They may not be as large as Catholics or as active as evangelicals, but white mainline Protestants have a big thing going for them this election cycle: they are divided, and possibly persuadable.

That’s according to a new poll released Thursday  that found white mainline Protestants are more evenly split between President Obama and his Republican challengers than other religious groups.

“They’re the most important ignored religious group in the country,” said Dan Cox, research director at the Public Religion Research Institute, which conducted the poll in partnership with Religion News Service.

In a matchup between Obama and GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, mainline Protestant voters are nearly evenly divided, with 41 percent supporting Obama and 43 percent for Romney. The same holds true between Obama and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — each is the choice of 41 percent of white mainline Protestants.

Mainliners — Lutherans, Presbyterians, United Methodists and others — tend to be well educated and civically engaged. They represent about 16 percent of the electorate, and are clustered in some key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

While the poll found lingering evangelical Republican wariness over Romney and a striking preference for Gingrich to lead the party into November, Romney’s campaign remains confident. In a matchup between Obama and Romney, Romney carries evangelicals over Obama, 60 to 22 percent, according to the poll.

“As we’ve seen in the early primaries in South Carolina and Florida, Gingrich has had an edge among these white evangelical Protestant voters,” said Romney pollster Neil Newhouse.

“But importantly, when you look at the general election, Mitt Romney does better at coalescing that voter group against President Obama than Newt Gingrich.”

At 27 percent of the electorate, Catholics remain the largest and most unpredictable swing group. Overall, Catholics went for Obama in 2007, although white Catholics supported McCain while Obama drew support from Hispanic Catholics.

According to the new poll, Catholics support Obama over Gingrich 56 to 32 percent, and also support Obama over Romney, but by a smaller margin: 48 to 40 percent.

Newhouse points out Romney’s relative appeal among Catholics who voted in Florida’s GOP primary on Tuesday: CNN exit polls showed Romney capturing 56 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to Gingrich’s 30 percent and former Sen. Rick Santorum’s 10 percent.

Romney belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gingrich and Santorum are Catholics.

Romney’s appeal, however, is shaky among white evangelicals, an important Republican voting block and about 23 percent of the general electorate. Many evangelicals have deep-seated wariness about Mormonism.

Despite Romney’s decisive win in Florida, Gingrich edged out Romney among white evangelicals, 38 percent to 36 percent, according to the CNN exit poll. In South Carolina, white evangelicals broke for Gingrich over Romney by a 2-to-1 margin.

So what’s going on with Romney among white evangelicals?

The new poll shows that Romney is not their first choice. Among white evangelical Republican voters, Gingrich drew twice as much support as Romney on who they’d like to see nominated, 35 percent to 17 percent. Santorum drew 22 percent.

“Romney is still having trouble sealing the deal with white evangelical Protestants,” said Cox.  “In Florida, percentage-wise among GOP primary voters, he’s been in the high 40s and in the 50s with women, seniors and many other groups. But with white evangelical Protestants he’s having trouble breaking 4 in 10.”

In other poll findings:

– Issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage take a back seat to the economy. Jobs and unemployment was considered a critical issue by 83 percent of all voters, compared to abortion at 29 percent, and same-sex marriage at 25 percent.

– Even among white evangelicals, social issues pale against economic ones, with 82 percent calling jobs and unemployment a critical issue. Just 41 percent called abortion a critical issue, followed by same-sex marriage at 38 percent.

– Fewer white evangelical Protestants (33 percent) consider the growing gap between rich and poor a critical issue than any other religious group, including white mainline Protestants (48 percent) and Catholics (47 percent).

The PRRI/RNS Religion News Survey was based on telephone interviews with 1,005 adults between Jan. 25 and 29. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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• 

I have a confession to make.

The only real reason I saw Spike Lee’s new film at the Sundance Film Festival here is because it is set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, where my oldest daughter started her career in an elementary school with Teach for America.

Even though I think and write about religion for a living, I didn’t attend “Red Hook Summer” because the program guide describes it as the story of a “firebrand preacher bent on getting (his grandson) to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior.”

After all, why would anyone expect a nuanced, respectful exploration of the black church in America from Spike Lee? Let’s face it, the words “Spike Lee” and “theologian” don’t roll off the tongue very easily, if at all.

So imagine my surprise when “Red Hook Summer” delivered a humorous, honest look at the vibrancy, complexity, sincerity and messiness of African-American Christianity.

The story begins with Flik, a teenager who attends a private school in Atlanta and enjoys the finer things of life. His life is turned upside down when his mother sends him off to Brooklyn for the summer to stay with his preacher grandfather, Enoch.

Flik is certainly unprepared for life in the projects, but is even less prepared for working every day at his grandfather’s Little Piece of Heaven church. The only upside is meeting Chazz, a sassy teen who has learned to negotiate life on the streets of Red Hook with her life in the church.

She’s a believer but not stuffy about it, and helps Flik get through the Sunday worship service, which is punctuated by Enoch’s theatrical rants, the spirited “Amens!” of the congregation and the melodramatic sounds of the Hammond organ.

The heart of this film is grandpa Enoch. As the story begins we get hints that Enoch is a man with a past, and it reaches its dramatic climax when we realize that though Enoch is done with his past, his past is not done with him.

Clarke Peters (Det. Lester Freamon from “The Wire”) in the role of Enoch delivers a textured, multi-layered performance that does for the role of a black pastor what Robert Duvall did for revivalists in “The Apostle.” These characters are believable, complicated and likable.

At the Q&A following the film, it was obvious that I wasn’t the only one surprised that Lee delivered a thoughtful, respectful and savvy film about religion. The first audience question was about Lee’s personal religious background. He never attended church as a boy in Brooklyn, he explained, although some summers he was sent to stay with relatives in Atlanta who made sure he did.

Suffice it to say that church and religion have not played a central role in Lee’s life.

So what is the source of the film’s religious content? To answer that question, Lee introduced his co-author on the script, James McBride, and the richness of the film immediately made complete sense.

I interviewed McBride in Chicago in the 1990′s about his best-selling book “The Color of Water.” It was an autobiographical account of his Jewish mother who converted to Christianity and, with her husband, founded the church where “Red Hook Summer” was filmed.

McBride talked about his belief in God and Jesus, and said his faith was renewed and strengthened during the writing and making of the film. He also talked about spirited debates with Lee about certain scenes where McBride’s desire to respect religion collided with Lee’s determination to keep it gritty and real. It was a productive tension, and it worked.

I still find it fascinating that Lee would make a film about religion, and that he teamed up with McBride to do it. Sundance is all about telling stories, and “Red Hook Summer” tells a center-stage story about the importance of religion.

(Dick Staub is author of “About You: Fully Human and Fully Alive” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at www.dickstaub.com)

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• 

PARIS — A decade ago, Rene Lebouvier requested that his local Catholic church erase his name from the baptismal register. The church noted his demands on the margins of its records and the chapter was closed.

But the clergy abuse scandals rocking Europe, coupled with Pope Benedict XVI’s conservative stances on contraception, hardened Lebouvier’s views. Last October, a court in Normandy ruled in favor of his lawsuit to have his name permanently deleted from church records — making the 71-year-old retiree the first Frenchman to be officially “de-baptized.”

“I took the judicial route to get myself de-baptized because of the church’s excesses,” said Lebouvier, speaking by telephone from his village of Fleury, near the D-Day beaches.

“It’s a sort of honesty toward the church because they have a guy on their register who doesn’t believe in God.”

Lebouvier’s case is among a growing wave of de-baptisms in Europe, one of the most visible manifestations of the continent’s secular drift. Websites offering informal de-baptism certificates have mushroomed. Other Christians are formally breaking from the church by opting out of state church taxes.

“The movement is happening across Europe,” said Anne Morelli, who heads a center studying religion and secularity at the Free University of Brussels. “It was very apparent during 2011 — in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria. It is obviously related to the scandals of pedophile priests, but it has been going on for some time.”

While there are no official statistics, experts and secular activists count the numbers of de-baptisms in the tens of thousands. It’s a phenomenon that has touched Protestant as well as Catholic communities.

In France, the de-baptism drive affects a relatively tiny proportion of Christians, experts say. Still, Lebouvier’s case may create a precedent.

The local bishop of Coutances, Stanislas Lalanne, has appealed the court ruling, a process that could take years.

“Baptism is a spiritual gift, it’s bigger than we are,” said Bernard Podvin, spokesman for the French Bishops Confederation, who would not comment on the specifics of the Normandy case. “It can’t be confined to a purely administrative framework.”

But if Lebouvier wins, de-baptism could become standard practice here, and trigger copycat lawsuits across Europe.

“The church is afraid the movement might amplify,” said Marc Blondel, president of the Paris-based National Federation of Freethinkers, who says he will launch another de-baptism drive if Lebouvier prevails.

Lebouvier’s split from the church took decades. Born in a deeply conservative and religious community, he went to Catholic school. But instead of becoming the priest his mother had wished, he became a baker, moving to Paris and joining a leftist trade union.

“I changed 180 degrees, “ he said. “It took time, but it happened.”

Change is afoot elsewhere. In neighboring Belgium, which has been hit hard by the church sex scandals, de-baptism requests in the French-speaking region alone soared to roughly 2,000 in 2010, compared to 66 two years earlier, according to the Brussels Federation of Friends of Secular Morality. The numbers of people reportedly leaving the Dutch church reportedly shot up 25 percent.

In Britain, a de-baptism certificate offered as a joke by the National Secular Society has since turned serious after tens of thousands of people downloaded it.

“Some people actually do feel actively hostile toward churches,” said society president Terry Sanderson. “And they want to express that by saying, ‘I’m not one of your members.’”

In Germany, a record 181,000 Catholics formally split from the Catholic Church in 2011 — the first time that Catholic defections outpaced Protestants leaving. Rather than requesting de-baptisms, Germans fill out government paperwork saying they no longer want to pay church taxes.

“I don’t think they want to get rid of their belief, their connection to Jesus and the baptism, but they don’t want to be connected with the church hierarchy,” said Christian Weisner, German spokesman for the international lay reform movement We are Church.

At stake for many cash-strapped European churches is not just faith, but euros.

“It’s not by chance that in Germany, Austria and Belgium that the movement is strongest,” says Belgian researcher Morelli, noting countries that levy church taxes, which France does not. “It’s also a struggle about subsidies the population must pay for a church that doesn’t represent them.”

The bigger worry, experts say, are plummeting rates of new baptisms. Half a century ago, for example, 90 percent of French children were baptized, said Sorbonne University religion professor Philippe Portier. Today, roughly one in three are.

“The church considers de-baptisms a very marginal phenomena and its strategy right now is to resist it,” Portier said. “It is much more active when it comes to reversing the drop in (new) baptisms — there it’s put in place a new evangelizing strategy.”

The parish at Paris’ historic Saint-Germain-des-Pres, for example, is offering a myriad of activities, from ski retreats to support networks for young professionals. At a recent evening youth Mass, the church was overflowing.

The parish priest, the Rev. Benoist de Sinety, is counting on faith, not numbers.

“What is striking today is that those who want to be Christian really want to be Christian,” he said. “I rejoice in the fact that people are free to choose.”

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• 

I am sometimes suspicious of how we employ our faith. Don’t get me wrong, faith is important to me, and I have given my life to it. But sometimes I treat my faith like it is a medicine cabinet or a pharmaceutical, going to it only when something is wrong, or if I am looking for a quick remedy.

My head hurts,” so I go to the medicine cabinet looking for a pain reliever. “I have a stomach ache,” so I reach in for a spiritual antacid. “I feel so uncertain,” so I explore my therapeutic options. “I’m feeling a bit anxious,” so I look for something that will serve as divine Prozac.

Certainly I am not the only one who does this – it is a common practice – and I’m not the only one to make this observation. Strangely enough (strange because rarely goes a Christian writer reference this man), it was Karl Marx who popularized this view, and this analogy would be incomplete without referring to his legendary quote.

Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the people,” and it appears he understood the medicinal, tranquilizing effects of religious faith fairly well. Now, before you write that letter to the editor or attempt to get your pound of flesh from this simple columnist, understand that I am no Marxist – not even close – I detest anything that smacks of coercion.

But that doesn’t mean that some of Marx’s observations about religion were incorrect, even if his means of modification were suspect. Marx felt that religious faith did very little to actually help people. Rather than drilling down to the source of a person’s trouble, he claimed that religion only treated that person’s symptoms. It was a barbiturate that had a numbing influence, instead of resulting in empowerment.

Faith in God, according to Marx, keeps the believer trapped in his or her current state, incapacitated, and prevents him or her from experiencing real, personal, substantial change. In short, Marx criticized the false relief that faith can bring – false because nothing ever really changes – and I find it difficult to argue with his conclusion.

The faith that is peddled by many pulpits today is little more than a sedative. It helps people to forget their pain and suffering, helps them sleep at night, and keeps them hanging on for next week’s dose of tranquility; but it does very little to move people to a place of growing, spiritual health.

Thus, we can easily succeed in converting our faith into a first-aid kit, only turning to it when something hurts, and leaving it in the cabinet otherwise. Yes, when life hurts I want relief. Yet, the real power of faith is not its ability to magically stop our pain or to provide a fix to get us through a rough spot. Faith simply doesn’t remove our troubles and worries, offering bubble-gummed-flavored baby aspirin and cartooned-band-aids.

Rather, faith offers us a new way to live, an opportunity to change our lifestyle. It does more than medicate our boo-boos or make us happy when we have been made sad. On the contrary, faith has the power to transforms us, to shape and fit us for life, making us whole and well.

It would do us and Marx well to hear some of the earliest words of Christian faith, written by the Apostle James. He said to some of the first believers, “My friends, what good is it for one of you to say that you have faith if your actions do not prove it? Faith that does not lead to change is a faith that is dead.”

It is possible to find great inspiration in our faith; to be comforted, reassured, and soothed, that feeling that, yes, we believe all the right things. Yet, if such beliefs do not have transformative power in our lives, then we do not have faith at all. Instead, we are addicted to a spiritual tranquilizer that blinds us to the reality of our world and the renewal God seeks to produce in our lives.

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• 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday (Jan. 11) unanimously threw its support behind a church school that fired a teacher, using a widely watched church-state case to bolster a legal doctrine that exempts religious institutions from some civil rights laws.

Religious groups heralded the ruling as a firm assertion of religious freedom that keeps personnel decisions about religious employees where they should be: within a church, synagogue, or mosque.

“The court hasn’t spoken this clearly on a church-state matter in almost 20 years,” said Rob Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who wrote an amicus brief on the case in support of the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School.

“This is bedrock,” Garnett continued. “All the justices came together to say if religious freedom means anything, it means governments can’t interfere with religious institutions’ decisions on who is going to be their minister or teacher.”

Those who advocate for the separation of church and state said the court has now set the bar far too high for employees of religious institutions who seek redress against discrimination.

“The really terrible thing about this decision is that if you fire someone and religion is just a pretext, it can’t be addressed by courts,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“It’s just a gigantic new exception, a new loophole to the civil rights law for religious groups that will not be shut in a very long time — if ever.”

The Hosanna-Tabor case revolved around Cheryl Perich, who had been elevated by the Lutheran church that ran the school to a “called teacher” position, one with some religious responsibilities. Though most of her duties were secular, Perich spent part of each day teaching religion and sometimes led chapel services.

Diagnosed with a sleep disorder, Perich took a leave of absence in 2004 and was replaced by another teacher. Cleared by her doctors to return to work, the church refused to reinstate her.

Perich filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, arguing that the school was hiding behind its religious protections to ignore the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The EEOC ruled for Perich, but she lost a lawsuit against the school in federal court in 2008. The school successfully argued that the doctrine of ministerial exception, which is well established in state courts, gave it broad hiring and firing powers over all religious employees, even if they engaged in nonreligious activities.

Lawyers for the school argued that the Lutheran tradition requires that disagreements within the church be settled within the church, and that Perich had flouted this requirement by going to court.

Perich appealed, and in 2010 the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor. The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, gave the final victory to the church, grounding the decision in the First Amendment’s guarantees of free exercise of religion, and a prohibition on government establishment of religion.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan filed concurring opinions.

“The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important. But so too is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith, and carry out their mission,” Roberts wrote.

“The First Amendment has struck the balance for us,” Roberts continued. “The church must be free to choose those who will guide it on its way.”

Said the Rev. Paul Undlin of Hosanna-Tabor, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod church that ran the now-closed school: “It is amazing when a church from Redford, Mich., stands up for its rights and ends up going all the way to the Supreme Court. Praise God for giving the justices the wisdom to uphold the religious freedom enshrined in our Constitution.”

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• 

LONDON — Christians in England and Wales are losing ground about as fast as nonbelievers are gaining it, according to a new government-sponsored poll.

The British government’s latest Citizenship Survey reports that in the five years leading up to 2010, the percentage of declared Christians in the region dropped by 7 percent, although they nonetheless held solid at 70 percent.

Meanwhile, the total of those declaring no religion climbed by 6 percent, to 21 percent over the same period, the poll indicated.

It was the sixth such study since the Citizenship Survey was set up in 2001 by the government of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Current Prime Minister David Cameron’s government has ordered an end to the Citizenship Survey project, on financial grounds. Officials say each survey’s 4 million-pound cost (about $6.2 million) was too much as Britain is forced to tighten its belt.

The survey found that Christians where more than half as likely as Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus to actually practice their religion. Religious practice grew among Muslims, from 73 percent in 2005 to 79 percent in 2009-10.

The latest poll was based on questionnaires answered by some 10,000 men and women, including 5,000 Muslims and other minorities.

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• 

And so it has come to this.

Newt Gingrich, the career politician and millionaire “consultant” for the health care and mortgage industries, a twice-divorced and thrice-married convert to Catholicism, may be the last great hope of the religious right.

Granted, this is the Republican nominating contest for 2012, which means just about anything can happen, if it hasn’t already.

But Gingrich as the political savior of conservative Christians?

The numbers indicate that’s just what is happening as Republican voters continue to look yearningly past Mitt Romney and abandon Herman Cain’s fading campaign amid multiplying accusations of sexual impropriety.

Or, as The Atlantic’s Molly Ball put it, Gingrich’s personal baggage is “garden-variety adultery and lack of marital commitment,” which “looks downright tame next to what Cain’s been accused of.”

The result: Gingrich’s “positive intensity” among GOP voters — a key metric tracked by the Gallup Poll — has soared while Romney’s has tanked, leading to the widest disparity among the leading candidates so far this year.

More telling is Gingrich’s emergence from the pack in Iowa, a stronghold of the religious right, where he has a 28 percent approval rating to Romney’s 12 percent runner-up rank. And in South Carolina, Christian conservatives are helping Gingrich establish a commanding lead, 38-15 percent, over Romney.

About 40 percent of Republicans in both Iowa and South Carolina identify themselves as fundamentalist Christians or evangelicals, according to a recent NBC News/Marist poll.

Given Iowa’s first-in-the-nation vote on Jan. 3, and South Carolina No. 3 place on Jan. 21 after No. 2 New Hampshire, such faith-based support could prove to be a crucial factor in finally deciding who will be the Republican challenger to President Obama.

There are several reasons why Gingrich has emerged as an unlikely for the Christian right, and why he could have the kind of staying power that others have not:

Discerning voters

The first factor — and perhaps the least appreciated — is that when it comes to politics, conservative evangelicals are far from a bunch of wide-eyed rubes who can be mesmerized by a slick sermon, or stump speech.

“This is a group of voters that has been active in presidential politics for a while now,” said John Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute. “Some evangelicals look at religion, some look at the issues, some look at electability. So they have a number of criteria that they apply.”

Certainly, evangelical suspicions about Romney’s Mormonism come into play, but added to that are deep concerns about the consistency of Romney’s conservatism, and his failure to court social conservatives — two problems Gingrich does not have.

Green and others also note that the religious right hasn’t fallen in love with a candidate since George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. Since then, these “values voters” have grown accustomed to looking around, and they may well be content with the sadder-but-wiser candidate as long as he can win.

“Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community,” Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, told The Daily Beast. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

A modern-day ‘King David’

Certainly that is the line that Gingrich has been pitching.

“I don’t claim to be the perfect candidate,” Gingrich said during a recent radio interview in South Carolina, where his meetings with rock-ribbed Christian leaders have been bearing fruit. “I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anybody else.”

By embracing rather than running away from his past sins, Gingrich is both playing up the kind of “authenticity” that he is famous for — and that voters don’t find in Romney — and he is playing to a Christian narrative that retains great power in the American religious imagination.

“They were willing to take Gingrich’s account that he was a changed man at face value because the drama of sin and redemption is something that fits very well with evangelicalism,” Green said.

Gingrich has doubled-down on that bet by adding a section to his campaign website about his checkered personal past, saying that he “has been honest and forthright about the fact that he has had moments in his life that he regrets, that he has had to seek reconciliation, and go to God for forgiveness.”

So far, that approach seems to be working.

“I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows,” Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host in Iowa, told The Daily Beast.

Unfinished business

Still, the remaining month before the Iowa caucuses is an eternity in this primary campaign, and many conservative pundits are still appalled at Gingrich’s unexpected resurgence.

“Gingrich’s serial adultery and his current hypocrisy suggest not a immoral man, but an amoral one,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote in a classic blast this week.

In addition, he hasn’t closed the deal with social conservatives. Richard Land, an influential Southern Baptist leader, posted an open letter to Gingrich congratulating him on his return “from the political equivalent of hospice care” but warning that he still has work to do to win over evangelical women.

Land suggested Gingrich find “a pro-family venue and give a speech (not an interview) addressing your marital history once and for all.” It might not convince everyone, Land said, but might change enough minds among evangelicals who are “immersed in a spiritual tradition of confession, redemption, forgiveness and second and third chances.”

And that, in the end, might be just enough to make Gingrich the nominee.

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• 

As Occupy camps nationwide deal with police crackdowns and the inevitable onset of winter temperatures, religious communities of all stripes are stepping in with offers of shelter and solidarity.

Soon after police forcibly evicted the original Occupy Wall Street camp in New York’s Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, many of the protesters began sleeping and gathering in local congregations, including Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.

“The eviction … really shifts what happens here, and it really boomed the movement, because immediately there was this network in place that we’d developed of communities throughout New York that were willing to open up their doors and house the movement,” said the Rev. Michael Ellick, a pastor at Judson Memorial.

Ellick and his colleagues got involved early on, marching to Zuccotti Park with a golden calf fashioned to look like the iconic Wall Street bull statue. Ever since, phones have been “ringing off the hook” with churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and monasteries wanting to get involved in some way, he said.

Various religious groups have held services at Zuccotti Park, which in turn have “re-radicalized” their congregations, Ellick said.

“Initially it was just sort of a few churches who work a lot together on these issues,” he said. “Now it’s actually a pretty hefty power base in New York City,” Ellick said.

A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and Religion News Service found that less than a third of Americans say the Occupy movement represents their values, but the police evictions seem to have boosted religious support for the movement.

According to Ellick, more than 1,400 faith leaders from around the country have signed a pledge of solidarity with Occupy protesters, many of them jumping in only after police cleared Zuccotti Park.

On the other side of the country, a network of religious communities sprang up in Portland, Ore., to support Occupy Portland after police cleared the camp on Nov. 13.

Since the eviction, the city’s First Congregational Church and First Unitarian Church have hosted meetings of the movement. While many of the campers search for places to stay, First Unitarian has been housing their gear and the media tent, making the church Occupy Portland’s unofficial hub.

About 25 clergy and religious leaders spent the night before the eviction at the camp, praying and providing nonviolence counseling. The Rev. Chuck Currie, a United Church of Christ minister, was one of them.

Currie said he found the number of young people who thanked or prayed with the religious emissaries “astounding,” especially because only one in four Oregonians identify with a faith tradition.

“A number of people expressed surprise that we were there. They did not realize that the church had an interest in these issues,” Currie said.

Although surprising to some, many of the Occupy camps now have some kind of faith outreach group, prayer tent or meditation class.

About a dozen Christian activists have started an ecumenical “Occupy Church” at Washington’s Occupy K Street encampment in downtown Washington. The Occupy Church holds a prayer service every Saturday at noon and is trying to establish a full-time, rotating chaplaincy for the occupiers.

Unitarians, Muslims and Jews have also held worship services at the encampment in McPherson Square. Mimicking the New York protest, Jewish occupiers set up a tent in the square in October for the harvest festival of Sukkot.

In addition to spiritual ministry and space to assemble and sleep, religious communities have provided the Occupy movement with material support such as food, clothing, tents, blankets and heaters.

A new interfaith coalition calling itself “Occupy Faith DC” hosted a free Thanksgiving meal at a historic Washington church for about 300 of the protesters, including a small group that had just marched in from New York City.

“We understand and we are in total solidarity with you,” James Lee, one of the chief organizers of Occupy Faith DC, told the diners.

Occupy Faith DC is preparing to distribute a rapid response contact list of faith-based groups and individuals who are willing to stand in solidarity with the occupiers in the event of an eviction.

The list may be needed soon. The day after Thanksgiving, park rangers issued notices about safety and sanitation concerns to the occupiers of federally owned Freedom Plaza, a possible first step toward an eviction.

“Churches traditionally do charity pretty well,” Ellick said, “and this is a moment where that charity gets transformed into justice work and they can start to see that there are underlying causes here that we need to address.”

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• 

n a war between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement to capture the hearts of Americans, who wins? According to a new poll, it’s a draw.

Less than a third of Americans say either movement represents their values, according to a poll released Wednesday (Nov. 16) by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service.

One thing, however, is clear: neither movement can make a strong claim to speak for Americans. Near identical majorities say neither movement represents their values—57 percent for the Tea Party, and 56 percent for Occupy Wall Street.

What’s more, one in five Americans say each of the movements has a negative impact on society, and about four in 10 Americans see both as largely irrelevant.

“They’re mirror images of each other, but the symmetry at the national level hides a very different distribution,” said Robert Jones, the research firm’s CEO. “Support for the Tea Party is more intensely concentrated among Republicans, but support for the OWS movement is less intense among Democrats and more evenly spread among other groups.”

The poll—designed to gauge Americans’ views about economic hardship and the proper responses to it—also revealed some striking divides and ambivalences, particularly in the way people view opportunity in America.

A significant majority (eight in 10) believes the gap between rich and poor has widened during the past 20 years, a finding that held true across generational, religious and political lines. Nearly half of those polled believe the American Dream—the idea that if you work hard you’ll get ahead—once held true but no longer does.

And while two-thirds of Americans agree that the government should do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor, an even higher proportion (71 percent) say poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.

Jones said that ambivalence speaks to a long-standing conflict between two strongly held beliefs in American culture: people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and the government should provide a safety net.

Overall, he said, people seem to favor raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and reject the idea of cutting programs for the poor.

“They feel government has a responsibility not to let people sink,” Jones said.

A strong majority (69 percent) says increasing taxes on people who make at least $1 million a year is an appropriate way to decrease the budget deficit.

About the same proportion reject cutting federal money for social programs that help the poor (67 percent) or cutting federal funding for religious organizations that help the poor (66 percent).

When it comes to both their feelings about inequality in America and the Tea Party and OWS movement, Americans break down along clear religious and generational lines:

—White evangelicals are the most likely to say the Tea Party shares their values (49 percent), followed by white mainline Protestants (32 percent), Catholics (26 percent), the religiously unaffiliated (19 percent) and minority Christians (19 percent).

—Occupy Wall Street drew the strongest support from the unaffiliated (38 percent), followed by minority Christians (34 percent), mainline Protestants (30 percent) and Catholics (29 percent).

—Younger Americans, 18 to 29, are much more likely to say the OWS movement shares their values (34 percent) than the Tea Party (26 percent).

The poll also asked Americans whether churches and clergy are doing enough to respond to the economic crisis, and found they are evenly divided, with 46 percent saying they have not provided enough moral leadership on the country’s most pressing economic problems, and 45 percent who think they have.

This near-even split is true across all major religious groups except members of minority Protestants: 64 percent say churches and clergy have failed to provide sufficient moral leadership on economic problems.

Jones said it’s not surprising that members of African-American churches would feel this way given black pastors’ history of taking vocal stands on civil rights and inequality.

“There’s a tradition of these clergy taking a strong leadership role on major issues facing society,” he said.

The PRRI/RNS Religion News Survey was based on telephone interviews with 1,002 adults between Nov. 10 and 14. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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While nearly 7-in-10 (69%) Americans believe there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, and nearly 6-in-10 (57%) Americans believe humans and other living things evolved over time, a new survey finds that approximately half of Americans who identify with the Tea Party reject both (50% reject global warming and 51% reject evolution).

The new PRRI/RNS Religion News Survey was conducted by Public Religion Research Institute, in partnership with the Religion News Service, amid back and forth among Republican presidential candidates on religion and science, especially the issues of climate change and evolution.

The survey finds that attitudes on climate change and evolution present strategic challenges for GOP presidential candidates: Americans who identify as Republican, along with key groups in the Republican base such as white evangelical Protestants and members of the Tea Party, hold views that differ significantly from the general population and from political independents.

“While most Americans say the issues of evolution and climate change do not strongly influence their support of candidates, these issues are symbolically important for two groups that play an outsize role in Republican primary politics: white evangelical Protestants and members of the Tea Party,” said Dr. Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute. “The challenge for Republican candidates is to talk about these issues now in a way that will not hurt them later in the general election.”

The survey also uncovers new complexity on the question of evolution. Among those affirming a belief in evolution, a majority (53%) say evolution is due to natural processes, compared to 38% who say a supreme being guided the process. Among those affirming creationism, fully half (50%) say humans and other living thing were created within the last 10,000 years, compared to 39% who disagree. There are large partisan differences on this question.

“Americans who identify with the Tea Party and white evangelical Protestants strongly reject evolution,” said Daniel Cox, PRRI Research Director. “In fact, roughly one-third of these groups believe humans and other living things were created within the last 10,000 years.”

Among the Findings:

A majority (57%) of Americans believe that humans and other living things have evolved over time, compared to 38% who say that humans and other living things have existed in their present form since creation.

• More than 6-in-10 political independents (61%) and Democrats (64%) affirm a belief in evolution, compared to 45% of Republicans and 43% of Americans who identify with the Tea Party.
• Nearly two-thirds (66%) of white mainline Protestants, 61% of Catholics, and 77% of the unaffiliated believe humans and other living things evolved over time, compared to only about one-third (32%) of white evangelicals. African American Protestants are evenly divided on the question, with 47% affirming a belief in evolution and 46% affirming a belief in creationism.

Nearly 7-in-10 (69%) Americans say that there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades, compared to only 26% who disagree.

• There are large, asymmetrical political divisions over belief about climate change. Eighty-one percent of Democrats and 7-in-10 independents believe the earth is getting warmer, compared to less than half (49%) of Republicans and only about 4-in-10 (41%) Americans who identify as members of the Tea Party.
• Strong majorities of every religious group say that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer, including 7-in-10 Catholics and the unaffiliated, 63% of white mainline Protestants, and 57% of white evangelicals.

A majority (53%) of Americans say that if a candidate does not believe in evolution, it would have no effect on their likelihood of voting for the candidate. Among those who say it matters, more than twice as many say they would be less likely (32%) than say they would be more likely (13%) to vote for the candidate.

• White evangelical Protestants are the only demographic group among whom the balance is the other way: nearly one-third (32%) say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who did not believe in evolution, compared to 24% who say they would be less likely. Only 40% say a candidate’s belief in evolution would make no difference to their vote.

A majority (54%) of Americans also say that if a candidate said they did not believe climate change is caused by human activity, if would have no effect on their likelihood of voting for the candidate. Among those who say it matters, four times as many say that they would be less likely (36%) than say they would be more likely (9%) to support a candidate who does not believe in human-caused climate change.

• Members of the Tea Party are much more likely than any other group to say that they would be more likely (33%) than less likely (24%) to support a candidate who does not believe in climate change. Only 16% of Republicans, 9% of independents, and 5% of Democrats say they would be more likely. Half of Democrats say it would make them less likely.

A slim majority (51%) of Americans believe that scientists generally agree that humans evolved over time. About one-quarter (26%) say they are divided, and 15% say scientists generally disagree that humans evolve over time.

Only 4-in-10 Americans believe that scientists generally agree that the earth is getting warmer because of human activity. Nearly as many (37%) say the scientific community is divided, and 15% believe scientists generally disagree that humans are causing temperatures on earth to rise.

Nearly 6-in-10 (57%) of Americans agree that God gave humans beings the task of living responsibly with animals, plants and the resources of the planet, compared to 36% who say that God gave human beings the right to use animals, plants and all the resources of the plant for human benefit.

Half of Americans believe dealing with climate change now will create new jobs and help avoid more serious economic problems in the future, compared to 43% who believe that given current economic problems we cannot afford to deal with climate change.

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