The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has released Part II of its U.S. religious landscape survey. The first part was released in February, and the big finding was that fewer Americans were "inheriting" religion from their parents and had become a little more fluid in their belief systems.

The latest results showed a similar trend: The majority of Americans believe there are multiple ways to interpret religious teachings, and most even believe that no single religion holds an exclusive franchise on truth.

Still, the United States remains a very religious nation. Ninety-two percent of Americans say the believe in a God or universal spirit of some kind (though I suspect including "universal spirit" in the question captured a lot of people who are fairly non-religious but spiritual). For comparison: About 12%-15% of the world's population is considered non-religious, and in England polls have put the number of non-believers as high as 40%.

UPDATE: An interesting parallel in the news today: James Dobson is attacking Barack Obama over comments made about various interpretations of the Bible. Dobson is pulling up statements Obama made in 2006 about the United States no longer being a Christian-only nation (which the survey results support), among other things.

"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?" Obama said.

Dobson is a fundamentalist with a fairly rigid interpretation of Christianity and is accusing Obama of "dragging Biblical understanding through the gutter." But the Pew survey results suggest that most Americans share Obama's point of view here. This attack may play well with the Focus on the Family audience (and that may be the only group Dobson is trying to reach), but it probably won't be effective with the general public.