Well, where does this tension come from? Well, I think it comes from two things. One is that this is a group with very distinctive religious beliefs and practices. When we look at survey data on religious behavior and we look at survey data on religious beliefs, we always have to be a little bit skeptical, because people tend to put the best face on their beliefs and practices. But even if you apply an appropriate discount to the self-report, these are deeply religious people. I mean, they really do behave and believe in distinctive ways, compared to the American public as a whole. And one part of that distinctiveness in belief and behavior is they build very strong communities. These people are very involved in their churches and in the organizations connected to their churches. And this is something of an exception in American society. I'm sure, as many of you know, we've had in the last several decades a dissolution of many communities, a decline in what scholars call social capital and sociability generally. Well, here's a community that's a countertrend, that builds these very strong communities and organizations. And they're able to, in many respects, lead a different kind of life than many Americans do. So here we have a distinctive community that is nonetheless enmeshed in this broader, diverse, pluralistic society. And there's just a lot of tension between those two things.

Evangelicals, because of their beliefs and their distinctive communities, do tend to put stress on traditional morality. As Anna indicated, perhaps not as strongly as the popular images, but they are distinct in that regard. They pay a lot of attention to sexual behavior. They're very interested in families and children. They're very worried about the institutions that impact families and children -- schools, the news media, entertainment, other forms of education. And while those are not the only set of concerns this community has, they're a particularly important set of concerns because of how they link the evangelical community to politics. So it's not that every evangelical wakes up every morning wanting to amend the Constitution to prevent gay marriages, but that these moral issues play a very important role in the way they perceive politics.

If we could remove from evangelicals, or from American politics today, these moral issues, then this community would not be a strong constituency of the Republican Party. It would be divided up. There'd be many more Democrats. There'd still be quite a few Republicans, by the way, because it's very diverse community. But at this particular time, it's the moral issues that tie this community to partisan politics. And that's why it's so central to our discussions of politics. But if you look on a whole range of other issues, as Anna indicated, there's a lot of diversity there. Someone like John Kerry might actually appeal to a fair number of evangelicals on some of these other economic and social issues, if the moral issues were subdued or were removed from the table.

Evangelicals are also deeply engaged in society in other ways than politics. The survey shows they're very involved in volunteerism. They are very involved in charitable activities. They really see their role in society as not just doing politics and not just spreading the word -- and they're very interested in evangelism -- but in participating in society in other ways as well. So this is a group that behaves in an extraordinary way in lots of different areas.

How would we sum this up? Well, there's an old phrase in Christianity that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, and that is that Christians should be "in the world but not of the world." In many ways that phrase describes the tension we're talking about with the evangelical community. These are folks that perceive themselves to be very much in the modern world. And they are, in fact, very much in the modern world. But they do not see themselves as being "of" this world, but having other distinctive values and aspirations that set them at odds with the society that they belong to.