Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
7 Figures: Faith and the 2016 Campaign
7 Figures: Faith and the 2016 Campaign
Sep 22, 2024 4:45 AM

A new Pew Research Center survey examines how voters feel about the religiosity of presidential candidates. Here are seven figures you should know from the report:

1. More than half of Americans (51 percent) say they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who does not believe in God. (This is down from 63 percent in 2007.)

2. About half of U.S. adults say it’s “very important” (27 percent) or “somewhat important” (24 percent) for a president to share their religious perspective. This view is mon among Republicans, among whom roughly two-thirds say it’s at least “somewhat important” to them that the president share their religious beliefs.

3. Relatively few Republicans think Trump is a particularly religious person. Overall, 44 percent of Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party say Trump is a “very religious” (5 percent) or “somewhat religious” (39 percent) person, while 47 percent say he is “not too religious” or “not at all religious.” By contrast, fully eight-in-ten Republicanssay Ben Carson is a religious person, three-quarters view Ted Cruz as a religious person, and seven-in-ten say the same about Marco Rubio.

4. More people view Clinton as “very” or “somewhat” religious than say the same about Sanders. This is true among both the public as a whole (48 percent vs. 40 percent) and those who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (65 percent vs. 47 percent).

5. Fully half of religiously unaffiliated registered voters (51 percent) think Sanders would be a successful president, while four-in-ten (42 percent) think Clinton would be a good or great president. Among black Protestant voters, about six-in-ten (62 percent) think Clinton will be a “good” or a “great” president, while 36 percent say this about Sanders. Among both groups (religious “nones” and black Protestants), just 15 percent or fewer think any of the Republican candidates would be good presidents.

6. Within their own party, more people in their own party than the opposing party view presidential candidates as religious. The biggest partisan gap is about Hillary Clinton: two-thirds of Democrats say she is “very” or “somewhat” religious, while two-thirds of Republicans say she is “not too” or “not at all” religious.

7. Half of Americans (51 percent) believe religious conservatives have too much control over the GOP, and more than four-in-ten (44 percent) think that liberals who arenotreligious have too much control over the Democratic Party.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Food prices: financial speculation is a red herring
The discussion is certainly on-going among the 220 opinion leaders who attended and spoke at Acton’s December 3 Rome conference In Dialogue with Laudato Si’: Can Free Markets Help Us Care for Our Common Home? The Institute’s Rome officehad hoped that the “dialogue” would continue well past the conference itself – within the Vatican, its pontifical universities and mass media – afterheated discussion erupted over what is magisterium and debatable opinion in encyclical letters. When discussing environmental issues treated by...
Explainer: Christmas 2015 by the Numbers
As the most widely observed cultural holiday in the world, Christmas produces many things — joy, happiness, gratitude, reverence. And numbers. Lots of peculiar, often large, numbers. Here are a few to contemplate this season: $39.50– Average amount U.S. consumers spent on real Christmas trees in 2014. $63.60– Average amount U.S. consumers spent on fake Christmas trees in 2014. 33,000,000 – Number of real Christmas trees sold in the U.S. each year. 9,500,000 – Number of fake Christmas trees sold...
Star Wars Discussion at Watchdog.org
Happy Star Wars day! The new Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens, opened across the US and worldwide today, and I can’t tell you anything about how well it’s doing. I’ve been avoiding Googling it because I’m a huge nerd and I don’t want to accidentally uncover any spoilers. (I haven’t seen it yet.) But I do know that the presales were over $100 million. So even if people end up hating it, it’s already done pretty well. (Not...
Keeping Watch over Their Flock at Night
For this week’s Acton Commentary, we have a Christmas meditation by the Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper. If we should ever be envious, shouldn’t we envy the shepherds out in Bethlehem’s fields? Those men singled out for their exceptionally glorious privilege! The ones awestruck on that holy night by the flood of heavenly glory that no one else had ever seen! Those who saw God’s heavenly hosts swooping and glistening above the fields! The men whose ears were ringing...
This Christmas, Should You Give Cash or Cows?
During the Spanish Civil War, an American farmer named Dan West served as an aid worker on the front lines. His mission was to provide relief to weary soldiers, but all he was allotted to give them was a single cup of milk. This meager ration led West to wonder if more could be done. “What if they had not a cup,” thought West, “but a cow?” The “teach a man to fish” philosophy behind that question inspired West to...
Christmas Greetings from Rev. Robert A. Sirico
With Christmas just around the corner, we at the Acton Institute would like to pause and share with all of you our warmest wishes for a blessed Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous new year to all of our friends and supporters. Acton Institute President Rev. Robert A. Sirico recorded thispersonal Christmas greeting, and we’re pleased to share it with you now. ...
The Economics of Bedford Falls (Part III)
[Note: This is the finalpost in a series highlighting some of the financial aspects and broad economic lessons of Frank Capra’s holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. You can find part one hereand part two here.] Economist Don Boudreaux recently outlined ten foundational lessons that should be learned in every well-taught principles of economics course. Examples of nearly all of the ten lessons can be found in Capra’s Christmas classic, but for the sake of brevity I’ll merely highlight two...
There is No Free Lunch—or Free Red Tape
It was once mon practice of saloons in America to provide a “free lunch” to patrons who had purchased at least one drink. Many foods on offer were high in salt (ham, cheese, salted crackers, etc.), so those who ate them naturally ended up buying a lot of beer. In his 1966 sci-fi novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein used this practice in a saloon on the moon to highlight an economic principle: “It was when you...
The Most Important (Good) News Story of 2015
From mass shootings to terrorist attacks, political petence to racial unrest, there has been no shortage of bad news stories in 2015. Death, destruction, and divisiveness tend to dominate the news cycle, leading us to despair over the direction our world is headed. But our incessant focus on the negative can lead us to overlook or downplay the positive changes that are happening across the globe. That is especially true of the most important good news story of 2015, one...
5 Facts About Christmas
Christmas is the most widely observed cultural holiday in the world. Here are five factsyou should know about the memoration of the birth of Jesus: 1. No one knows what day or month Jesus was born (though some scholars speculate that it was in September). The earliest evidence for the observance of December 25 as the birthday of Christappears in the Philocalian posed in Rome in 336. 2. Despite the impression given by many nativity plays and Christmas carols, the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved