God's Approval Ratings

Only 52 percent in a recent poll approve of the job God is doing. I feel a heckuva lot better about myself today, for some strange reason.

I heard about the PPP poll via The Atlantic Wire.  If you download the actual report, you'll find that while 52 percent approve of God's job, only 9 percent disapprove and 40 percent -- well, those folks aren't sure.  What's fun is not only the results of questions immediately below this but the results later in my post which break down the crosstabs, such as who gives God the highest marks -- men versus women, by age, by political partisanship.  Read all the way through to get it.  First, some of the other questions:

• If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of
  its handling of natural disasters?  50 percent approve, 13 percent disapprove, 37 percent unsure.

• If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of
  its handling of animals? 56 percent approve, 11 percent disapprove, 33 percent unsure.

• If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of
  its handling of creating the universe? 71 percent approve, 5 percent disapprove, 24 percent unsure.

Yeah, the use of "its" strikes me as either politically correct or gender safe.  On the last one above, I'm not exactly sure how you can disapprove or be unsure about the whole creation thing, otherwise we wouldn't be here.  I suppose you might quibble about certain aspects of creation, such as the color of the sky or the existence of light beer.

Further down in the report you can have a little fun with the crosstabs.  Looking only at God's approval ratings, we find:

• Among the "very liberal," 54 percent give God good job ratings.  Among the "very conservative," 61 percent do.  Not a huge difference.

• Women gave God higher marks than men, 55 percent to 48 percent.  Again, kinda close.

• Republicans gave higher marks than Democrats, 55 percent to 50 percent.  Ditto on close.

• Blacks gave higher approval (72 percent) than Hispanics (53) and whites (47).   That's a big difference, but the number of blacks in the survey may be so small as to raise methodological issues.  Still, I'm not surprised by the difference.

• And finally, to bury a lede, the older you were, the lower God's approval ratings.  Among those 18-29, God got 67 percent aproval.  The other age categories and approval ratings in parentheses were: 30-45 (61), 46-65 (50), older than 65 (40).  I suppose as you get older, you have a little more to bitch about when it comes to God and the job, um, "its" doing.