UNITED STATES
Lexington
Belief and the ballot box
Jun 3rd 2004
From The Economist print edition
Religion affects politics in subtler ways than you may think
FOR years, the dominant story about religion in American politics concerned the religious right. White evangelical Protestants aligned themselves with the Republican Party and formed a large part, maybe a fifth or a sixth, of the Republican coalition. Evangelicals thought of themselves as outside the mainstream, alternatively disgusted by it and called upon to change it. So when religious concerns emerged in the public sphere, they seemed to present a clash between evangelicals and the rest of America, all mediated by intra-Republican-Party politics.
This view is looking more and more dubious. Increasingly, the defining political-cum-religious conflict in America is between aggressive Republican evangelicals on the one hand and an equally aggressive Democratic group of secularists on the other. Yet at the same time, the manner in which people worship, and their attitudes towards their faith, are becoming more important in determining people's politics than their denomination alone (whether they are evangelical, or Catholic, or what-not). In politics, these trends are pulling in opposite directions.
United States
Religion
US Election 2004
Click to buy from Amazon.com: The Two Americas, by Stan Greenberg (Amazon.co.uk).
ReligionLink posts a guide to religion in the 2004 elections. See also the campaign websites of George Bush and John Kerry.
The evangelicals' support for Republicans has not changed. Indeed, it has grown, as evangelicals come to recognise George Bush (formally a member of the mainline Protestant Methodists) as one of their own. According to a new survey of voting intentions by John Green of the University of Akron, 77% of evangelicals say they will vote for Mr Bush, easily the highest level of support for the president among any large group of voters.
At the same time, an almost precisely corresponding group of voters is emerging on the Democratic side. This is the secular left: people who say they are not affiliated with any church and who never, or hardly ever, set foot in one. Three-quarters of those who describe themselves as atheists or agnostics back John Kerry. This looks much like the 2000 election campaign, when the number of times you went to church was the single best predictor of which candidate you would vote for.
In his recent book, The Two Americas (St Martin's), Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton's old poll-sifter, describes secular voters as the true loyalists of the Democratic Party. They are second only to blacks in their party affiliation and on social issues, such as health care, taxes and education. On cultural issuesgun-control, immigrationthey are more reliably Democratic than blacks. They account, according to Mr Greenberg, for about 15% of the Democratic base, a fraction below the share of white Protestants in the Republican base.
The close association of secular voters with the Democrats is actually a problem for the party. Over 90% of Americans say they believe in God and two-thirds claim to be members of a church. Secularists are a minority, albeit a growing one. Moreover, while religious intolerance has more or less disappeared from American politics, there is one exception. Voters do not like atheists: 41% say they would never vote for one, far more than say they would not vote for an evangelical, Catholic or Jew. No wonder the Catholic Mr Kerry has been loudly proclaiming his faith, even though he would be banned from communion in the diocese of Colorado Springs for supporting abortion choice.
Traditionalists, centrists, modernists
If you look at the extremes of the political spectrum, therefore, you see a clash of evangelicals against secularists, of religion against irreligion. That is worrying for Democrats. But if you look across the whole spectrum you see a different pattern, one with chances for Democrats and some risks for Republicans.
The University of Akron's survey divides up religion in America not just by denomination but according to adherents' attitudes to doctrine and belief. All evangelicals, for example, emphasise personal salvation, Biblical literalism and spreading the word of God. But not all do so to the same degree. Those who express the firmest confidence in their doctrine, and who go to church most frequently, are labelled traditionalists. Those who express the most doubts or who go to church infrequently are modernists. In between is a group of centrists. The same divisions are made for Catholics and mainstream Protestant denominations, such as Methodists and Lutherans.
The new study shows a striking alignment between religious attitudes and politics. In the ranking of support for President Bush, evangelicals do not come first followed by mainstream Protestants and Catholics (traditionally part of the Democratic base). Rather, all the traditionalists come first, then all the centrists, and lastly the modernists. Traditionalists of different denominations have more in common with one another than with members of the same denomination. And the same holds true for centrists and modernists.
Thus if you take Mr Bush's net job approval (those who say he is doing an excellent or good job minus the poor and very poor ratings), you find the range among evangelicals is wide, 57 points. Among mainstream believers it is even wider, 68 points. But between the various traditionalists it is only 23 points, between the centrists 22 and, among the modernists, just 16. In politics, it seems, religious attitude trumps denomination.
And that contains good news for Democrats. In the middle of the spectrum you find the swing voters of faith, the religious equivalent to purple states. Centrist mainstream Protestants support Mr Bush by a few points. Centrist Catholics and modernist evangelicals support Mr Kerry by the same narrow margin. In all, these are nearly a fifth of all voters.
If Democrats become the party of secularists, they are doomed to a minority existence and Republicans will become, by default, a majority party based on religion. But that is not inevitable. The new battleground of American politics is about religious attitudes as much as affiliation. And here Democrats can be as competitive as Republicans.
