Poll Finds Fewer Americans Support Religious Freedom for Muslims Than for Christians

Eighty-two percent of survey respondents in the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll said protecting religious liberty was important for Christians.

Americans overwhelmingly support safeguarding religious liberties for Christian believers, but they’re less keen on protecting Muslims’ religious liberties, a new national survey found. “People in different traditions, with different ideological commitments, define religious freedom differently”, Haynes said.

In the poll, 72 percent of participants said religious freedom protections are important for Jews; 67 percent said they were important for Mormons.

It should be noted that the poll was conducted December 10-13, shortly after Islamic extremist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, California, and after Donald Trump’s call for a ban on immigration by Muslims. In the latest poll, almost 6 in 10 Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned that they or their family might be victims of a terrorist attack, after just 3 in 10 said so two years ago.

Majorities both of Republicans (67 per cent) and Democrats (55 per cent) favour government surveillance of Americans’ Internet activities to watch for suspicious activity that might be connected to terrorism. Civil libertarians use the same line of reasoning, albeit in a far less extreme example, against Christians who they say would deprive gay couples of the right to buy a wedding license or purchase a wedding cake. On a more general level, 42% in the poll said it was more important for the government to ensure Americans’ safety than to protect their rights, while 27% said rights are more important. More than half say it’s doing a good job of protecting religious liberties.

But Eric Rassbach, an attorney with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public interest law firm that takes clients of all faiths, said “people may not realize you can not have a system where there’s one rule for one group and another rule for a different group you don’t like”.

But some conservative Christians, as well as some politicians, are capitalizing on fears of terrorism to push a longstanding agenda opposing Islam as what they believe to be an inherently threatening religion, Mr. Haynes says.

“It’s to be expected that people would favor the rights of their own group above others”, Hooper told Mic.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,042 adults was conducted online and by phone using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is created to be representative of the USA population. The overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.9%.

Be Civil – It’s OK to have a difference in opinion but there’s no need to be a jerk.