OxBlog

Saturday, April 03, 2004

# Posted 6:26 PM by Patrick Belton  

THANKS, MEL: The percentage of Americans who say Jews were responsible for Christ's death is rising - particularly among young people and blacks - according to a poll just released by the Pew Research Center. In a telephone survey of 1,703 randomly selected adults, 26 percent of respondents said Jews killed Christ - which was up from 19 percent in an identically worded poll from 1997, and the increase among people under thirty was a particularly startling threefold - from 10 percent to 34 percent. (The proportional rise among blacks was smaller, 21 percent to 42 percent.)

That these views are correlated with having seen Mel Gibson's "Passion" movie is borne out by the survey - particularly, again, among the troubling "young anti-semite" demographic: of those 18-34 year olds who have seen the film, 42 percent believe Jews were responsible for Christ's death, compared with 36 percent of 35-59 year olds who watched the movie. And for respondents 60 years and up, there was hardly any difference between the responses of people who had seen the film and those who hadn't.

We should be careful what kind of views we impart to the youngest generation - they'll be with us for quite some time.
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