Researchers are starting to see Americans are remarkably flexible regarding their religion and even their sexuality, and on the whole, Americans shift these supposedly fixed parts of their “identity” to match their politics:

There was more inconsistency among answers to these types of questions than I would have expected. For example, about a quarter of people who identified themselves as born-again Christian in at least one of the three interviews either had not described themselves that way in a previous interview or stopped describing themselves that way in a later interview. Nearly half of respondents who identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual at some point during the three interviews did not identify themselves that way in all three (meaning that some people stopped identifying as LGB, while others started to after not having done so at first).

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