So there’s a new Pew U.S. Religious Landscape survey out, with some veddy veddy interesting findings. One of them, I’ll let Steven Waldman say, so I don’t get accused of making it up myself:

Evangelicals Similar to Muslims - In many questions, the group most similar to evangelicals was Muslims. For instance, 79% of evangelicals say religion is very important in their lives. The compares to 56% for the population as a whole, 56% among Catholics, 31% among Jews - and 72% among Muslims.

There’s more to it than that, actually.

Homosexuality - Most people disagree with the following statement: “Homosexuality is a way of life that should be discouraged by society.” The exceptions (i.e. the folks who mostlyy do want to discourage homosexuality) are: Evangelicals, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims.

And then there’s the government-as-an-agent-of-morality business: only three groups had a majority of repondents saying the government should do more to protect morality: Evangelicals (50 percent), Muslims (59 percent) and Mormons (54 percent).

And only three groups had a majority saying Scripture was the Word of God, literally true word for word: Evangelicals (59 percent), historically black churches (62 percent) and Muslims (50 percent).

The point here isn’t that Muslims are bad and look, Evangelicals are bad too!!! But it is to say that for those to whom religion is of the utmost importance in their lives, there’s going to be a sort of continuity in terms of how they view moral issues and how they view the relationship of church - or mosque - and state. That’s not a slur - but it shouldn’t surprise us, either.