At Spiritual Politics, Mark Silk points out that Obama’s approval ratings have shot up among church attenders:
Today’s Gallup poll on The First Hundred Days suggests that Obama has shrunk his religion gap. Whereas 41 percent of weekly worship attenders and 61 percent of seldom or never attenders supported him just before the election, now the numbers are 69 percent and 57 percent. Thus the gap between the two groups has narrowed from 20 points to 12 points. Since Obama has improved his numbers markedly with both groups, the best way to understand this is to say that of those who didn’t support him six months ago, he has gained 27 percent of the weekly attenders as compared to 21 percent of the seldoms and nevers. What explains the differential?
In my view, it’s that Obama has succeeded in calming the fears of religious folks sufficiently to enable a disproportionate number of them to support him for other reasons—mainly economic.
Continue reading at Spiritual Politics, where, further down, Silk discusses Arlen Specter, the Republican economics, and the Club for Growth.