Monday, October 13, 2003

Slate has a useful article for those of us on the left end of the religious scale. It's a list of seven myths about the "religious right", one of which being the notion of a "religious right". One of the most interesting is the myth that a politician's religious identity isn't important to voters. He pulls out a Pew study that shows that atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and *evangelicals* are at a disadvantage among the average American voter. I took a closer look at that study, and found that Hispanics were equally unlikely to vote for all of the above, at about the same percentage. The numbers more-or-less agree with his conclusion, however: voters prefer people with professed mainstream beliefs like Judaism, Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism, than secularists or Bible-Belters.

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