SageLaw.us — Analyzing religion, politics and the 'Christian right' in the 21st century

The “Christian right” as a modern political phenomenon made its mark for 25 years, culminating with George W. Bush's two presidential wins. The influence of this constituency has waned, but it is by no means gone.

“We really have to understand how religion works in the political system we are living with,” said Mark Silk, associate professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Silk, along with religious studies professor Wade Clark Roof of the University of California, Santa Barbara, spoke about the connection between religion and politics at a conference sponsored by UCSB’s Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life, Dec. 7-8, 2005.

The terms “religious right” and “evangelical” elicit polarized opinions, especially in regions outside of the movement’s Southern heartland. At the UCSB seminar, hostility toward these groups was evident.

“They’re not content just to go to church: They’re trying to legislate a theocracy in this country; they’re knocking on my door on the weekend to proselytize; they’re striding up and down State Street bellowing and thumping their Bibles,” declared one attendee.

Silk cautioned against demonizing religious conservatives: “To say ‘theocracy’ means to say they would like to get rid of the First Amendment and have their church become the church of the United States,” he said. “While there are some groups, like Christian re-constructionists, who might say that, they are a very small minority. Yes, the Christian right wants to take away the right to abortion and prevent same-sex marriage, but that is not the equivalent of theocracy. I do think that is important to understand.”

Silk said it is important to ask religious conservatives where they stand on issues, rather than just assume they believe a certain way.

“I think it’s important to get them to say what they want,” he said. “It seems to me we don’t get this clearly articulated: Just how far do these people want to take things? What is too much? What would they want in terms of prayer in schools?”

Silk pointed out that neither the Bush administration, for all its religiosity, nor the Republican Congress pushed through legislation mandating prayer in schools, nor did they push forward constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion or same-sex marriage.

In addition, despite the many negative ways the Christian right might be characterized, Silk pointed out that it is not exclusivist in the narrow denominational sense, nor is it anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic.

“The Christian right are prepared to make substantial alliances with people they would not have made alliances with before,” Silk said. The numerous Catholic members of the Supreme Court are evidence of this. “The whole demise of anti-Catholicism is more extraordinary than the demise of anti-Semitism on the part of conservative Protestants,” he said.

But in promoting their agenda, the tone of Christian conservatives is often combative and abrasive, which rubs many people the wrong way. “It is very ‘Us vs. Them,’ and ‘Us’ means people of faith and people who share these moral values. And this can include people of different religious traditions,” Silk said.

Moral values and the 2004 election

“After the election, there was a lot of talk that it wasn’t really about moral values but something else. I’m here to tell you that moral values counted.”
— Mark Silk

Religion and politics may be like oil and water, but they came together like bees to pollen in the 2004 presidential election. Exit polls indicated that, by a slim plurality, moral values were the single most important factor for voters in their choice for president.

The meaning and validity of the exit polls are still the subject of debate. But even if moral values came in second or third place behind the economy and Iraq, the importance of the morality factor would be significant.

“After the election, there was a lot of talk that it wasn’t really about moral values but something else,” Silk said. “I’m here to tell you that moral values counted.”

Moral values have a powerful core constituency in the American electorate, primary among them white Christian evangelicals, who have formed powerful and perhaps unlikely alliances with Catholics and even a small portion of Jewish voters who have strayed from their traditional Democratic base.

“Moral values is a cover for a voting block, as it has been since the days of the Moral Majority: Vote your Christian values,” Silk said.

The ‘God gap’

Political divides are no longer formed along the lines of religious vs. non-religious. The degree of religious commitment is playing an increasing role in elections. In the last election cycle, analysts began to talk about the “religion gap” or the “God gap.”

In the 2000 election, the more-religious voters weighed 20 percentage points higher than their less religious counterparts in favor of Republicans for both Congress and the president. These 20 percentage points constitute the religion gap.

“This doesn’t mean that a lot of voters who go to church all the time don’t vote for Democrats. But a lot more vote for Republicans,” Silk said.

The religion gap began to show itself in the 1972 Nixon-McGovern presidential contest, in which the more religious voters leaned Republican and people who were less religious voted Democrat.

“The Nixon-McGovern race was kind of the first ‘culture war,’” Silk said.

In terms of more-frequent church attendees, the religion gap widened significantly in the 1992 Clinton-Bush race, largely a result of continuing stories about Clinton’s extramarital escapades.

“More frequent attenders were more reluctant to vote for Clinton than for Democratic candidates in Congress,” Silk said. “All of the pre-Monica stories seemed to have an effect.”

By the 2000 election, Congressional voting caught up with the presidential voting. And by the 2004 election, the religion gap remained at about 20 percent. “In order to understand what this picture means, one needs to look at it through the lens of gender,” Silk said.

The gender gap

“The entire religion gap is contained in the difference between the women who don’t go to church and the men who do.”

The gender gap breaks down into four categories: (1) women who are frequent church-attenders, (2) women who are less-frequent attenders, (3) men who are frequent attenders, (4) and men who are less-frequent attenders.

In the 2000 election, less frequently attending women voted 3 to 1 Democratic. The more frequently attending men vote 3-1 Republican. The more frequently attending women and the less frequently attending men are split down the middle.

“The entire religion gap is contained in the difference between the women who don’t go to church and the men who do,” Silk said. “Why do you get this kind of split? If you take certain issues like gun control, women like it, and men tend to go the other way. On education spending: Men are not enthusiastic about increasing it; women are. Men who go to church are pushed toward the Republican Party on all of those issues. Women who don’t show up at church tend to move in the exact opposite direction. Frequently attending women may be responsive on Republican issues like right-to-life and same-sex marriage. On the other hand, women like education spending, and they don’t like guns. And when you have people who are conflicted, you get swing voters. And that’s our current picture.”

Ethno-religious splits

“This is a huge gender gap, which suggests mainline Protestant spouses are not talking to one another.”

Gender gaps and commitment gaps exist within different ethno-religious groups. Historically, ethno-religious identity defined the way certain groups tended to vote. For example, historically, mainline Protestants tended to vote Republican, while Jews, Catholics and African-Americans voted overwhelmingly Democratic.

In the 2000 election, 92 percent of frequently attending mainline Protestant men voted Republican. But 56 percent of frequently attending mainline Protestant women voted Republican.

“This is a huge gender gap, which suggests mainline Protestant spouses are not talking to one another,” Silk said. “Mainline Protestants are among the most interesting groups right now. Between 2000 and 2004, they move, unlike every other religious group, in a pronounced way toward Democratic candidates. And it’s not the less-frequently attending mainline Protestants, but the more frequent mainline Protestants who go from 62 percent to 54 percent away from Bush.”

Silk attributes this shift to a reaction among mainline Protestants against the “evangelization” of the Republican Party.

Mainline Protestants – Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Lutherans and Church of Christ – are a shrinking portion of the U.S. population – at about 21 percent compared to 24 percent Catholics, according to the 2004 Gallup Poll.

An even smaller proportion of the U.S. voting population, Jews, continue to lean overwhelmingly Democratic, despite the Bush administration’s unwavering support for Israel. Like their mainline Protestant counterparts, many Jews are wary of evangelical Christians.

“The amount of anti-Semitism on the Christian right is negligible, but there is a sense on the part of the Jewish community that when Christians are on the march, you should move in the opposite direction,” Silk said.

Commitment gaps

The difference between high commitment and low commitment has an impact on how both Catholics and Protestants view specific issues.

For example, 45 percent of low-commitment evangelical Protestants favor pro-choice on abortion, making them more similar to mainline Protestants than high-commitment evangelicals.

“In terms of moral liberalism and economic liberalism, there is a huge discrepancy between highly committed evangelical Protestants and low committed evangelical Protestants,” said Wade Clark Roof, who specializes in the sociology of religion at UCSB. “Low-committed evangelical Protestants are more similar to high-committed mainline Protestants than they are to their fellow evangelical Protestants.”

An even higher discrepancy exists between low-committed Catholics and high-committed Catholics. Because Catholics are so numerous in California, Roof said they are the most important “swing vote” in elections when it comes to particular moral and economic issues.

The importance of region

“Region matters politically today because of religion.”

Religion in the United States varies considerably by region, and these differences are reflected in voting patterns.

“Region matters politically today because of religion,” Silk said. “We have these different regions with different compositions of people, and those shape voting patterns of the different regions.”

Regional voting patterns were evident in the 2004 election, where John Kerry won in New England, the mid-Atlantic and the Pacific Northwest, while Bush dominated the South, the Midwest and the mountain West.

In exit polls, voters cited moral values as the number one issue in all of the places where Bush won. “Moral values” is almost interchangeable with “religious values.”

“To understand how religion works, one has to understand how these things work regionally,” Silk said.

See more on religion and region here.

Sidebars

Variables

Silk identified four important variables regarding religion in electoral politics:

Ethno-religious identity
Religious commitment
Gender
Geography

Fibbing

Religious commitment is generally measured in how often people attend religious services. But measuring church attendance can be tricky.

“When people attend religious services more frequently, what we mean is people who SAY they attend more frequently. We know that Americans tend to fib a bit,” Silk said.

Since the 1940s, The Gallup Poll has asked Americans if they attended a religious service in the past week, and over the years the answers have varied between 38 and 42 percent.

“The suggestion is that about 40 percent of Americans go to church once a week. That is not true. The number is probably in mid-20s. But it is important that 40 percent of people say they attend, because it says something about who they think they ought to be. And we’re interested in that too,” Silk said.