Reading Scripture and the Conservative/Liberal Divide

My wife provided a link to this article at Christianity Today, which discusses some new research on the relationship between regular Bible reading on whether the reader leans conservative or liberal on various topics. Some of the key findings (find more at the link):

Frequent Bible reading has some predictable effects on the reader. It increases opposition to abortion as well as homosexual marriage and unions. [...] But [...] For each increased level of Bible-reading frequency, support for the Patriot Act decreased by about 13 percent. [...] As might be expected, respondents who were more politically liberal were prone to disagree with the statement, "The government should punish criminals more harshly." Unexpectedly (at least given the conservative stereotype), the more frequently people read the Bible, the more they too are prone to disagree with the statement. [...] the more someone reads the Bible, the more likely he or she is to believe science and religion are compatible.[...] contrary to liberal media stereotypes, those who are most engaged in their faith (by directly and frequently reading its source material) are those who are most supportive of social and economic justice.

The article interprets this as causal: more frequent Bible reading makes otherwise conservative Christians more liberal. I think there is some sense to this interpretation. It's hard to read large segments of the Bible and think of it as more about rules and instructions than stories and people. And it's very hard to read those stories and still think of people as either good guys who follow the rules or bad guys who bring God's wrath upon them. The Bible doesn't really have many black hats, and even fewer white hats.

But it sounds like the study doesn't actually pin down the direction of causation in this way, I can think of good reasons it could go differently. In particular, if you're a slightly more liberal person in a conservative church environment, you will more frequently leave a sermon wondering "but does it really say that?" This provides motivation to read the Bible for yourself rather than just taking a pastor or teacher's word for it.

So my instinct is that sorting out the degree of cause in each direction is far from simple. Nevertheless, it's an important correlation, and one that holds even after controlling for a number of other important relationships. What do you think? Does reading the Bible regularly moderate your views? What about other people you know?