Americans are sharply divided on the influence of Hollywood — for good or bad — and unsurprisingly this “culture war” division tends to follow religious faultlines.That is one of the many findings of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s massive “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.” The second part of this detailed survey, based on interviews with over 35,000 U.S. adults last year, was released on Monday.

For our story on its “culture war” findings look here.

The survey asked Americans if Hollywood “threatened” their values: 42 percent said it did, 56 percent said it did not.

Hollywood has long been a target of U.S. conservatives, many of whom regard its main movers and shakers as hardcore liberals (or worse) and its movie industry as corrupting.

So it comes as no surprise that most U.S. evangelicals agreed that Tinsletown goes against their grain though not by the overwhelming margin one might have assumed: 53 percent saw it as a threat but 45 percent did not.

The stoutly conservative Mormons regard Hollywood and its ways with the most suspicion among U.S. religious groupings with 67 percent agreeing that it threatens the things they hold dear.

America’s small atheist contingent is the least alarmed by the entertainment industry with only 19 percent seeing it as a threat; fully 79 percent did not.

One thing is sure: America’s culture wars remain as divisive as ever with both sides dug in their trenches for the long haul.

(Photo Credit: REUTERS/Hector Mata, Feb 20, 2008)

Is the Democratic Party really “Godless” and are Republicans really righteous?

Far from it, though there are findings from the monumental U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life which could be used perhaps to make such arguments. You can see our main story on the survey here and the survey itself, which was released on Monday, here.

On partisan affiliation for example, the survey found that Mormons were the most staunchly Republican religious group in America with 65 percent of those polled indentifying with or leaning towards that party.

Members of historically black Protestant churches remain the most reliably Democratic at 77 percent while the Godless crowd was also firmly in that camp. It found that atheists and agnostics leaned heavily Democratic (65 percent and 62 percent respectively).

But among evangelical Protestants, a group normally associated with the Republican Party and social conservative causes, things are less clear cut. The survey found 50 percent of this group tilted Republican but 34 percent of such folk favoured the Democratic Party.

This raises interesting issues. Can presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama woo the faith vote without alienating the party’s “atheist base?” Can his Republican rival John McCain woo independent evangelicals?

The survey was taken in 2007, so it is not up-to-the-minute, and the first batch of its findings were released in February. But it involved polls of over 35,000 U.S. adults nationwide and so it is an excellent indicator of broad trends.

“Popular imagination relegates ‘heresy’ to the Middle Ages…” says the Wikipedia entry on heresy. The Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and other excesses of religious zeal against dissenters also seem to be located comfortably far back in the past. But several  news items these past few days have shown that hunts for heretics continue in the 21st century. Locations, religions and methods may be different, but the intolerance is the same.

“Thousands of hardline Indonesian Muslims rallied outside the presidential palace and Jakarta police headquarters on Monday to urge the president to disband a sect branded by many Muslims as “deviant”, a news report from our Jakarta office said. “Militant Muslim groups have attacked mosques and buildings associated with Ahmadiyya, and are lobbying the government to outlaw the sect.”

Ahmadiyya, a late 19th-century movement that considers its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad a latter-day prophet who came to perfect Islam, says it is a Muslim denomination. Most Muslim scholars dispute this, saying Mohammed was the last one, the “seal of the prophets”. Comparisons between religions are always tricky, but its situation looks similar to that of Mormonism within Christianity. Mormons say they are Christians with latter-day prophets and scriptures, but several traditional Christian churches dispute this. This disagreement may have lost Mitt Romney some votes in the Republican primaries in the United States, but otherwise it has not had much effect on public life.

But in Indonesia, the Islamists demand that the state ban Ahmadiyya because — as the Indonesian Ulema Council has decreed — its teachings deviate from mainstream Islam. Islamic radicals have damaged mosques and other property belonging to Ahmadis in Indonesia. “Today is the beginning of our fight. We are ready to die for the Ahmadiyya sect’s dismissal,” said Abdurrahman of Indonesia’s Muslim Forum (FUI) at the rally on Monday. “If ( President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) ignores us, we will bring him down.” As that threat indicates, the issue has become a political football and could influence elections next year.

The government finally decided to issue a stern warning to Ahmadiyya followers that they could face five years in jail for “tarnishing religion” but stopped short of banning the movement. Human Rights Watch promptly called on Jakarta to withdraw the decree. Religion experts said the Ahmadiyya unrest fits into a larger picture of rising religious intolerance in Indonesia.

Anti-Ahmadi protesters have an easier time in Pakistan, which officially declared the group non-Muslim in 1974. At the Punjab Medical College in Faisalabad, 23 students have just been “rusticated” (a term a Pakistani blogger translates as expelled) after Islamist students beat them up and demonstrated against them. The college principal told the Daily Times on Sunday that “the issue of Ahmadis was one of the most provocative in the world”. He said the college was sympathetic to the students but it was clear it had to give in to the Islamist students’ pressure.

Witch hunts are also still practiced. “Villagers in Assam stoned four members of a family, including two women, and then buried them alive on suspicion of practising witchcraft, police said on Wednesday,” according to our report from Guwahati in India. “More than 500 people have been killed in the state in the past few years because their neighbours thought they were witches, police say.”

The issue of Mormon proxy baptisms has resurfaced with the news that the Vatican has written to Catholic dioceses around the world telling them not to provide parish records to the Genealogical Society of Utah. As the Catholic News Service reported last week, the letter calls proxy baptism using these records “detrimental” and says the Vatican did not want Catholic parishes “to cooperate with the erroneous practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. Mormons use genealogical data to find names of people to baptise posthumously, a practice the Roman Catholic Church rejects on theological grounds.

The LDS Church has not yet replied, but the comments section of the Church-owned Deseret News has erupted with hundreds of entries. Many are from Mormons who cannot understand why anyone would object to their baptism of the dead. Several criticise the Vatican for withholding the data, arguing it actually belongs to the general public. Other blogs have also been commenting for (mostly Mormon — see here, here, here, here, here) and against (mostly Catholic — see here, here, here, here, here). There are also critical comments from Mormons and ex-Mormons (see here, here, here).

Most of this commentary misses the point. There is no way either side is going to agree on proxy baptisms; different religions exist precisely because they disagree on fundamental issues. It is also futile to argue about religious freedom, because obviously both Churches have the right to practise their faith. The idea that one religion’s teachings give it a right to another religion’s data is also a non-starter.

The real issue is not theology, but privacy. The Vatican does not recognise Mormon baptisms anyway, so it has long ignored the proxy baptism issue. However thanks to the Internet, large numbers of names of saints, popes and average Catholics have been published in recent years on Mormon baptism lists that are available for all to see. Pontiffs have even been “sealed” in eternal Mormon marriage to fictitious wives despite the celibacy rule for Catholic clergy. Is publishing names for posthumous baptism on the Internet (in its International Genealogical Index – IGI) an invasion of privacy, especially when done without the permission of the living families of the people concerned?

This is not just an issue for Catholics, Jews asked similar questions in the 1990s, after finding Holocaust victims on the IGI. After strong Jewish protests, the Church agreed in 1995 to stop proxy baptising them, a step that seemed to indicate some recognition of a problem. However, names of Jews have continued to appear over the years, including that of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 2006. According to Helen Radkey, a researcher who specialises on the IGI, “In 2008, the Church is still posthumously baptising Jewish Holocaust victims, against the terms of the agreement it signed with Jewish groups on May 3, 1995.”

(NB: The Vatican has had its own issues with offending Jews and Muslims and was roundly criticised for them.)

We have tried asking about the privacy issue in the past but got no answer. The spokespeople at the LDS Church in Salt Lake City were invariably polite, helpfully provided detailed information about Mormon beliefs and said Mormons were “deeply saddened” to learn that some non-Mormons were offended by seeing co-religionists or deceased family members on the IGI. However, they did not address the key question about publishing this. When asked why they did not at least monitor the list, which includes many noted and notorious names, they said too many Mormons submitted too many names every year for proxy baptism for the Church to vet them all. Mormons were supposed to ask living family members before baptising anyone born in the past 95 years, but the records show this is often ignored.

The question here is not about the rights or wrongs of proxy baptism. That is an internal Mormon issue and, since they are performed secretly in temples that non-Mormons cannot enter, it can stay an internal Mormon issue. When the names of those proposed for baptism are published on the Internet for all to see (even if lists with all details of the baptisms are kept in genealogy centres only open to Mormons), is this still an internal affair or does it enter the public sphere?And if it does, what should the LDS Church do to respond to other faiths offended by this? The usual answers — that this is an important Morman practice, a gift to the dead, one that they can decline — have not convinced Jews or Catholics.

While trying to come up with a counter-example to illustrate this problem, I came across a post by Sharon Lindbloom on the Mormon Coffee blog (whose name alone shows it is not orthodox Mormon). She asked what the LDS Church would think if “a powerful and influential group” created a public database of prominent Mormons and “attached to each name is a letter of resignation from LDS Church membership, sent by proxy to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.” She concluded: “I suspect Latter-day Saints would be very upset over Mormon pioneer proxy resignations from the LDS Church. They may even believe it to be an injustice to the memories of their loved-ones…”

Now here’s something new for us — a story that began with a post on FaithWorld last week, prompted a slew of comments and now features in an interview for the wire. Ed Stoddard’s post “Mormons have ‘fundamental’ PR problem” highlighted the confusion caused by the case of a breakaway sect whose Texas compound was raided this month. The post has over 130 comments so far. As the debate raged, Ed interviewed Quentin Cook, a spiritual elder with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to get the official view:

DALLAS (Reuters) - The mainstream Mormon church renounced polygamy over a century ago, but it says the breakaway sects that practice plural marriage are giving it a public relations headache.

Attention has once again been drawn to the issue by the raids this month on a Texas compound run by followers of jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs. More than 400 children were removed in the raids sparked by an abuse complaint and their fate remains in legal limbo.

Quentin Cook, a spiritual elder with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told Reuters in a telephone interview that his church of 13 million had to constantly contend with public misconceptions stirred by the actions of a few thousand polygamists who were not attached to it.

Read the full interview here.