One of the most irritating things about today’s conservatives — and they offer lots of irritations to choose from — is their presumptuous use of the word “values,” as if they have values and those whom they oppose don’t have any. One example of this took place over the weekend, at the fourth annual “Values Voters Summit” in D.C., where rightwingers got together for a fun weekend of liberal- and Obama-bashing, talons-out speeches, and a few GOP presidential candidates lining up to beg for support. These guys make it clear that they not only think their values are the only real values, they even regularly call liberals “godless” or even “anti-God” — which is OK, I guess, since they say it with smiles on their faces and cross pendants around their necks.
Daily Politics reports, though, on a new in-depth survey that belies conservatives’ claims of a monopoly on spirituality in the political marketplace. The survey, by Public Religion Research and the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics, shows that an increasing number of Americans consider themselves part of a “religious left” and support progressive religious activism. Tellingly, the survey shows that 45 million adult Americans share the conservative religious mindset, while 38 million share what the survey calls the “modernist” spiritual mindset typical of the religious left. It’s a very interesting survey that shows, as most in-depth studies usually do, more nuances and subtle differences among religiously inclined Americans than the media usually acknowledges. And it shows that the religious right's belief that it alone represents "values voters" is nonsense.
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