Charles M. Blow has been a welcome addition to the New York Times op-ed page and yesterday he had a story about a recent Pew poll showing that majorities of religious Americans believe that people who don’t share their beliefs can still get to a pleasant afterlife.
He writes:
This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.
The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?
He makes a rookie pundit mistake by invoking “evangelicals” without citing any of them specifically, but who cares? His point is still valid, though it hardly qualifies as news. Fervent believers have always had a dim opinion of fellow travelers who don’t share their ardor. Religions are like professional sports teams, there are die hard fans and there are casual fans and the two don’t always easily coexist even though they’re nominally on the same side. The die hards often see everyone else as free riders or fair weather fans/believers. I have an uncle who once half jokingly suggested that as he goes to church every Sunday he should get preferred seating on Christmas and Easter. The people who only go to church twice per year irritated him and it’s easy to see why, but that doesn’t mean he believes that most of his fellow parishioners are hell bound.
Of course most people aren’t fanatical or fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Normally sweeping statements that contain the phrase “most people” are pretty suspect, but in this case we can say it with a lot of confidence. Not only is there the phenomenon of Christians who only go to church on the two biggest Jesus days of the year, which seems to be close to universal, but if solid majorities of Americans actually thought that almost everyone else was eternally damned there would be a lot more religious friction in this country. Having those two recent Pew polls add some hard data to the conclusion helps as well.
None of this is to suggest that there aren’t millions of fundamentalists out there, many of whom are deeply unpleasant to be around once they know you’re not one of them. After all, someone is buying all those “Left Behind” books and bumper stickers that say “If you’re living like there is no God . . . you’d better be right.” But if those people were a majority we’d be living in a society that would be significantly worse than the one we currently have.
The survey Blow cites says that 50% of white Catholics believe that even atheists have a shot at the afterlife and that should come as a surprise to precisely no one. Religious tolerance, even of non-believers, is a fundamental American trait. It has been that way since colonial times and even after eight years with a nominally evangelical President there aren’t any serious threats to it. People who disagree with that tend to be obnoxious and, for lack of a better word, downright loud, but, relatively speaking, there just aren’t that many of them.
