FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Judaism Is the Most Respected Religion in America and Other Revelations

The results for Rice's Portraits of American Life survey are in: We're nothing but a pack of fickle mush heads.
Photo via

If you’re looking to make some hasty generalizations about Americans, Rice University’s Portraits of American Life survey results just came out. While Americans are becoming more respectful of the diversity of religions overall, Judaism remains the most respected religion, and Islam the least. So Americans might be Islamaphobes, but at least we aren’t raging Anti-Semites.

The 600-question survey is done every six years, with the same 1,300-or-so people. I thought that was a really small sample size, but you'd be surprised how small your sample can be and still give you a fairly small margin of error. The researchers hope to chart changing attitudes in America "in real time" from 2006 to 2012 presumably to show just how lost a timetraveller would be, if she went from 2006 to last year. Just like a bad conversationalist at a dinner party the survey mostly pertains to religion, morality and politics,

Advertisement

For instance, the survey explored "mutual respect of religions." In 2006, one-third of respondents said they respect all religions equally. In 2012 that number rose to 58 percent.

In both surveys, Judaism was the religion that the highest percentage of participants said they most respected—although that number dropped from 24 percent to 15 percent. No other religion broke 10 percent either year.

And while 20 percent of participants in 2012 said that Islam was the religion they least respected, at least that number didn’t change from 2006. Or shamefully, that number didn’t change. Or maybe that number stayed the same because it's already perfect.

There’s a lot of really interesting tidbits in the survey. For instance:

If you're so inclined and want to see how far we have or haven't come since 2006, or if you just want to make sure your generalizations are up-to-date, check out the results here. I'll see you back here in 2018.