Just the facts. The infomation provided by Gallup is a valuable tool for marking the trends of our society. Interpretation of the facts could vary based on one's political/religious point of view - but this is a gold mine for journalists.

The headline of the press release exaggerates peoples' satisfaction with religion. 39 +/- 3 percent are satisfied, but 32 +/- 3 percent want religion to have a smaller role, and 27 +/- 3 want it to have a greater role. So, it would also be fair to headline this story "Public divided over Role of Organized Religion in America."

How dissapointing that Gallup's enormous reach could ask relevant questions that could have lead to meaningful responses. The article is more self promotion of useless suggestions collected by a data dinosaur.

Free access to this report may expire on 1/30/7. Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Jan. 15-18, 2007. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points.

I bet the media has already mistaken these results for saying that people are satisfied with the role of religion in politics, which is not at all the question they asked. I suspect that more interesting and specific question would find very different answers. Of course religion often plays a role in individual decisions people make. But I still hold out hope that the majority of the country doesn't want those decisions to be enforced by law.