The Gallup Organization has just released a study of religion and politics showing that for white people anyway, the closer you feel to God the more likely you are to vote Republican.
For blacks and Hispanics it doesn’t work that way. While the African-Americans and Hispanics Gallup identifies as ‘intensely religious’ are slightly more likely to vote Republican than other members of those groups, the relationship is much less strong than among whites.
Among whites, the ‘God gap’ is huge. 62% of ‘highly religious’ whites are Republicans; only 28% of secular whites identify with the GOP. 56% of secular whites are Democrats; the Democratic share of highly religious whites falls to 28%.
It didn’t use to be this way. In the old days, religious southern whites and devout Roman Catholics were almost all Democrats, and more liberal northern whites spent more time in church.
Southern whites and African-Americans are much more like one another than either group really likes to acknowledge. Both cultures have strong loyalties to political parties and they tend to vote in blocs. For generations after the Civil War, blacks supported the Party of Lincoln and southern whites stuck to the Party of Jefferson Davis. Now they have switched, and to the extent that southern whites are more religious than white people in general, the GOP’s edge among the godly whites is partly a reflection of the North-South divide in American politics.
The more interesting and, for Democrats, more serious problem is the Catholic vote. With a handful of exceptions, most Roman Catholics in the United States have historically been strong Democrats. This is partly because the 19th century GOP appealed to anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic voters. (GOP stalwart Thomas Nast’s anti-clerical political cartoons, like the one on the right, were famous at the time.) It is also because Catholic immigrants tended to be working-class voters and then as now the Democrats were more supportive of labor unions and social welfare programs than the hardhearted skinflints of the GOP.
The “Reagan Democrats,” ethnic Catholic northern whites who shifted from the Democrats to the GOP in the 1980’s, are the swing voters whose shifting behavior has most affected American politics in the last generation. They went solidly for Reagan, shifted back to Clinton, backed Bush in 2000 and more strongly in 2004 when John Kerry was the first Roman Catholic presidential candidate in American history to lose the Catholic vote. Reagan Democrats swung back towards Obama in 2008. Since the election, this group has been trending back toward the Republican side; that is a major reason for rising GOP optimism about the 2010 midterms.
Some of this Catholic drift is about God, or at least about ethics. For a significant number of Catholic voters, abortion is an important issue. For these voters, the strong pro-choice stance of the Democratic Party is a deterrent. Most voters will look at other issues as well as abortion, but if you sincerely believe that legal abortion is the equivalent of the legalized murder of millions of innocent babies, you will think twice before supporting pro-choice candidates.
But God can’t claim all the credit (or take all the blame). Over the decades, the descendants of the European mass immigrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have become more economically, socially and politically diverse. They are not only less Democratic than they used to be; they are less unionized, less blue collar, less concentrated in urban neighborhoods and less dependent on social programs for their welfare and security. They are also less religiously observant, and much less inclined to vote as a bloc or take political advice from the clergy.
The ‘God gap’, in other words, is over-hyped. Americans vote by tribe and by their economic interests more than they vote on their doctrines. African-American evangelical and Pentecostal Christians who vote the straight Democratic ticket have much more in common theologically with southern white evangelical Republicans than they do with Nancy Pelosi. The question about the future of the Hispanic vote has less to do with Hispanic religious affiliations than about how Hispanic voters perceive the intentions of the two parties on a wide range of issues.
Religion counts in American politics, but fortunately God is found on both sides of the aisle. In politics as elsewhere, the words of William Cowper still make sense: God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.
You must be logged in to post a comment.