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Nearly 40 percent of Arizonans say they seldom or never attend worship services, and more than one-fifth claim no religion, but most believe in God.

That snapshot of our beliefs and habits comes from a survey of America's religious landscape released last week by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

As a nation, our religious beliefs are not as black-and-white as the media often portray them, survey leaders said. The results indicate Americans on the whole have a non-dogmatic approach to faith and are open to varying viewpoints.

Seven in 10 of the more than 35,000 American adults surveyed said many religions can lead to eternal life; nearly 80 percent of Americans believe that miracles still occur as they did in ancient times; and 12 percent of atheists said they believe in heaven.

While the country's evangelical Christians often are portrayed as Republican, anti-abortion and anti-gay, the survey showed that isn't always true, for example.

Fewer than half — 38 percent of the evangelical respondents — identified themselves as Republican, more than a quarter said homosexuality should be accepted by society, and nearly a third said abortion should either be always legal or legal in most cases.

The study also included a state-by-state breakdown.

Eighty-eight percent of Arizonans say they are either absolutely certain or fairly certain there's a God, the poll said. Nationally, 90 percent said they believe in God.

That doesn't mean Arizonans are going to churches, mosques and synagogues, however.

"For a lot of people, being in church is something that was kind of coerced in their life. . . . It doesn't surprise me, even as a pastor and as a Christian," said the Rev. Scott Richards, senior pastor at the evangelical Calvary Christian Fellowship of Tucson and host of "Scott Richards Live" on KGMS, 940 AM.

"I was an atheist before I became a Christian, and it took me three years after I became a Christian to go to church," Richards said.

Tucsonan and semiretired physicist Jerry Karches was critical of the survey results, particularly the one that said just 6 percent of Arizonans don't believe in God at all. That response was about on a par with the national response of 5 percent. He thinks the percentage is much higher.

He also was confused by some of the atheist responses about heaven and God. Karches, an atheist, co-founded the Center for Inquiry Community of Southern Arizona.

"It's hard to believe. Maybe the question wasn't presented properly," Karches said. "The only claim to fame an atheist has is that they don't believe in God."

Karches said there's still a stigma attached to being an atheist, which is perhaps why the percentage of atheists wasn't higher. He noted that the number of people who aren't affiliated with any religion has been growing steadily.

"A lot of people are really objecting to organized religion. A number of us feel it's a big business," he said. "Maybe they are still able to connect in their own way. I don't know."

Thirty-nine percent of Arizonans say they seldom or never go to worship service, which is much higher than the national average of 27 percent. And a Pew survey released on Feb. 25 said 22 percent of Arizonans claim no religious affiliation at all, also higher than the national norm.

"We are such a state of transients," Richards said. "Most of us do not have the history, for example, of going to a church because our grandfather and great-grandfather went there. And in Arizona, there isn't the stress on church attendance like there is in the South and the Midwest, where a lot of times the church is the epicenter of a community's life."

He did wonder why nearly 70 percent of Americans and more than half of evangelical Christians in the survey — 57 percent — said they do not think their faith is the one true way to eternal life. Richards understood the question to be asking whether Jesus is the only way to God. The answer to that question is always "yes," he said.

"I'm not the one who came up with that," he said. "The non-Christians will rap evangelicals for saying our way is the only way. But it's not our way. It's what Jesus said."

Richards said perhaps many of those who answered the survey are new to evangelical Christianity and have not had a lot of exposure to the faith. At least that's what he hopes.

Some experts have said the new survey results may indicate Americans are not well-educated about Scripture and the meaning of their beliefs, hence the one-fifth of atheists who say they believe in God. In that case, they might not be distinguishing between agnosticism and atheism.

In faiths such as Roman Catholicism that have strict doctrine against abortion and homosexual relations, worshippers don't necessarily adhere to what the church says. Fifty-eight percent of Catholics said homosexuality should be accepted by society, and 48 percent of the Catholics surveyed said they believe abortion should be either always legal or legal in most cases.

Catholicism is the largest organized religious group in Arizona, making up about one-quarter of the population.

"The statistics have been true for a long, long time — that many Catholics do think abortion is wrong but they don't want it to be illegal, and that really tracks (with) what most Americans think," said Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

Nearly 80 percent of Catholics in the survey said their faith is not the only one true religion, and that many religions can lead to eternal life.

"Forty or fifty years ago, we would not have seen those results. I think Catholics have changed. They have become much more ecumenical," Reese said. "It doesn't mean they think all religions are the same, but they are respectful of other religions and believe God is bigger than all of us, and that if people are loving and kind and generous, God is going to find a way to bring salvation."

Tucsonan Caroline Ragano grew up in post-Vatican II Catholicism and never thought about her religion as being the only way to salvation. In her office at the University of Arizona, she has symbols of Buddhism, Hinduism and Catholicism. She still remembers how her mother referred to God: "as you understand him."

Ragano still thinks about God that way, though she doesn't always think in terms of "him," as God is referred to in Catholicism, but rather a bigger entity than herself.

Her faith is complex. "It's not simple to categorize, but I had to be in a category, I'm fine with saying I'm a very open-minded Catholic," she said. She is a musician for an interfaith chanting group. She attends Catholic services, but not weekly.

"There's a lot more commonality than difference among the different faiths, if you get away from the dogma," she said.