Americans are split down the middle on their perceptions of the country’s religion, new research finds.
Fifty percent of Americans surveyed say they think the U.S. is a Christian nation and should be based on Christian values, according to a Sept. 24 analysis by Public Religion Research Institute fellows.
The research is based on a national probability survey of 1,280 U.S. adults, conducted in April.
According to the data, white Christian conservatives show the most support for the idea that the U.S. should be based on Christian values, with 85 percent of the group saying so.
By contrast, non-Christian and nonreligious groups are much less likely to say they think Christian values should ground the country, according to the analysis.
Forty percent of Americans who identify as religiously Jewish say the U.S. should be based on Christian values, while just 25 percent of religious “nones” agree, the survey found.
According to the survey, 35 percent of Americans overall think Christians should have dominion over U.S. laws, compared to 43 percent of white Christian conservatives who agree.
Allyson Shortle, one of the survey’s researchers and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, told McClatchy News she thinks it’s easy for Americans to believe the U.S. is a Christian nation because there’s a significant overlap between democratic values and Christian values.
“It’s the biggest religion, obviously the dominant religion,” Shortle said. “It does shape a lot of the civil society actions that we see.”
Many of the country’s positive values have been credited to Christianity, but, Shortle noted, they’re actually liberal democratic values seen across many religions.
Shortle said she thinks a lot of Americans simply like the idea of a positive force driving policy and politics.
“But the reality is that there are individual leaders within fringe Christian movements who have been able to sort of package up this positive goodwill into trying to achieve really exclusionary policies,” Shortle said.
Overall, the survey’s findings highlight and “also point to the need for additional research on the growing impact of Christian nationalist views on non-white and non-Christian communities in the U.S.,” researchers said in the analysis.
