Yes, that's very important, too

Lots of interesting stuff in the Pew survey released last week. One item that's gotten some attention is a question asking repondents how important each of the following issues is to their vote for president: the Iraq war, domestic issues, and social issues. The last of the three gets the fewest "very important" responses--even among white evangelicals.

But the question doesn't ask people to rank the three issues/areas, just to rate each one's importance independently. So the survey doesn't do much to answer what I think is the biggest question about evangelical political behavior--to what degree will the environment/poverty/war/whatever start to be a priority to a large number of evangelicals, as opposed to another issue that's "very important" (but perhaps less very important than, say, protecting your marriage from the gays and lesbians who seek to tear it apart)?

Unless we've switched to a system in which individuals get to vote directly on individual policy questions and no one's told me, this would seem to be the more important question.