People place a higher priority on preserving the religious freedom of Christians than for other faith groups, ranking Muslims as the least deserving of the protections, according to a new survey released on Wednesday. A skeptic might think the Associated Press did this poll less to explore the question of religious liberty than to make mischief about Muslims being less favored in America.
The poll, which was conducted by AP and the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, showed that solid majorities said it was extremely or very important for the U.S. to uphold religious freedom in general.
However, the percentages varied dramatically when respondents were asked about specific faith traditions, according to an article written by Rachel Zoll and Emily Swanson.
In the poll, which was conducted Dec. 10 to 13, "82 percent said religious liberty protections were important for Christians, compared with 61 percent who said the same for Muslims,” Zoll and Swanson stated.
“About seven in 10 said preserving Jews' religious freedom was important, while 67 percent said so of Mormons,” they noted. “People who identified with no religion were ranked about even with Muslims in needing support to live out their beliefs.”
Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute, said the findings “reflect deep divisions among Americans about the very definition of religious liberty,” which “is now in the eye of the beholder.”
“The poll was conducted after Islamic extremist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and during intensifying anti-Muslim rhetoric by Donald Trump and other candidates for the Republican presidential nomination,” the reporters asserted.
“The furor has led to a spike in vandalism of mosques and harassment of U.S. Muslims over the last month,” Zoll and Swanson stated before asserting:
In the survey, 88 percent of Republicans said it was important to protect the religious liberty of Christians, while only 60 percent said so for Muslims.
Democrats also ranked religious freedom for Muslims as a lower priority. Eighty-three percent of Democrats said the protections were important for Christians, while only 67 percent said so for Muslims.
"These numbers seem to be part of a growing climate of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States," said Madihha Ahussain, an attorney for Muslim Advocates, a California-based civil rights group. "This climate of hatred has contributed to dozens of incidents of anti-Muslim violence in recent weeks.”
Helen Decker, a 65-year-old West Texas Christian who reads the Bible regularly, believes strongly that “religious freedom should be provided to people of all faiths or no faith,” including her grandson, who is an atheist.
"Muslims -- they need to be protected just like Christians unless they pose harm to human life," Decker noted.
However, John Ashford of Chicago -- who is retired from the U.S. military and the Postal Service -- said that “it's not right" to deny religious liberty protections to Muslims. He said officials have been showing too much deference to Christians for political reasons, in what he considers a threat to the separation of church and state.
"There's supposed to be equal protection under the law -- that's what the Constitution says," he noted. "If you're not doing that, you're doing something wrong."
“But advocates for broad exemptions, including U.S. Roman Catholic bishops and Southern Baptist leaders, say the requests are in line with the longstanding American tradition of protecting individual conscience,” Zoll and Swanson stated.
Meanwhie, Greg Scott of the Alliance Defending Freedom -- a Christian public interest law firm -- said a focus on protecting Christians right now "makes sense in that Christians today are facing mounting threats to their religious liberty by acts of state officials and bureaucrats."
“In the latest survey, eight in 10 Americans said it was very or extremely important for people like themselves to be allowed to practice their religion freely,” the reporters stated.
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 cannot have a system where there's one rule for one group and another rule for a different group you don't like."
"No religion is an island," Rassbach added. "If somebody else's religion is being limited by the government, yours is liable to be limited in the same way. Even if you only care about your own particular group, you should care about other groups, too, because that's the way the law works."
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 designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
