Useful Pew backgrounder on faith and U.S. healthcare debate
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released a useful backgrounder on the role of faith groups in the increasingly bitter and partisan U.S. healthcare debate. You can read it here.
The report focuses on the two large faith-based coalitions that have emerged on opposite sides of the political struggle to overhaul America’s system of healthcare, which is President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.
Faith for Health, is a broad coalition of self-described progressive groups that strongly supports Obama’s reform drive. It includes mainline and evangelical Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists and Jews.
The Freedom Federation is a group of mostly conservative Christian organizations — a key Republican Party base — which strongly opposes what many of its activists decry as “Obamacare.” Both groups have taken to the airwaves and undertaken grassroots campaigns.
Healthcare reform is the biggest political show right now in Washington, where faith and politics often mix in ways they don’t elsewhere in the developed world. What do you think? Do you think faith-based groups will make a difference one way or the other on this issue? And which side will have its prayers answered?
U.S. religious conservatives and progressives profiled
The first ever comparative surveys of U.S. conservative and progressive (or liberal) religious activists has just been published by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and Public Religion Research. Click here for a link to the survey.
Many findings of the study – based on a detailed survey answered by 1,866 progressive religious activists and 1,123 conservative ones — will come as no surprise to followers of the U.S. political scene. But they will no doubt be closely scrutinized by both Republican and Democratic strategists.
Republicans are sure to take note of the fact that religious conservatives are still preoccupied with the issues of abortion rights and gay marriage, which they staunchly oppose. The Democratic Party will note that progressive religious activists care deeply about poverty, health care and the environment.
The report’s findings come as activists from the Religious Right and the Religious Left are ginning up their supporters to oppose or support President Barack Obama’s drive to overhaul America’s healthcare system, which is his top domestic priority.
Among the report’s key findings:
Religious affiliation: conservative activists are almost exclusively Christian, whereas progressive activists are more diverse. Among conservative activists, 54 percent identify as evangelical Protestant, 35 percent as Roman Catholic, and 9 percent with Mainline Protestantism. Among progressive activists, 44 percent identify as Mainline Protestants; 17 percent as Roman Catholics; 10 percent as evangelical Protestants; 12 percent as interfaith, mixed faith, or Unitarian; 6 percent Jewish; and 8 percent who have no formal religious affiliation or identify as formerly affiliated.
I wonder if the study broke down into age grouping, since there are indications that the culture war divide is increasingly being bridged by the younger generation.
A number of secular observers have noted the irony of people being pro-abortion and anti-war, or anti-abortion and pro-war. The environment, gun control, the “welfare state” and a host of other issues has odd conundrums across the culture wars. Hopefully some of our younger generation will lead the rest of us through this theological muddle.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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