In 1979, Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell (that would be “senior”) launched the Moral Majority to mobilize religious conservatives across America in support of conservative politics — imitating prior campaigning by liberal churches.

One year later, these culturally conservative voters helped Republican Ronald Reagan score a surprising 44-state sweep for president against two evangelical Protestants, Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and independent John Anderson.

Ever since, news-media professionals have disgorged an endless stream of reports assessing the impact of evangelical Protestants in Republican and conservative politics. Of course, when the media people say “evangelical” that’s almost always shorthand for “white evangelical.” African-Americans and Hispanics are far more liberal on economic issues and, thus, Democratic.

This emphasis was understandable back when the “religious right” was newborn, but far too many journalists continues to neglect other faiths.

News Flash. There is evidence that at the grass-roots level, white evangelical churches are the least politicized among the nation’s five main faith sectors, over against congregations of Catholics, Black Protestants, “mainline” Protestants in predominantly white denominations and non-Christiana (i.e. Jews, Muslims, and adherents of Eastern religions).

So says new survey research from the National Congregations Study (NCS) reported by sociologists Mark Chaves at Duke University and Kraig Beyerlein at the University of Notre Dame. The advance release was timed to accompany early voting, with academic publication set for December.

This is the fourth round of NCS surveys that started in 1998. Working off the General Social Survey data base at the University of Chicago, the project developed a randomly selected sample of leaders from an array of 1,262 congregations, of which 43% were evangelical. (Only 6% were Catholic, where parish memberships are far larger than for the typical Protestant congregation).

Journalists should explore this material in depth, but the emerging scenario appears to indicate a relatively small and unrepresentative band of evangelical partisans at the national level has — aided by massive amounts of news coverage — distorted the public image of grass-roots white evangelicalism. (This is a different question from how these churchgoers vote, where sweeping fidelity toward Republican candidates has long been evident.)