Poll: Muslims Have Highest Approval of Obama; Mormons Lowest

President Barack Obama gets his highest approval rating among religious groups from Muslims and his lowest from Mormons, according to a newly released national poll.

A Gallup survey indicates that in the first half of this year, 78 percent of Muslims approved of the job the president's doing in the White House, while just 24 percent of Mormons give Obama a thumbs up. According to the poll, the president's approval rating among Protestants and other Christians was 43 percent, it stood at 50 percent for Catholics, 61 percent among Jews, 63 percent for Atheists, Agnostics and those with no religion, and 64 percent for those from other non-Christian religions. The president's approval among all Americans stood at 48 percent.

The survey indicates that Obama has lost 15 points on his overall approval rating from the first half of 2009 to the first half of this year, and that he has lost slightly more ground than average among Mormons and has receded the least among Muslims.

"The differences in Obama's approval ratings across the religious groups included in this analysis have held fairly constant across time, even as Obama's overall rating has fallen by 15 points between the first half of 2009 and the first seven months of this year," says a release by Gallup.

American Muslims have been in the headlines over the past few weeks, thanks to the controversy over a proposal to build an Islamic center, that would include a mosque, near ground zero in New York City. The president has spoken out in support of the legal rights for the Islamic center to be built. But the polling in this survey was conducted before the controversy made national headlines.

The findings of the Gallup poll are based on interviews with more than 275,00 adult Americans conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking from Jan. 21, 2009, through July 31, 2010. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus one percentage point.

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