c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Father Andrew Greeley has a gift for seeing past the surfaces of the great “accepted truths” of our times _ those popular shorthand interpretations of the pundit class that are repeated so often that they are taken for granted even by people who should know better.

Greeley’s latest project is the new book “The Truth About Conservative Christians,” written with sociologist Michael Hout, in which he examines the generally accepted cultural ideas about these well publicized and presumably fiercely fundamentalist believers.

Some Americans see conservative Christianity as “embattled and thriving” as it defends religious and American core values against, as Greeley summarizes it, “the onslaughts of a secular and vulgar culture that will … undo both nation and culture.”

Others see conservative Christians as “a dangerous juggernaut” filled with hypocrisy that wants to end our liberties and establish an American theocracy. Greeley and Hout present a picture far different from the sharply differentiated one that the pundits have hung on the nation’s living room wall.

Most, but not all, conservative Christians “insist on the literal word-for-word interpretation of Scripture” and are more likely than other Protestants to be “born again” and to work for the conversion of others to Jesus. Even though they tend “to accept predetermination, to reject evolution” and to follow a stricter, more personal spirituality than mainline Protestants, the differences are “not so great as to make conservative Christians unique,” they say.

Although conservative Christians are thought to be strongly Republican and conservative in politics, the findings show that they are only 6 percentage points more likely than other Protestants to vote or identify themselves in this way. Despite pundit shorthand, “they have added very little to a Republican base.”

Nor is religion the only factor in determining who votes for either party. Greeley and Hout find that “social class” is also important and that “three out of five working-class conservative Christians tend to vote Democratic, more … than working-class mainline Protestants.”

Although conservative Christians “disapprove of premarital sex (though not by much), extramarital sex, and homosexuality more than mainline Protestants, they are more likely to be in partnership relationships and cohabitation” than mainliners. The authors wonder in passing why conservative leaders, “so eager to denounce threats to the institution of marriage, seem disinclined to criticize these relations … which are either fornication or adultery by their own moral standards.”

A large majority of conservative Christians are not consistently pro-life and tolerate abortion in cases of rape or if the mother’s life is threatened. Even those who accept a literal reading of the Scriptures are not consistently pro-life. While they are important to many, “neither abortion nor homosexuals,” in Greeley’s judgment, “are the `value’ issues that the leaders … would have us believe.”

While conservative Christians have more taste for bluegrass music and NASCAR, they are as likely as mainline Protestants to watch the nightly news on PBS. Pentecostals may be the “super-conservatives” within this movement, but they are more likely than other conservatives or mainline Protestants to identify as Democrats.

In the end, Greeley and Hout conclude, against the grain of media interpretation, that there “is a whiff of fact behind some stereotypes but no basis for the venomous denunciations that one hears so often.”

Those who accept a literal interpretation of the Bible and reject abortion in all cases “are a little more than 2 percent of the American population _ hardly a mass of barbarians at the gate.”

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/PH END KENNEDY

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