We spent some time looking at the gay marriage question because it would have been malpractice for us not to ask this question, though it only took up about three questions of a very extensive survey. And the results were interesting. I think we fully expected that evangelicals would be opposed to gay marriage, but there were a couple of things that were interesting. A majority of evangelicals opposed gay marriage. But when we asked people, do we need a Constitutional amendment or are state laws sufficient, only 42% said we need a Constitutional amendment. Now, that is higher than all Americans, but it is well short of a majority of evangelicals saying we need a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. And what's even more interesting is we asked people, is this a litmus test for you when you vote? In other words, would you vote for a candidate if that candidate had a different position than you on gay marriage? 47% said "I would not." That's less than a majority [who] said that had this litmus test. I'm not sure that Bush needs to worry about where they're going on gay marriage, but the point is, again, like the question of the place of moral values in the larger bundle of issues they care about, gay marriage is not straightforward either. Less than a majority favors a Constitutional amendment, and less than a majority says it is a litmus test for them when they vote.

There's been a lot of attention paid to the role of evangelical elites in raising concerns about the treatment of religious minorities internationally. And we were interested in thinking about the evangelical view of the world and how America should be in the world. We asked a series of really interesting questions about what America's role should be in the world. And what we found was that, along with other people who are conservative, questions of strength, the military, fighting the war on terrorism, prosecuting the war on Iraq, were the most important sort of things that America needed to be doing. At the bottom of the list was worrying about the rights of religious minorities and the rights of people more broadly and human rights in the world. And so it was interesting, because I think that there's a disconnect between the way this issue gets covered at the elite level, in the White House, or [the way] regular evangelicals think about it, very much like other Republicans and conservatives, about the role of America in the world, and certainly less likely than, say, more liberal or moderate Protestants to care about taking care of the disadvantaged internationally, dealing with AIDS and the spread of disease and those kinds of issues.

Looking at themselves as a community, what's not surprising is that they have very intense levels of religious practice and religious belief. But what was interesting [was] they were discerning about their own leadership. We asked questions about favorability of James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell. From the outside there's an assumption that any leader in the evangelical community is a potential spokesman for the community. But in fact, evangelicals have very mixed feelings about some of their leaders and in fact were fairly unfavorable toward Pat Robertson. Almost all of them know who Pat Robertson is; 79% know who he is. 34% feel favorably toward him, 23% unfavorable. That's not an overwhelming number for Pat Robertson among evangelicals. If you look in contrast at someone like Franklin Graham, fewer people know him, only 50% could recognize who he is. But 37% feel warm toward him and only 7% [feel] unfavorable toward him. If you look at James Dobson, who's slightly better known (58%), 44% feel warmly toward him, 6% cool. They are discerning about their own leadership, and we shouldn't assume that anybody who's an evangelical spokesman is well-liked by their own constituency.

There's such a strong emphasis on proselytizing and evangelizing (and that was very clear in this survey -- very, very intense numbers around the levels at which they proselytize and talk to people in their families and talk to friends and talk to co-workers), [but] not everybody in the evangelical community thinks that only evangelicals go to heaven. There's actually a fair amount of -- I don't know if the right word is tolerance, again, that's a very loaded word -- but there's a fair amount of openness to people who come from a different worldview in that sense. The question is, do you that only born-again Christians go to heaven? Only 48% of evangelicals say that's true. Less than half [say] that's true. If you look at African-American evangelicals, only 41% say that's true. But overall, less than half say that only born-again Christians go to heaven.

We were looking to see is there any opening for Democrats with evangelical Christians. We're in turbulent times with the war in Iraq, but also with the economy. This is a group that has pretty significant economic concerns. Is there a potential for economic populism to break through and sort of trump maybe the question of moral values when it comes to voting? In fact, we found that Bush has a very sizable majority, when it comes to evangelicals, which is pretty solid, and Kerry does not do very well at all among evangelicals. It seems that their status as a base group for Bush is solid and it's hard to imagine it moving much. They think they have a fair amount of influence within the Bush administration and, by the way, so do non-evangelicals. Non-evangelicals also think that evangelicals have a fair amount of influence in the Bush administration. And I think they fairly accurately perceive they have a fair amount of influence within the Bush administration. The thing I looked for but couldn't find was: Is there a crack? Is there an opening? For evangelicals who are Democrats (and there aren't very many of them unless you look at African Americans), partisanship trumps religion. It's interesting. They are very strongly for Kerry if they call themselves Democrats, as much as other people who are Democrats, and it trumps their religious beliefs. But they're a pretty small group of people.