UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Lauren Markoe Religion News Service | Dec. 18, 2013
Clergy used to rank near the top in polls asking Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of people in various professions. This year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1977, fewer than half of those polled said clergy have “high” or “very high” moral standards.
But opinions on clergy differed markedly by party, with Republicans viewing them far more favorably than Democrats.
Overall, 47 percent of respondents to the survey gave clergy “high” or “very high” ratings, a sharp drop in confidence from the 67 percent of Americans who viewed them this way in 1985.
Among Republicans, 63 percent gave clergy one of the two top ratings for ethics, compared with 40 percent of Democrats.
In a piece accompanying the poll, Gallup Senior Editor Jeffrey M. Jones wrote that Republicans might think more highly of clergy, police and military officers “because those people work in traditional institutions in American society, which Republicans may hold in greater esteem because of their generally conservative ideology.”
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