Image courtesy of Westminster John Knox Press
Last week I told you about the drama in the Texas speaker’s race, where conservative Christian activists have been accused of anti-Semitism for suggesting that incumbent (and Jewish) speaker Joe Straus is not sufficiently Christian. The catch is that this kind of attack is hardly unique to Straus. Here’s a new poll from the Christian firm Lifeway Research, which illustrates that pretty well.
Lifeway surveyed 1,000 protestant pastors—liberal and conservative, evangelical and mainline—about the religious views of a handful of well-known politicians and celebrities. The good news is most of the pastors (a supermajority, even!) think Sarah Palin is a Christian. On the other hand, 33 percent of them don’t. Obama checks in at 41 percent. And Glenn Beck? Just 27 percent, largely on account of his Mormon faith. That’s better than Oprah (19 percent), but not what you might expect from the man who’s built a movement (and a bank account) preaching the Christian influence of the Founders.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I’d add that “Protestant pastors” is a fairly specific cohort; actually, it sounds dangerously close to a Mark Penn Microtrends demographic (“station-wagon seminarians,” perhaps?). And Lifeway doesn’t really get into the details, except to note that liberals are more likely to say everyone’s a Christian, and conservatives are more likely to say no one is. But you can see the larger point: Being a “Christian,” and being identified as such by others is not mutually inclusive. Politics only magnifies that.
