Read more of Bob Abernethy's interview with Anna Greenberg and John Green about the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY national survey, "Faith and Family in America":

Q: What is a family?

ANNA GREENBERG: A family is many things. Families are quite diverse, and what you see when you look at the American public is that they have very, very different notions of what a family is. Overall, about 75 percent think of kinship networks. They think of someone they're related to by blood. But then when you ask them what does that look like, it can be friends, it can be family, it can be people they feel emotionally connected to. What's interesting is that very few say the nuclear family -- mother, father, married with children.

Q: Yet people think that's the ideal.

ANNA GREENBERG: Absolutely. Overall, if you look at this study, the vast majority think that God has said there should be marriage between a man and a woman for life. But if you look at how people live their lives it's quite different, and if you look at their attitudes it's quite different. A majority accepts divorce; a majority accepts cohabitation. The really interesting thing is that people who are in nontraditional families -- in other words, they are single or they're cohabiting -- the vast majority of them think marriage is between man and woman for life.

Q: And how do you define family for the survey?

ANNA GREENBERG: In the survey we look at two kinds of families. We look at traditional families, who are people that are married with kids under 18. And we look at nontraditional families -- people who are single with children under 18. They may be divorced; they may be cohabiting without being married; they may be in same-sex relationships. Right now, about 25 percent of the country [is] in traditional marriages and relationships, and 16 percent [is] in nontraditional marriages, relationships, and families.

Q: And what are the rest?

ANNA GREENBERG: The rest are older and don't have children anymore, or they're younger and they're single.

Q: You found a gap between the ideal of the family and the realities of family life.

ANNA GREENBERG: I think one of the most important things we found in this survey was a gap between belief and reality. Overall people have very romanticized and idealized views of marriage. Three quarters say it should be between a man and a woman for life. A vast majority believe that kids should be raised by parents who are married. But then when you look at issues of divorce, cohabitation, trial marriage -- in fact, people are very open and accommodating towards divorce. Over half say divorce is an acceptable resolution of conflict within marriage; over half say it is okay for people to cohabitate -- and I think it is a recognition that in reality most people can't quite live up to that ideal.

Q: Talk about the apparent tolerance for things a lot of people used to object to strenuously.

ANNA GREENBERG: One of the things that is very surprising about this study is that if you look at religiously conservative people, mainly evangelicals [and] traditional Catholics, they have very traditional notions of what a family should look like, and yet they have some fairly tolerant attitudes. For instance, only about a third of them say divorce is a sin. In particular, if you look at Catholic teachings, the notion of divorce being a sin is quite well established.

Q: What surprised you about the findings?

ANNA GREENBERG: I'm surprised at the level of tolerance of religious conservatives around a whole range of issues related to marriage and family. Although they hold idealized and traditional notions about what a family should look like, they are largely tolerant of divorce, of people living together. I think [this is] basically a reflection of the lives they are leading.

JOHN GREEN: A couple of things surprised me. One is the greater tolerance and acceptance of even conservative religious people of deviations from the ideal of marriage, but also the fact that many people who are not in traditional families nonetheless have very vibrant spiritual lives. They pray; they have family devotions; religion is important to them. This suggests to me that religion as a coping mechanism is still important to many people, even if they're not involved in congregations.

Q: What are the effects of the gap between the ideal and the real among nontraditional families when it comes to religion?

JOHN GREEN: Probably the major effect is that nontraditional families are less likely to attend traditional worship services and be active in the lives of local congregations, and that has an effect -- not only on their own lives, because they don't have available to them the resources of local congregations, but it also impoverishes the congregations themselves, because there's a whole set of people not present in those churches. There's kind of an irony here; many of those nontraditional families could in fact benefit the most from being involved in local congregations. We do find that some of the more conservative congregations -- evangelicals and others that preach a very conservative and traditional view of family -- are ironically much more open to people who are in nontraditional families, having ministries for singles and for divorced people. This creates perhaps a little bit of a problem for someone in a nontraditional family that may find a church most welcoming personally that actually holds a different set of values than fits their life.