National study challenges 3 mistaken perceptions about American religion

More and more Americans see strong faith of any kind through a jaded eye, considering religion almost automatically as a pejorative — and seeing believers as intolerant, politically driven and insincere. “One characteristic of a deeply polarized society is that opposing groups often hold distorted views of their opponents, vastly overestimating the extent to which the other side holds extreme views,” say the authors of a new seminal study on faith in America — seeking to get at the “root causes of conflict” by identifying “perception gaps” that “lie behind the animosity and fears between different groups.”