people of all religious beliefs and no religious beliefs feel that they belong”), and yet are willing to sit in pews where a preacher is espousing Christian nationalistic sentiments.
None of our data directly speak to this — we did not ask participants if they were affiliated in any way with the NAR or another Christian Nationalist movement—so I can only speculate about what might be happening. My initial answer for this pastor was lackluster, something to do with how social desirability (i.e., wanting to give the answer the question-askers will favor) might explain some respondents’ answers. But since the study was anonymous, I highly doubted it could explain away the entire perception gap. Most importantly, my answer didn’t address this pastor’s real concern: Even though only a small minority of people might reject religious pluralism or support religious nationalism, there seem to be plenty of people who stay in the communities espousing those views and go along with the message.
I’ve since come up with a better hypothesis, one that I hope illustrates the importance of shedding light on perception gaps: I wonder if people may be misjudging the norms of their own communities, and some may be going along with anti-pluralist messages even though they privately disagree because they (incorrectly) think that’s what most believe in their communities. In social psychology, we call this phenomenon “pluralistic ignorance.” Many Evangelicals might be sitting in pews and assuming that everyone around them is agreeing with the Christian Nationalist message being shared when in fact—based on our data—most aren’t.
This is why countering perception gaps is so important. Norms are really malleable, and the more time people spend sitting in pews thinking that everyone around them is against pluralism, the more likely it is that they’ll start thinking that’s an OK thing to believe. We know from psychology research that people update their beliefs about what should be based on what is; in other words, when they learn something is very common, they are more likely to say that it’s OK. We can’t let Americans think that Christian Nationalism or other anti-pluralist views are very common in society both because our research suggests they simply aren’t and because it might make us think that it’s good (or at least acceptable) to have those views.
We published this report with the aim of challenging entrenched conceptions about faith in contemporary American life. Tough questions like these are precisely important because they extend the conversation. We therefore ask: what do you think about these findings? What is the role of faith in your life and politics? Write in the comment section below. And to read the full report, visit https://www.faithperceptiongap.us/
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From Jay: We strategically waited to post this until I was out on leave with my fourth kid, so if my answers aren’t good enough, you won’t be able to get in touch with me until February.