The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.
The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.
Notice how all the "religious" groups aren't defined by religion alone, but also by the qualifier "White". That's important, because if you go to the source [0], you see that the Race/Religion combination suggests the conclusion you describe because of its blend of race and religion together in some of its categories, but if you look at the Race breakdown, you see that Whites have large majority support for torture (66/25), while Non-Whites do not. Which makes the fact that the Race/Religion breakdown shows that the identified "religious" groups it breaks out all have majority support -- when those "religious" groups are White evangelical protestant (69/20), White non-evangelical Protestant (75/22), and White Catholic (66/23)-- somewhat less significant in religious terms than it seems at first.
[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/...
I suspect that the explanation might be that not only are the non-White subsamples too small, but the racial composition of the various religious groups in the polls is (because of sample size issues) often not representative of the racial composition of the groups in the population and the sample size of the non-White subgroups in the religious groups is too small, so that its quite likely that the overall numbers for the religious groups are distorted as a result of the racial demographics being non-representative, and they don't have meaningful numbers for most of the racial subgroups, but they do have meaningful numbers for the White subgroup.
OTOH, this often results in even more misleading presentation, where the White subgroup of each religious group is all that is reported, but news articles based on the poll still treat that as if it was a result for the religious group as a whole. And it doesn't explain why the non-religious group doesn't get the same treatment, because it almost certainly would have at least as much of the same problem.
It'd probably be better -- for media polls, and media coverage of polls at least -- to either do polls with a big enough sample that your sub-samples in various non-White race/religious subgroups are big enough to report on or just not report religious breakdowns at all where the only way you feel the numbers can be meaningful is just to report the White subgroup for religious groups.
Select "Show results by: Race/Religion".