The God Squad's in Trouble

If the news is true, it could be the best thing to happen to the United States in decades. In a survey published Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 70 percent of those polled (35,000) concurred with the statement that there are many roads to salvation. Say what? Is this really the United States we're talking about?

First reported in Monday's edition of Time Magazine, these survey results were assessed in terms of what they immediately suggest: that even Evangelicals no longer believe in the primacy of their own vision. American Protestants s are becoming more tolerant of other faiths, said one source, while another stressed that such open-mindedness signals a de-emphasis of religious purity.

Such responses are entirely reasonable. For over a generation, Americans have debated whether the country needs one overriding religion for everyone to subscribe to, or a multiplicity of faiths, reflecting the remarkable diversity that characterizes US cultural life. Evangelicals have championed one approach, while a declining number of secularists and religious liberals have emphasized the other. Since the early 1970s, sectarianism and intolerance has come to characterize how we speak about faith in the United States.

What's left unsaid in Time's coverage of this event is what such changes might portend for American politics. Christian conservatism has fueled most of the conservativisms that have ruled American life since the beginning of the Reagan era. If this religious disposition is now becoming more tolerant, it means that the fundamental religious ideology underpinning the political character of our era is in crisis. It may be a harbinger of a new era of social liberalism. That's the most important thing about this.