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Steven Waldman

We often look at the religious landscape in binary terms – believers vs. nonbelievers, churchgoers vs. atheists, the “religious” vs. “secularists”. It’s time too add a new group: “pious but not religious.” For a while now, some pollsters have tracked an increasing number of people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” We’ve found at…

Buried in the spectacularly deep new U.S. Religious Landscape Survey are some statistics of great interest to politicos, especially on the three big religion-and-politics questions of 2008. The God Gap Is Gone — In past elections the most religious voters clearly broke for the Republicans, and Democrats were increasingly seen as hostile to religion. Even…

My take on ABCNews on James Dobson’s attack against Barack Obama.

For someone who is both a religion junkie and a numbers junkie, the fabulous new Pew Religious Landscape survey has left me a bit giddy. Every page tells an amazing story. Eventually, we’ll parse this more thematically but for now I want to just tell you which stats I put exclamation points next to, and…

The drumbeat for Jim Webb continues. Sunday’s New York Times featured his photo as one of a prominent name mentioned as a potential vice presidential pick for Barack Obama. A story in the Wall Street Journal highlights the important role that the former Navy Secretary under Ronald Reagan is playing for the Democrats. It’s true…

The excitement among Democrats about James Webb, the Senator from Virginia, is understandable. Having a Vietnam-war-hero-turned- Reagan-administration-official-turned-Iraq-War foe on the ticket would lend Barack Obama a stiff dose of military experience, not to mention manly toughness. But most speculation about Webb misses just how radical, risky and historic a choice Webb would be. He’s not…

Conventional wisdom holds that John McCain is struggling to win evangelical voters. Evangelical leader Mark DeMoss predicted last week that he’d run weaker than any Republican since 1976, and a front page New York Times piece detailed the evangelical malaise. Sen. McCain has been criticized by prominent Christian leaders such as James Dobson, who said…

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Crunchy raises an excellent question in response to my earlier post. If that’s true — and it sounds plausible to me — that does not make me feel any better about Obama’s moral reasoning. How does one get around the idea that he calculated that fear of and hostility to the white community was the…

As Barack Obama has begun focusing on the general election, he’s clearly spent some time contemplating how to reach voters who fear he’s a closeted lefty-black-radical. His resignation from Trinity United Church of Christ last week will help but Sen. Obama left something important unsaid: it’s not just Rev. Jeremiah Wright or guest preacher the…
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