Link Banana

I strongly suspect this is months old, but it’s none the less fascinating.  The USA Today offers a great Flash presentation of some data from the latest Pew Religion Survey. A few things that really struck me (unfortunately, it being Flash, I can’t link straight to the relevant charts):

• Jehovah’s Witnesses are truly exceptional. They seem to be outliers on just about every question in the set.
• Catholic’s acceptance of homosexuality is much higher than I’d expected. (58%, higher than the general population, which is at 50%. Still nowhere near the 80ish scores for Buddhists, Jews, and “Other Faiths.”)
• Belief in heaven is most common among Mormons and historically black churches. Who knew the two would have so much in common?
• Jews pray about as much as the unaffiliated.

(via Robin, who offers other portraits of the United States)

Because we hadn’t already heard it 1000 times. Also, I realize a lot of this is just noise, but — like Blake Houshnell — I’m wondering what Spain has against McCain.

Wired Science found a recent Pew survey on climate change both weird and confounding:

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now.

Seeing as how 2007 was the second-warmest year on record, and the popular press finally took climate change seriously, I’m not sure how attitudes shifted in this manner. That’s the troubling part.

The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

In an essay with parts that might qualify as “overtly partisan” Michael Barone makes an interesting point:

Americans’ views of the economy are increasingly a function of voting behavior or party loyalty, rather than the other way around. The most succinct evidence of this comes from a January 2006 report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press entitled “Economy Now Seen Through Partisan Prism.” As the Pew report notes, during the1992 campaign year and up through 1994 there was a partisan divide on the economy, with about 20 percent of Republicans and less than 10 percent of Democrats rating it as excellent or good. From 1995 to 1998, with a Democratic president and a visibly aggressive Republican Congress, Democrats and Republicans gave similar ratings to the economy. From 1998 to 2000, Democrats were somewhat more positive about the economy than Republicans, at a time when economic growth was vibrant and inflation low.