Faith, morality and Big Brother

There's a very interesting essay over at Corner of Church and State.  It's titled 'Politics of American churches & religions in one graph'. I won't reproduce the graph itself, but here's an excerpt from the accompanying article.

There’s a lot of information stuffed into this one graph, but here are a few key things we can see:

• Churches that are similar religiously are also similar ideologically.
• Evangelicals are classic conservatives (small role in economy, protect morality). Pentecostals want a larger role for government on economic issues.
• Presbyterian Church in America, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and smaller Methodist churches have historical ties to both evangelicalism and mainline denominations. On the question of government and morality, they are between other evangelical churches and mainline denominations.
• Mainline churches hold similar economic views as evangelicals but want less government involvement protecting traditional morality.
• Christians in traditionally black denominations and evangelicals are similar in their views toward morality policy, but there is a large divide on economics.
• Catholics are large and represent the center on both dimensions.
• Jews are centrist on the economy. There is a major divide between both Conservative and Orthodox Jews and other streams of Judaism. This divide falls along the morality dimension.
• The “nones” are united on their ideology toward morality (keep government out!) but there are interesting divides on government services. Atheists want more government services; agnostics favor less governmental involvement in the economy. If you consider Unitarians part of this group, then they’re the most supportive of government services.

There's more at the link.

If you have any interest in how the various faiths, sects and denominations stack up in terms of their attitude towards Big Brother (how intrusive and 'helpful' should government be?) and the legislation of morality (should the government enforce religious edicts of morality or not?), the graph makes for very interesting viewing.  Highly recommended.

Peter