bodhi tree swaying

Charles M. Blow has a short but interesting column explaining that the vast majority of Americans believe that good people who are not Christians can go to heaven. The sub-plot of the article is the disbelief that some people experienced when they learned this finding. That suggests to me that the tenets of hard-right evangelicalism have come to be seen as normative, when in fact they are a minority position that happens to have a lot of political traction and a direct channel to the media.

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved

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