The rubber particularly meets the road when it comes to salvation. Americans, the survey suggests, are far more likely to believe in universal salvation instead of restricting salvation to their fellow believers. The Times reports:
The most significant contradictory belief the survey reveals has to do with salvation. Previous surveys have shown that Americans think a majority of their countrymen and women will go to heaven, and that the circle is wide, embracing minorities like Jews, Muslims and atheists. But the Pew survey goes further, showing that such views are held by those within major branches of Christianity and minority faiths, too.
In many ways, such findings are not new. American religion, despite its conservative undercurrents, has often been amorphous and inclusive. Bill Herberg, writing in the 1950s, observed that the religious divisions between Americans were eroding and merging into a single, corporate faith under the heading of the "Judeo-Christian tradition."
Of course, many religious people—particularly Jews—found Herberg's description of American religious life bland and amorphously syncretistic, but its assesment of the religious sentiment of American culture was remarkably accurate. Nevertheless, when Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, suggests that the survey suggests "that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view," he is not describing a new phenomenon but a much longer trend within American society.
The difference, perhaps, is that American religious life is moving away from the Judeo-Christian tradition into a much more complex synthesis, in which Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam are part of the equation. What this will mean—and how traditionalist Christians will deal with it—is yet to be determined.
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