Whenever I hear those three little words -- "the latest poll" -- I generally tune out. Pollsters and survey-takers seldom ask the right questions, I've found, so the responses they get are less than reliable. One exception is the surveys conducted by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and the organization's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, released Monday, June 23, proves why.

The Pew survey not only asks highly specific and carefully worded questions but also asks participants to provide detailed information about themselves. Demographic breakdowns go well beyond, say, the evangelical/mainline divide to subgroups such as Baptists in the evangelical tradition, the mainline tradition, or the historically black church traditions; mainline Christians who pray daily and regularly attend church services; and Catholics who consider religion to be very important in their lives.

So we know who Pew talked to, and that makes the results of this survey particularly compelling -- and encouraging to those of us who stubbornly hold on to the hope that we can effect political and social change by building on the common ground that unites us as Christians. And the meticulous wording of the survey enabled Pew analysts to recognize such nuances as the indirect influence of religion on political life.

Here's what I see in the survey as cause for hope:

• Seventy to 87 percent of all Christians expressed dissatisfaction with the political system and the direction the country is taking. Imagine what we could accomplish if we turned that level of dissatisfaction into action.
• Even though 48 percent of evangelicals prefer a smaller government that provides fewer services, 57 percent believe the government should do more to help the poor, even if it means going into debt. That may seem incongruous, but I don't think it is. To me, it indicates that evangelicals place a higher value on helping the poor than on some other governmental services.
• Fifty-four percent of evangelicals believe stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost. That's compared to 64 percent of mainline respondents, which dispels the long-held myth that mainliners and evangelicals are clearly divided on this issue.
• While only 48 percent of evangelicals favor diplomacy over military strength as a means of ensuring peace, I have to believe that's an improvement. (38 percent favor military might over diplomacy, with 16 percent responding "neither," "both," or "don't know.")
• The gap between evangelicals and mainline Christians is also much narrower than was once the case with regard to foreign affairs. Fifty-four percent of evangelicals and 52 percent of mainliners believe we should pay more attention to domestic problems than to international problems.

That last question is one of the few I think could have been better worded. The alternative response was, "It's best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs." Given that wording, I would have also opted for paying more attention to problems at home. But the question makes no distinction, for example, between involvement in Iraq and involvement in Darfur. If it had, the responses likely would have been different.

In any event, the survey results indicate, among many other things, that Christians of all stripes are far more united on some social and political issues than our politicians and religious leaders would have the American public believe. And that's good news -- no, great news -- for everyone who favors working together to solve problems over battling it out along partisan or denominational lines.

Marcia Ford is the author of We the Purple: Faith, Politics and the Independent Voter.

During the South Carolina Republican debate, Mike Huckabee garnered greatest applause when defending his views of wifely submission as part of his evangelical faith. The questioner quizzed Huckabee about being one of 131 signers of a 1998 USA Today ad by the Southern Baptist Convention that asserted, "a wife is to graciously submit herself to the servant leadership of her husband." Huckabee responded by saying "I am not the least bit ashamed of my faith." He joked that his own wife was not submissive and appeared to temper his original statement by affirming the idea of mutual submission in marriage (a view, by the way, specifically rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention).

Some evangelicals might find this acceptable, but many more do not—not to mention the American public as a whole. Over the last decade, the Pew Research Center has tracked a steady decrease of the impact of conservative religion on views of gender. In 1997, 28 percent of Americans strongly disagreed with the idea that women should return to "traditional roles." In 2007, 42 percent strongly disagreed with the same statement. One wonders how many Protestant Christians—evangelical and otherwise—are included in that 42 percent.

If the media thinks that Huckabee's views represent evangelical Christianity, they are wrong. Wifely submission is only one interpretation of scripture and not without significant criticism by biblical scholars and theologians. American evangelicalism has a long and conflicted record about its views of women, with egalitarianism as the alternative to submission. This week's other major news story—Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire primary victory—provides an instructive historical lesson about that evangelical alternative.

Hillary Clinton is not, of course, an "evangelical" using the current definition. She is a mainline United Methodist. However, she graduated Wellesley College. Although few would think of contemporary Wellesley as in any way evangelical, the school's 19th century heritage was that of evangelical feminism.

Henry and Pauline Durant founded Wellesley in 1871 (first classes held in 1875) as a distinctly evangelical institution. Henry, a wealthy lawyer, had become a lay-evangelist with a vision for a women's college that "will be Christian in its influence, discipline, and course of instruction." At the groundbreaking of Wellesley's first building, Mrs. Durant gave every workman a Bible as a gift before she placed another Bible in the cornerstone. The cornerstone prayer reads:

This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything ... that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ.

All of Wellesley's early professors were required to teach the Bible along with their regular subjects; all trustees were obligated to be active members of evangelical churches. Revivalist Dwight L. Moody served as a trustee and ardently supported the school and his friends, the Durants, in their endeavor.

The Durants not only preached the gospel—they were equally committed to the "cause of God's poor." They believed that universal childhood education was the key to alleviating poverty and that medical care needed to be widely available to the indigent. The Wellesley evangelicals believed that women were as capable as men in every field, with one exception: religious matters. When it came to religion, they believed that women were superior to men. In 1880, Noah Porter, Yale College president, addressed Wellesley women praising that superiority while warning them that such giftedness exposed them to "unreasoning fanaticism and tenacious bigotry."

Wellesley women took this all quite seriously. Submitting to no one, these young evangelical women became scholars, professors, theologians, pastors, missionaries, teachers, doctors, and lawyers across the globe. Although the Wellesley of Hillary Rodham Clinton's day had become secularized, the feminist legacy of 19th century evangelicalism continued to influence its priorities—full equality for women, quality childhood education for all, universal access to health care, and a passion for the poor.

Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) holds a Ph.D. in American Religious History from Duke University. She is the author of six books, including Christianity for the Rest of Us (Harper One 2006).

The denomination which I am now seeking to enter and belong to, the Episcopal Church, is a denominaton that many others are now seeking to depart. 

Such a situation carries within it two things: danger and opportunity. The danger is self evident. The opportunty will come from listening to the jackhammer on our roof. The image of a hammer on the roof comes from my Bishop Greg Rickel. I've added "jack" to the "hammer" to note the severity of the "noise." But we must remember that we are people of the paschal mystery. Out of death, can come new life and renewed purpose.

Both the modern liberal and the modern conservative frameworks for being church are crashing down around us. From these ruins, both we and our more conservative friends need new to forge new alternatives and pathways forward for being church and working together on the core things we hold in common: Love of Triune God, the creed of Nicea, the dominical sacraments, the story of Jesus recorded in the scriptures, (albeit with varying frameworks for interpreting the scriptures among the churches) the call to mission, the call to reconciled relationships with one another reflective of the relational being of God, and the call to loving service, in and for God's world.

We who remain in the Episcopal Church should not waste time and missional energy being angry and "against" those who are more conservative, but instead direct energy and resources towards engaging renewed mission, reconciliation and service.

Let us pray for those have left us and ask their prayers for us who remain.

And let those of us who remain in the Episcopal Church give thanks for the "Interim Report House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church," November 2007, which says:

As Episcopalians, we approach and express our faith and relationship with Christ through our Baptismal Covenant and Eucharistic community. Now is the time to articulate and renew these leadership trajectories, and to re-kindle enthusiasm for both evangelism and mission... We need to undertake these efforts with a sense of urgency: urgency in evangelism, urgency in leadership development, urgency in outreach, urgency in structural reorganization—but first and foremost, urgency in more clearly defining who we are, where God is calling us to go, and how we should "press ahead" in mission in response to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

With this new urgency, there is much to be done. Anglimergent is small, and newly forming cohort of emerging Anglican leaders that ready to be put to serious work to help lead and transform our church around and renewed focus on mission, reconciliation and service in the way of Jesus Christ. There are amazing missional opportunities before us. It is Advent once more.

Karen Ward is Abbess of the Church of the Apostles: An Intentional, Sacramental Community in the Way of Jesus Christ. www.apostleschurch.org

A week before Thanksgiving, I spoke in Lake Tahoe for the clergy convocation of the California-Nevada Conference of the United Methodist Church, a sprawling geography that comprises a wide array of congregations in big cities and small rural towns. The wide variety of clergy reflected that of the churches—the group included many women, persons of color, younger pastors, folks with a spectrum of theological views, and ordained and non-ordained leaders. It was obvious that this group of Methodists was working hard on issues of diversity.

But the most stunning diversity was in the presence of people from around the world, not as mission guests or visiting Methodist dignitaries. Rather, the group included local congregational leaders who hailed from the all the "souths": the South Pacific, South Africa, South Asia, South Korea, South America, and even south Jersey, South Carolina, and southern California. There, on the shores of an alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, gathered the Global South and the emerging community of world Christianity in the form of Methodist clergy.

We spent the day talking about postmodern Christianity and cultural change as related to mainline churches. Early in the conversation, an Indian pastor graciously raised the relevance of postmodern analysis in relation to his community and worldview asking, "Isn't this a western phenomenon?" His questions and their implicit challenges to a western worldview drew the group into a new conversational space. We began to think about cultural change globally—looking at postmodernism and its effects through a prism of worldviews. We did not argue about issues of sexuality; we did not get into a theological fight; we never resorted to ignoring others. We ruminated on God's work in history. We talked about something important—about how the world is changing and why. We listened to and affirmed each other, hospitably opening ourselves to understand and integrate perspectives different from our own. What resulted was, for me, one of the most stimulating intellectual and spiritual days I have experienced in a long time.

I grew up United Methodist in Baltimore in the 1960s. In those years, my childhood church was nearly ripped in two by the Civil Rights Movement. Even the thought of sharing "our" church with African-American Methodists frightened much of my neighborhood to the point of fleeing both the congregation and the city. It would have been impossible to imagine that, some 40 years hence, I would participate in a Methodist community encompassing such a rainbow of ethnicities.

I am sure that good Methodists of the California-Nevada Conference will demur, saying how far they have to go and how imperfectly they practice diversity. But 40 years is a pretty short time to go from a fractured community fearful of race toward the room I experienced at Lake Tahoe. And it demonstrated to me the power of diversity as a Christian practice. If their diversity was merely a "program" of the denomination, it would breed resentment and suspicion. But the level of trust in the room (we even talked about trust) indicated that their diversity went far beyond program—that it is a genuine attempt to enact Christian community in bringing together humankind through Jesus Christ. Their diversity was a practice of faith, an action that Christian people do for the sake of God in the world.

Frankly, the world has never needed the Christian practice of diversity more than it does today. By creating global community in a room on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the Methodists of the California-Nevada Conference provided a hopeful example of what may be possible for the rest of us on a larger scale. It may not be perfect, but I can testify that for one day, we did it. We really acted like Christians—Christians of every imaginable stripe—in the same room, doing important work together. We proved—or maybe discovered—that the only limit to diversity is the love of God.

Diana Butler Bass (www.dianabutlerbass.com) is the author of six books including Christianity for the Rest of Us (Harper One, 2006), just released in paperback. She says she lives in Alexandria, Virginia. But, from her speaking engagement schedule, we think she lives on United Airlines.