Some evangelical Christian pollsters have an interesting survey on morality online. The general conclusion? Morality Continues to Decay. A few other points:
There is a big gap in social conservatism between the general “Born Again” and “Evangelical” categories. Many general interest magazines trumpet conservative American Christianity by citing the 30-40% “Born Again” figure, but many of these individuals aren’t that religiously conservative. Those who identify themselves as Evangelical though are in fact far more conservative than the typical American, and the Barna survey notes that non-evangelical Born Again Christians are more similar in their views to the general public than they are to Evangelical Born Again Christians. In a similar vein, Bainbridge and Stark in The Future of Religion note that liberal and moderate American Christians are socially clustered with the non-religious rather than conservative Christians (for example, what movies you watch). One problem that the general public has is that they often conflate Born Again, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. The latter are the loudest, and so their views are projected to the larger clusters in which they are embedded. For instance, the conception that Evangelicals are all Creationists is belied by the existance of The American Scientific Affiliation, a group of Evangelical scientists who reject Creationism.
Moral permissiveness is negatively correlated with age. In other words, the young are more tolerant of various behaviors than the old. This flies in the face of idiotic sociological pronouncements asserting that the gen-Y and gen-X cohorts have recoiled from the free & liberated ways of their baby boomer parents, in fact, baby boomers are more conservative than gen-Y and gen-X (though yes, the boomers might have become more conservative as they age-nevertheless, attitudes toward homosexuality are probably more tolerant among the young today than in the 1960s).
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