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.

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."

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.

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.