ABSTRACT
This chapter describes differences between Catholics and Southern Baptists on religious, social, and political matters can be accounted for by different imaginative religious stories in the two traditions. It argues that there were over a thousand Southern Baptists in the National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey from 1983 to 1991. The chapter explores the Southern Baptist religious imagination would be different from that of Catholics and whether David Tracy's theory of the Two Imaginations, which emerged from the Reformation, might possibly be a useful model to explore the data. The Catholic tends to see society as a "sacrament" of God, a set of ordered relationships, governed by both justice and love, which reveal, however imperfectly, the presence of God. Southern Baptists are more "conservative" on family values than other Protestants and Catholics but differ very little from other Christians in their attitudes toward abortion.
