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We
were eating salad together one night, my folks and I,
when suddenly my mother, a good and devout Italian American
Catholic of eighty-two, declared in the Calabrese dialect
of her youth something that I roughly translated as,
“Dear God, that you made the buttocks of the cucumber
so bitter.”
Now, I generally try to avoid
being ensnared by these sorts of disorienting conversation-starters,
but this was too much for me. “Ma,” I exclaimed, “What
is that supposed to mean? It’s not even a complete sentence!”
My mother nodded soberly.
“There’s a lot of wisdom in those old sayings,” she
said.
We all comprehend the infinite
in our own ways, I guess. The differences among them
can leave us quite perplexed.
Of
course, the implications of Americans’ differences in
matters spiritual carry well beyond our dinner tables,
families, and places of worship, as was quite dramatically
demonstrated in our recent national elections.
As associate editor John
Benson writes in this issue of Public Opinion Pros,
“Many analysts are beginning to see that being religious
in America
has consequences.” He sees no excuse for survey researchers
not including a measure of religiousness in any poll
that probes political or social attitudes.
These same analysts may not
realize that a tremendous wealth of polling data pertaining
to religiousness already exists. Benson here applies
a good many of them to exploring in depth the consequences
of not being religious.
In a similar strain, Sid Groeneman
and Gary Tobin showcase findings from the Institute
for Jewish & Community Research’s Survey of Heritage
and Religious Identification, which demonstrates a dramatic
growth trend in recent years in the numbers of “non-identifiers”—Americans
who deny affiliation with organized religion—a shift,
they say, whose effects “may be felt for generations
to come in politics, philanthropy, and other areas of
civic life.”
Playing on a broader stage,
Tom Smith uses data from the International Social Survey
Program to place American
spirituality into context with over thirty other countries
throughout the world. He reveals important differences
among nations in terms of personal spiritual transformations,
as well as between those Americans who have experienced
personal religious change and those who say their belief
in God has been consistent throughout their lifetimes.
The
lead article in this issue is by John Kenneth White,
and it is the most comprehensive of our features. White
gives historical perspective to the deep partisan divisions
that manifested themselves in the November 2004 elections
not just in the form of a “God gap,” but as fissures
of gender, race, education, and sexual orientation,
among others. He shows us that this “tough, competitive
race,” though perhaps unusual in its “vitriolic rhetoric
that further polarized an already alienated and exhausted
public,” was not unprecedented in the degree to which
it threw our differences into sharp relief.
Americans have been grappling
with our differences, religious and otherwise, for a
very long time. After more than two centuries of trying
to come to grips with them, they still leave us perplexed.
As the articles in this issue of Public Opinion Pros
demonstrate, there is a lot that polling can do
to shed light on what these differences mean to American
society and politics—and, given how bitterly polarizing
they have lately proved to be, it is quite vital that
it be employed to do so.
—Lisa
Ferraro Parmelee, Editor
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