Christian pollster George Barna has a new report up: Ethnic Groups Differ Substantially On Matters of Faith. Here are some the results:

The data sample isn’t the largest, but tends to agree with the key findings of The Religious Identification Survey. An interesting point is though, as George Barna himself has noted, there has been an upsurge of evangelical activity among Asian Amerians, it starts from such a low base that the impressive growth is not that astounding (similar to the Asian HIV “epidemic”).

Also, Barna reports that African Americans are rather strong Christians, and as everyone knows they are pretty solid Democratic voters. That makes interviews like this with white evangelical Christians illuminating. In answer to questions about John Kerry and his possible victory, Michael Evans offers the following responses:Number one, we’re in a horrendous battle between darkness and light. We began with a distraction of our moral principles We saw it through the 1960s and the 1970s. We saw it through abortion and prayer in school and all these other issues. We saw it in the White House through Clinton.If Kerry wins, we get Clinton all over again because Kerry has already brought in most of Clinton’s holdovers. We’ll get New Age liberals who will have the same Middle East policies that Clinton hadWe’ll get two Sauls in a row. King Saul was rejected by God. We’ll have gone from a Clinton Saul to a Kerry Saul.This is a battle between two books, two kingdoms and two spirits.

I don’t disagree with everything Michael Evans asserts, but his vehemence and demonization (in a close to literal fashion) of his political enemies quite clearly makes him a mirror image of Michael Moore & co. The transformation of religious beliefs into political positions is pretty disturbing, and rather antithetical to the perpetuation of an open and pluralistic society where defeat is accepted as only a temporary set-back in the democratic process. I’m not the only one, National Review Online has published several critical articles by Catholic author Carl Olson about evangelical eschatology. I have criticized this in the past because of the unseemliness of the establishment intellectual Right turning on evangelicals after using them for their ends for so many years, but I think the fact that NRO signed off on these articles indicates that portions of the elite Right (more Catholic and Jewish than grassroots conservatives) are getting nervous about the tiger they’ve been riding since the rise of the Christian Right.

Addenum: Mr. Evans is a somewhat extreme form of evangelical Christian, and if you read the interview you will understand why he is so focused on Middle East politics. But, many of his views could be found in a diluted fashion among my evangelical friends during my youth. Posted by razib at 08:36 PM