I agree this sample size is too small for any meaningful conclusion but the conclusion makes sense. Questioning authority is a skill that discouraged in churches. Once you believe you should unquestioningly follow one leader, following another without question is just habit.

I am not surprised at all that "White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified".
But by the same token, the rationale can be presented that Jesus was labeled a "terrorist" (at minimum a dangerous subversive) and the scourging he suffered along with the extreme nature of his individual cruxifiction was indeed torture. I wonder if these same "white evangelical protestants" have thought of it that way?

As a Christian I find this shocking and shameful. I've been involved in a number of Protestant churches (not evangelicals however) over my lifetime and this would NOT be true of the congregations I attended.

LaRae, your comment about questioning authority hits the nail on the head. Still, and as much as I admire and frequently rely on Pew statistics, I'd feel as if a larger sampling might be in order.

agree with LRae. Plus there is the element, undoubtedly present, "it was good enough for Jesus, so it's good enough for you".

Was that the only question that was asked? Did they use the word torture or water boarding? The problem is some consider water boarding torture and others don't. To get an accurate picture of what religious and non religious people think on the issue, you would first have to define what is torture in the minds of the American people before making such broad statements. Also, the sample is very small.

Even if the word water boarding was not used it is still the frame of reference of most Americans which would skew the results if the person is thinking water boarding (torture) when answering yes it is acceptable. I wonder if the same poll was conducted three years ago without any understanding of water boarding would the results be quit different?

Walter: Since only whites were asked the question there is no way of knowing how a cross section of all races would answer the question. And to jump from water boarding and uncomfortable positions to crucifiction and scourging is not even within the same context in most peoples mind, white or black. To make a statement about over 60 million people based on a sampling of less than 1000 is rather bold.

The differences between how many non-churchgoers support torture versus not aren't that big, though--42% is still a lot! I'm going to look up this survey and see how many people fit into each group. If the non-churchgoing population is small enough, maybe the difference isn't statistically significant. That said, I agree with LaRae that respect for authority is probably much higher among evangelical Protestants than the rest of the population, and can be associated with a world view held by the types of people who support torture.

I just think it's sad that so many people--churchgoing or otherwise--find torture acceptable. I mean, 42% doesn't exactly speak well of the secular population either. And I'm with Faith, too--I go to a Reform synagogue every week, and when all the memos first came out our rabbi, along with the congregation, was freaking LIVID. Granted, Reform Jews are some of the most liberal people on the planet, and we do a lot of collaborative charity work with a mosque, so that reaction was pretty predictable.

I think it depends on the religion/denomination, and the location--churches seem more popular in very conservative parts of the country, but not because all people of faith are conservative.

Perhaps Christian fatalism plays a role: What has to happen, has to happen. Christ had to die for Heaven's Gate to be unlocked for the faithful. The nails through flesh? Just incidental?

This is not anywhere near enough of a large enough sample. You can make poles say whatever you want depending on how you ask the question, where you take the sampling etc. Did it say "often" or "sometimes". This is very unclear and is pretty preposterous to even consider as something credible.

This is not anywhere near enough of a large enough sample. You can make poles say whatever you want depending on how you ask the question, where you take the sampling etc. Did it say "often" or "sometimes". This is very unclear and is pretty preposterous to even consider as something credible.

jeesh, I just read my post. Terrible spelling sorry.

Despite the problems with this survey and its conclusions, it does resonate that the particular strain of people (white evangelical Protestants) that seeks to interfere in other people's lives and be generally harsh would be the people who'd support torture. (And let us not even look back at the Christian history of torture...)

That's amazing, and sad, but not surprising since the leaders of the religious right sold themselves to the Republican Party, no matter what their policies. These "Christians" clearly haven't read the Book of Matthew, and if Jesus were around today, they'd call him a pansy.

BULLETIN BULLETIN - CNN's Jack Cafferty just had this subject on for his question of the day. Good responses - someone pointing out the nature of fundamentalism, an evangelical saying he hopes the study is flawed, a response that fundies tend to be self-righteous and quick to demonize others...and some poor soul who said that, after being tortured in the pews listening to sermons, figures that the congregations want to share the misery...

Okay, I find these numbers disturbing. Their magnitude, that is, rather than the correlation with church-going per se. About half the American population thinks, "The use of torture against suspected terrorists can sometimes be justified" or "can often be justified"? Holy crap.

Actually, Rob, you are looking at this right. It's 'demonizing' the fundies to try to point out their possibly slightly greater support for torture. The real horror is that a very substantial proportion of the population period supports torture.

I think I'm in agreement, Myriad. But now for a technical question: What exactly are the problems with the sample size, according to those who are raising the issue? LaRae? M Todd? thesagejournal? I know that Sandra has a Ph.D. in statistics, and I understand that Jessabelle crunches numbers in a research lab at the University of Wisconsin. But I don't think they've raised specific concerns.

Past religious surveys correlate weekly church with conservative political views, so these results make sense.

I worried when The Passion of the Christ came out, in part because Passion plays have a grim history. But I wonder if that level of violence could desensitize viewers.

Perfectly good sample size. I would wonder about the distribution of it by region, maybe, if it were somebody we didn't know, but Pew is reputable.

It is a perfectly good sample size for the meta take away which is the real finding here, as Rob points out - that half of this group approved of torture!

I am sorry to admit that at one time, I may have numbered myself among them. I'm still analyzing why, and what is the change I went through to arrive at the place here, where I see torture for what it is: untenable.

Need a larger sampling, I think.

But if a larger sampling turns up similar results, it's a sobering reflection on American Christianity, from my POV. I knew there was a reason I have remained a fairly agnostic and secular person throughout my life....

The attitude toward torture is basic conservatism. It makes me wonder if a lot of people are attending church now because they're conservatives instead of being conservatives because they attend church. I certainly know several people who are atheists because of their disgust with the religious right.

Politics uber alles.

Here is the actual report, not filtered by CNN

http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=156

I think it is not helpful to hype these results the way it has been because the survey says nothing about Jesus or waterboarding. And it is particularly problematic to use a title that titillates and misleads.

Since the survey itself is one click away from the first answer in a Google search of "Pew Report on Torture" I can not see any reason why the actual report should not be the basis of this post.

Torture is not defined in the study and the largest sample of any group is 174. It was not a typical large Pew survey.

You will notice that white mainline Protestants have the smallest number that would sometimes use torture and the largest number who say that torture should never be used. That includes unaffiliated with any church. I am a white mainline Protestant just so you will know any bias that I might have.

As to attending church there is only one percentage point difference between those who attend church weekly and those who seldom if ever go.

To me it is surprising that so few of any category said that torture is never justified.

As I see it no group can be proud of these findings. There is not a huge difference between those who think torture is justified at least "rarely."

I would conclude that the church, of whatever stripe, is doing a poor job of teaching the flocks about how the ethics of Christ should influence the members' thinking on this subject. And the society as a whole is not doing a hell of a lot better.

No group comes out very well in this study.

And I would hope that in the future we would take the time to get the data needed to support our conclusions

Monte

the 12% difference between the groups, based on church attendance, is notable, I agree. But I worry more that the numbers seem pretty high for both groups. Merely the fact that a Republican president took an action seems to have legitimized torturing prisoners, despite this clearly being illegal and inhumane.

Rob,

Here is my problems with the conclusion of the author. First the term evangelical is a very,very, large tent. It crosses a large segment of the population from every economic and social group. Saying Evangelical is like saying white or black, Muslim or North American, it is just to broad of a term. You have everything from mainline denominations to small store front churches who might consider themselves evangelical, but have totally different belief systems. S0 to take a sample of less than a 1ooo people from such a broad group of people cannot give an accurate picture.

Also, even the word torture means something different to people especially considering the context of torture being discussed is water boarding, slapping, and uncomfortable positions. I think historically there are a lot of people who consider much more extreme methods torture, while they may consider slapping harsh, they do not consider it torture.

If the question was do you think it is OK to slap a terrorist to gain information that would save innocent lives, compared to is it OK to burn someone with a blow torch would result in two totally different answers.

As for professionals taking the polls, does not mean it is accurate considering professionals are just as bias and conditioned by their presuppositions as everyone else. I would trust CNN's findings on evangelicals as much as I would FOX's findings on democrats or Muslims. Most polls conducted by the major media outlets and political groups are not trying to gather information, they are trying to support their already for gone conclusions. They play to their audience, that is why I do not give them must stock.

I have a huge comment brewing. This one is goooood!

I share Monte's bias, being a white mainline Protestant myself. And the fact that white mainline protestants are less willing to approve and more willing to repudiate the practice of torture than the population at large should give pause to anyone who here wishes to explain WHY religious people are okay with torture, since ot has not even been established THAT they are.
Even by the deplorable sampling standards of this poll-- which records no results for agnostics, atheists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, Reformed Jews, Conservative Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs etc.; which makes no distinction between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Christian sects; which takes no account of African American Christians, be they evangelicals, mainline, Roman Catholic or fundamentalist; which takes no account of Hispanic Christians, be they Protestant or Catholic; which takes no account of the large Korean Christian community etc.--even by the deplorable sampling standards of this poll, the conclusion that Christians (as supposed to certain Christians) are more torture-friendly than other people is so unwarranted, so distressingly simple-minded, as to betray the ideological motivations of those who would draw them.

I find the focus only on the religious analysis amusing. If one looks at the full report from which the religious sub-set was analyzed (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1202/torture-terrorists-public-remains-split) it appears that the evangelicals are a bit higher than the general public, but not by much. Most astonishingly, only about 25-30% of the American Public seems to feel that torture is never acceptable. The real CNN story should be how Americans overwhelmingly accept torture as permissible, be they evangelical, democrat, republican, independant, young, or old.

Related links:

Views About Torture Remain Evenly Split: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1202/torture-terrorists-public-remains-split

The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1210/torture-opinion-religious-differences

Raw results for question about torture: http://people-press.org/reports/questionnaires/510.pdf

Survey Methodolgy: http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1506

S0 to take a sample of less than a 1ooo people from such a broad group of people cannot give an accurate picture.

What sample size do you think would be appropriate for a variation on this question, M Todd? If 1000 isn't large enough? (I know you don't trust people to interpret "torture" as meaning torture, but let's just assume a preamble that says something like "something that's unambiguously torture" so that everyone's clear on the scope of the question.)

This is depressing, really. I thought real religion was supposed to be all about laying down the sword. But of course in the Bible lots and lots of folk didn't get it then, and they don't now apparently.

Sure sounds like the Fundamentalist Protestants among whom I grew up, and such Fascism and decidedly "un-Christian" behavior is the reason I gave up organized religion. Supporters of torture who then call themselves "Christians" mock everything Christianity is supposed to be about: non-violence, "do unto others as you would have done to you...", "God is Love", "Judge not that ye be not judged...", "Love thine enemy as thyself....", etc.

I agree with Faith. As a Christian, I don't identify with this mindset, but I do know it. I worked with and eventually supervised a right-wing Christian who supports torture, doesn't believe in global warming, and once called Bill Clinton a "scum sucker." His religious beliefs are so colored with politics, which are shared by his Southern Baptist pastor, I don't believe he even knows what true Christianity is. It sure ain't torturing folks!

Rob,

I don't think that an accurate picture could be gathered. As I stated the term evangelical is so broad depending on the group you could come away with a totally different result. Were they Southern Baptist, Methodist, or Independent Pentecostals who all may consider themselves evangelical, but have a totally different view on almost everything. The same is true of the people in the non faith category.

The question was asked do you believe torture is acceptable against terrorist, but there is no definition of what exactly what they meant by torture. According to Webster torture could mean any mental or physical anguish which almost any imprisonment or interrogation would fit that broad definition. The second meaning is the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure which does not fit interrogation such as stress positions. Where water boarding (which seems to be the focal point of the discussion in this country) may cause mental anguish and discomfort, it does not inflict intense pain.

I find these type of polls worthless, because they don't really tell you anything. Since there is no baseline of this group and the question was so broad it is not sure if those who said torture was acceptable where thinking water boarding or burning some one's hands off to gain information. Therefore their conclusion as to what people of faith and non faith believe is inconclusive as to the issue of torture. Yet, that does not stop CNN from making such a claim based on very limited information.

I find these type of polls worthless, because they don't really tell you anything.

Okay, I get it. When you said that the sample size was too small, I took that to indicate you had some familiarity with polling and statistics, and were making a technical objection based on such knowledge, and that you could design a better poll. It sounds as if I assumed too much.

There's nothing quite as Christ-like than torturing people. Hypocrisy rules the world and will be its downfall.

To look at this with any surprise is to ignore the facts from Day 1. Churches sanctioned torture, burning was commonplace, from Day 1. Its been one long Crusade ever since. If you're at all shocked for real than you are an Ostrich as well.

Aloha Kakou

As someone who works extensively with statistical and regression methods, it looks to me that the difference between both groups may not be statistically significant (say at the 5% level). I tried looking in the original report for information related to the standard error for each estimate, but these values are mysteriously absent (http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/510.pdf). For instance, if the standard error for each estimate is say 5%, this means that the lower 95% boundary for the “religious group” would be 54% - 2 x 5% = 44% (note: we should use 1.96 rather 2). Now, for the ”non-religious group”, the upper 95% boundary would be 42% + 10% = 52%. Since both the lower and upper boundaries cross each other, the estimates are most likely not statistically different than each other. One would have to use a more sophisticated test to truly determine whether both values are different, since the test is dependent on the sample size for each group. It is late getting late, but perhaps I could find the time to actually determine whether both groups are different (although this would be a useless exercise, as shown below). My apologies for the technical babbling stuff….

Regardless of the potential difference, seeing values this high about acknowledging that torture is justified for both groups is a cause of concern. These values should technically be zero or close to it.

I discussed this topic in details a few days ago here:

Torture: 'Do Unto Others', Remember?

Showing that right-wing Christians are the ones who are "lost."

I am just confounded when I run into surveys where "my" answer doesn't fit into the questions. For example, from this one:

Attend religious services at least weekly
Attends religious services monthly or a few times a year
Attends religious services seldom or never

Does "monthly" mean "once a month"? That's what it means to me. I attend services about 2x/month, which amounts to 24x/year. That feels like more than "a few" times a year and more than "monthly." But I fit into the other two categories even less. I hate when that happens and often walk away from surveys that make me feel frustrated.

Rob,

I work in the advertising and marketing fields so conducting studies, establishing baselines, creating methodologies, interpreting results and conducting polls are very familiar to me. I also, know that the larger the group of people the more information must be gathered to determine what that group really thinks. It is almost impossible to lump millions of people into one group. The more reliable method is to break very large groups into segments based on more defined criteria and then determine what each segment believes and not make an assumption about the whole based on the answers of one or two segments.

CNN conducted a poll of less than 1000 white people using a very broad criteria of what they consider Christian and non Christian. They then asked one question with very broad language without any real context or understanding what torture meant to that group. From that one question they boldly assert that White Evangelical Christians approve torture more than non Christians.

Could I do it better than CNN? No I could not create a magical question and ask less than .001% of a people group to establish what over 100 million people really think. But, that is not why FOX, CNN, CBS, NBC and other groups take polls like this. They do it to support their already bias assumptions about people groups they dislike or want to discredit. And the people who jump on these polls as fact share the same bigoted bias towards the group being discredited.

Over the years I have worked with evangelicals, mainline protestants, Catholics, new age, republicans, democrats, atheist, homeschoolers and different ethnic groups. Despite the diversity of these groups I have found one constant. They are all bigoted towards anyone that disagrees with their group and willingly believe anything that supports their hate without questioning the validity of the evidence.

If you go down the comments on this blog and replace Christian with black, gay, Muslim, atheist, etc., would the comments and assertions being made seem bigoted or reasonable?

LaRae Meadows said “I agree this sample size is too small for any meaningful conclusion...”

742 respondents is quite an ample number from which to draw conclusions. However, the numbers of Buddhists or Hindus WITHIN that population, their numbers being small in our country, were too small to constitute a statistically valid sampling of THOSE groups.

Todd - your analysis of the validity of this and other polls is right on IMO. But few people here want to see your logic because they like the conclusion. Religious people are evil morons.

As for "professional" pollsters being an argument is supportive of the validity, well they don't seem very professional to me. Almost all poll questions are badly worded. It may be because they want the answer they want or because in fact they are not that smart and don't think through the wording very well. Seems to me most subjects would require multiple carefully worded questions in order to find out exactly what people are specifically thinking.

John - 742 is ample? How many evangelical folks do you think there are? You find 742 to be ample. Unlikely.

I am not sure how water boarding and loving your neighbor fit together?

Gramps,

Most belief systems include provisions for self and national defense, even within Christian theology. Also, many give justification to restrain and defeat evil. Water boarding has nothing to do with loving, but neither does war.