A majority of Americans from all major religious categories say they believe their religion is not the only path to eternal life, or that there’s only one correct version of their own faith. But an even larger majority of Americans say they believe in God and in absolute standards of right and wrong.

These are among the results reported Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The numbers emerged from a massive national poll commissioned by the organization last summer.

Pew issued its first report on the poll in February. That report was notable for suggesting that nearly half of Americans older than 18 have switched faith traditions at least once. Monday’s report drilled more deeply than the first one into what people say they believe and how they practice their faith.

The poll’s unusually large sample size — more than 36,000 people, compared with most national surveys of about 1,000 — allowed researchers to more accurately assess the entire population and to offer a snapshot of faith groups too small to show up in most other polls.

About seven in 10 of those surveyed said they believed that many religions can lead to eternal life and that there is more than one true interpretation of the teachings of their own religion.

A majority of the members of almost every religious tradition agreed with those positions: More than 60 percent of those who said they were Southern Baptists said they believed that many religions can be right about how to get to the hereafter. And about eight in 10 Catholics said they believed there was more than one true interpretation of their faith.

In both of those cases, the majority seems to be at odds with official teachings. People in much smaller religious groups also expressed disagreement with some of the official teachings of their faith.

About six in 10 Buddhists say they believe in Nirvana and about the same percentage of Hindus say they believe in reincarnation. Those concepts are central to most descriptions of the two faiths, so what does that say about the other 40 percent of those groups?

Some results are just plain baffling: How to explain that one-fifth of those who said they were atheists also said they believe in God, and that one in 10 said they pray at least once a week? Did some people think they were asked if they were “a theist"? The Pew researchers say probably not.

Almost eight in 10 of those surveyed said they believe in “absolute standards of right and wrong.” But only a third said they turned primarily to religious teachings to set their standards.

As other surveys have indicated, the Pew study indicates that America has drifted slightly more secular over the decades, but overwhelming majorities continue to say they believe in God (92 percent), heaven (74 percent), hell (59 percent), and angels and demons (68 percent).

And also tracking other surveys, this poll showed that the more often someone says that they attend religious services, the more likely they are to say they are Republican and consider themselves politically conservative. For those who said they attend church at least weekly, 43 percent said they were Republican, compared with only 30 percent of everyone else.

One question got more interesting in the aftermath of the controversies about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Rev. John Hagee and their endorsements of senators Barack Obama and John McCain. About half of those surveyed said that churches should express their views on day-to-day social and political questions — with almost seven in 10 members of historically black churches saying they should.

The survey also offered a new measure of how many people constitute the “religious right.” Generally, that term has been applied to religiously and politically conservative Protestants who have been reliable Republican voters at least since the Reagan era.

Depending on the question, from a third to half of those who said they belong to Evangelical churches took religious and political positions generally associated with the religious right. If those results are accurate, 10 percent to 15 percent of voting-age Americans would be in that group.