Apocalypse Statistics

I found this quote on Megnut: “59% of all Americans believe that what is written in the Bible’s Book of Revelations will come to pass.” She was citing a BBC article about Bush and religion. My question is this… what, specifically, does the study say 59% of Americans believe about Revelations? Conservative evangelical churches can’t agree whether “The Rapture” will be pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, or post-tribulation, and Catholics have a completely different understanding of the meaning of the Book of Revelation (few Catholics believe the Church is the Whore of Babylon, for instance, and I recently heard a radio interview with a theologian who argues that Revelations is actually a highly poetic description of what goes on during the Mass — thus from a certain point of view, it is not a distant prophecy but something that most Catholics see every week). My point is not simply to raise a theological question, but rather to note that the BBC could have added a web link so that the curious could find out more about this intriguing statistic. (A few minutes with Google led to me to a blogger who credited a Time poll, but I didn’t get any farther than that.)Apocalypse StatisticsLiteracy Weblog)