Polls: Most Americans ‘Under God’
Vol: 9 Issue: 30 Sunday, June 30, 2002
Following the outcry against the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, Newsweek conducted a poll that clearly demonstrates how out of touch the media is with the rest of America.
As the pundits applauded the 9th Circuit decision to declare the ‘under God’ provision of the Pledge unconstitutional, Newsweek found less than one American in ten agreed with the media assessment.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans [Newdow estimated 90% in his “I’m a patriot” comments] believe the phrase does not violate the 1st Amendment ‘Establishment’ clause.
Only nine percent believe the phrase should be removed. Thirty-six percent read the Establishment Clause as prohibiting government from promoting religion in any way. But a fifty-four percent majority disagreed.
And fully six in ten Americans thing it is a good thing for America when government leaders publicly express their faith in God.
Only twelve percent of those polled by Newsweek felt that government should eliminate all references to God and religious beliefs in schools and government and public buildings.
A whopping eighty-four percent of all Americans believe such references are acceptable, provided they don’t mention a specific religion.
Before we start doing handsprings, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the majority of Americans are Christians, but we aren’t the tiny majority we’ve be led to believe by the liberal establishment.
Forty-five percent believe America is a secular nation in which religious belief or lack of it, isn’t a defining characteristic.
I would hazard an opinion that those figures come from across the spectrum, including the most conservative Christian view. I share that view, myself.
An American Buddhist, atheist, Muslim or Jew are no less American than an American Christian [or an American Indian who practices native animism, for that matter].
That particular question and response are so worded as to be essentially meaningless, except to suggest most people didn’t understand the question. But it does reveal that the majority disagree with the sentiment America is a secular nation, even if expressing that view suggested they supported religion as a qualification for citizenship.
One American in three believes America is a Christian nation, and another sixteen percent would define America [accurately, I believe] as a Biblical nation, defined by the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Ten Commandments [and not the Golden Rule] form the bedrock of English [and American] common law, as defined by Blackstone’s definitive Commentaries on the Law.
Christians accept the whole Bible as the Word of God, not just the New Testament.
Assessment:
It’s that last figure that caught my attention. God has been banished from the public school system for some forty-plus years. An entire generation grew up in America under constant, systematic and organized spiritual desensitization.
Only a member of the liberal left would argue that such a desensitization process took place, or that the liberal left was not its champion.
After four decades of heavily slanted media propaganda exhorting abortion rights, NOW, the gay rights movement, evolution, the New Age, one American in three still sees America as a ‘Christian’ nation.
Less than half even come close to agreeing with the current liberal interpretation of America as wholly secular, even when the question is slanted to favor the ‘secular nation’ worldview.
[Why else would the question include religion as a qualification for citizenship? I know no Christian who would support involuntary conversion to Christianity].
The liberal pundits should take note as they wax eloquent about the upside-down version of democracy in which views espoused by less than one out of ten are celebrated as a victory for ‘majority rule’.
Despite the best efforts of an entire system to remove Jesus Christ from American public life from an entire generation of Americans, one in three still define America as a Christian nation.
When one considers the most generally accepted estimates of the Islamic population at about 3% of the US population, the homosexual population at about 2% of the population, the atheist population at 9% [or less – hard to nail it down from the vaguely worded poll question], and balance that against the third that view America as ‘Christian’, or the eighty-seven percent who want America to remain ‘one nation, under God’, it suggests somebody has been redefining the term ‘majority’ while we were sleeping.
Even after a generation of constant bombardment from the liberal elite, less than half [45%] buy the argument in even the most general terms that America is a secular nation.
For a generation, religious Americans have been told that they are outside the mainstream, and apparently, bought into the liberal propaganda that marginalized them as the Oddball Factor.
The poll numbers bring to mind Hans Christian Anderson’s political allegory/children’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
The little boy in the story had no important job in the kingdom and, as the story goes, “therefore only saw what his eyes told him.
‘The Emperor is naked,’ he said.”
Omegaletter 