More than twice as many Americans view the Democrat Party as “unfriendly” toward religion than the Republican Party, with fewer than one in five U.S. adults saying the Democrats are “friendly” toward religion, the Pew Research Center reported Friday.
In its massive new survey, Pew found that nearly a third (31 percent) of all U.S. adults believe that the Democrat Party is unfriendly to religion, while only 13 percent say the same of the Republican Party. Conversely, more than half of Americans (54 percent) say that the Republican Party is friendly to religion, while only 19 percent say the same of the Democrats.
Evangelical Christians in particular sense hostility toward the faith among Democrats, with a majority (55 percent) saying they believe the Democrat Party to be unfriendly toward religion. Well over half of Evangelicals (59 percent) say the opposite about the Republican Party, declaring it to be friendly to religion.
Remarkably, even among the Democrats surveyed, the Republican Party emerged as being far more religion-friendly. More than half of Democrats (52 percent) say that the GOP is friendly to religion, whereas fewer than a third (28 percent) of Democrats believe that their own party is friendly toward religion.
Pew also asked Americans whether they see university professors and members of the news media as friendly or hostile to religion with even starker results.
Only about one in twenty (6 percent) U.S. adults said that university professors are friendly to religion, with even fewer Christians (5 percent) sensing friendliness to faith among academics.
The news media did not fare much better, since only ten percent of Americans believe they are friendly to religion, while more than three times as many (33 percent) say the media are unfriendly to religion, Pew found.
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