Counting the Ballot of Belief
By Paritosh Bansal
Steven Waldman
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Polls, statistics and demographic numbers linking religion and voting trends are easy to come by in an election year. But the real stories are the ones that dig beneath the simple surface statistics to try to examine why the numbers are what they are - and what they really mean.
Mark Silk, director for the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, and Steven Waldman, CEO and editor-in-chief of Beliefnet, evaluated the different explanations of how religion works in politics at a Western Knight Center seminar session entitled “Religious identity, party affiliation and political engagement: Understanding the ‘lay of the land’ in American religion.”
Silk looked at four factors that influence the way people vote: ethno-religious identity, religious commitment, gender and geography.
He said the degree of religious commitment, when measured in terms of how frequently people attended church, was a good indicator of how people tend to vote.
“If you divide people who say they attend religious services once a week or more, from those who say they attend less than once a week, you find out that in the white Christian groups that make up the largest portion of the American electorate, the more frequent attenders have over the past decades tended strongly Republican, while the less frequent attenders have trended strongly Democratic.” This split is known as the religion gap (a.k.a. “God Gap").
Silk compared the God Gap to the gender gap, which is the tendency of women to vote Democratic or the men to vote Republican. In recent elections, the religion gap has been larger than the gender gap, he said.
However, the religion gap comes into even sharper focus when seen through the lens of gender. The biggest differences are in “voting patterns of the regularly attending men and the less regularly attending women.” The other two groups - less regularly attending men and regularly attending women - are split down the middle.
Regular attending men have all their issues push them in one direction, Silk explained. “They like the NRA. They don’t like the teachers’ association. They go to church a lot. They don’t like same-sex marriage. They don’t like abortion. Everything tends to push them toward the Republicans.
“Everything tends to push them toward the Republicans.”
In the middle are people who are pulled in opposite directions. Regularly attending women are still pushed toward the Republicans by traditional moral values, but then “they don’t like guns and they like teachers’ unions. It’s just the opposite with less regularly attending men,” Silk said.
It is also instructive to look at the role of ethno-religious identity in determining how the votes were cast. “African-Americans and Jews vote heavily Democratic. And evangelical Protestants and Mormons vote heavily Republican. Mainline Catholics and Protestants are rather evenly balanced between the two parties,” Silk said.
But he said that many white Catholics had moved away from the Republican Party because the social teachings of the church matter to them. Republican policies antithetical to those teachings had pushed Catholics away.
On the other hand, Silk pointed out that with Latino Protestants, it had worked the other way round. They voted slightly Democratic in 2000. But two years later, they became strongly Republican.
“The Republican message that is being put out there, especially from the White House, is not a religion message as it’s heard by people; it is a non-Catholic, Christian message or a Protestant message,” he said. “It’s heard by Protestants.”
Silk also said that geographical differences pointed to different patterns in political mobilization. He said the Republican Party was reaping the benefits of 25 years of concerted mobilization of evangelicals in the South. “In the South, conservative, white evangelical churches have become for the Republican Party what labor unions became for the Democratic Party.”
But Silk said the Republicans were still faced with a problem. “There are a lot of places in the country where there are not too many white evangelicals.”
Waldman qualified the understanding of the God gap, saying it depended on what one took as an indicator of religious commitment. The church attendance gap, he said, was only one of them. And when other forms of expressions of spirituality are factored in, the gap shrinks significantly.
Nevertheless, he said the gap defined in terms of church attendance presents a serious problem for Democrats because people who go to church more tend to vote more. “So even while debunking the idea of the God gap and saying that actually it is a more narrow thing called the church attendance gap, it is a real issue.”
Waldman said there were more reasons why religion was playing an important role in the presidential elections this year.
Two obvious factors are that religion has become an important part of President Bush’s personality since he talked about it a lot, and that Sen. John Kerry is the first Catholic presidential nominee since 1960, he said.
But there are three overriding reasons for the emergence of religion in the 2004 elections:
- In a close election, the importance of mobilizing the base becomes essential;
- Catholic voters are one of the few actual swing voters left;
- The war in Iraq.
“Some of the most significant impact of religion on this election has to do with non-religious issues and non-religious voters,” he said. “One of George Bush’s strengths is that being viewed as a person of religious conviction has translated to being viewed as a person of conviction.”
Conversely, for Kerry, he said, the appearance of his lack of religious conviction feeds the perception that he was a waffler. The argument: “If he wasn’t a person of religious conviction, he must not be a person of conviction of any kind.”
In terms of mobilization of the base, Waldman said white evangelicals make up a large and cohesive voting bloc, and they like Bush even though some of his policies might annoy them.
“It has to do more with a lot of them believe they are discriminated against.” Bush is one of them, he said, and he is not apologetic about it. “That is what forms an extremely strong bond between Bush and the evangelicals.”
But he said the real issue before the Bush team was to increase the turnout among evangelicals, which was not low in the last election. “The riddle is how do you appeal to religious conservatives without alienating the middle.”
Waldman said the Republicans were trying to get around that problem by sending out targeted messages, using small-town, local media. “It’s not on national TV. They don’t want to pollute the overall message, he said.
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