Interesting PRRI survey numbers on religious left/religious right

[DC Al Fine]

Scott, did you write about this a few months ago?

Anyways here's my quick response

1) Religious conservatives, particularly evangelicals are demographically similar to mainline Protestants in the 1950's and are poised for a similar decline.

2) There's a big difference between a "religious liberal" and a liberal who is religious. The former has a much brighter future in America than the latter.

3) Religious progressives (the kind that are liberal on theological issues) tend to be less involved on average. They may believe in God/Jesus but are less likely to attend church, give money, volunteer for a ministry etc. That sort of person is secular in all but name.  What I mean is that they'll be useful at the ballot box, but completely useless if you're trying to change a church or congregation.

tl;dr Religious conservatives have a poor outlook, an religious progressives have a positive one, but the picture is not nearly as rosy as it seems for them.

[DC Al Fine]

I posted another survey dealing with this, yes.  This one is just more detailed and has some interesting factoids.  I personally didn't expect that there would be so many American Catholics self-identifying as 'progressive.'

Why not? At least according to most surveys that I've seen in the recent past, Catholics have been roughly on par with or slightly to the left of America as a whole for a while now. (In the more distant past they were obviously a strongly partisan Democratic group but not really a strongly ideological 'progressive' or 'liberal' one in the sense that more recent surveys usually purport to measure.)

I don't deny that a significant number of American Catholics differ with official church teachings, I'm just a tad surprised that mainline Protestants don't outnumber them, what with the increasing number of Protestant churches adopting moderate-to-liberal political stances.

To be fair, though, this article isn't specific about what churches these mainline Protestants are affiliated with, so I suppose that has to be considered as well.

Mainlines as defined in the media can be a pretty broad range. Let's not forget that UMC member George W. Bush could be considered a mainline Protestant.