Short Take on Baylor God-Poll

Gentle readers interested in a succinct summary of the recent Baylor University poll of Americans' views of God, with cautious analysis, will find it at, of all places, the Christian Science Monitor. It's rife with the CSM's usual pale optimism, but leaves room for important observations like these:

The study found that even people within the same denomination hold different concepts of God - which may explain schisms over dogma. Evangelicals and black Protestants, however, hold the most uniform views (a majority sees God as authoritarian).

It also found that the "four Gods" track more closely with political and social attitudes than do traditional indicators such as church attendance. The study found, for instance, that the closer one moves toward the authoritarian model, the more likely one finds abortion and gay marriage are "always wrong."

Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark got clobbered a few years ago for suggesting that in the study of religion, what matters most is how adherents view god (with N. T. Wright, we use lower case here deliberately, since human views of deity[ies] vary so greatly that it's absurd to assume that everyone is really talking about the Same Being when we reference many or all such views). That such patent verities prove controversial reminds us of how much more significant the Baylor poll is than, say, the generic party-preference polling that occupies considerable media attention these days.