Does the GOP have a lock on God?
'Religious vote' could suprise us
"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."
When John F. Kennedy spoke those words before the Houston Ministerial Association in June 1960, America's "religious vote" was much on his mind. He was a Catholic running for president in Protestant America, and the majority's ancient fears of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion" were far from dead.
Forty-four years later, the "religious vote" issue in America's presidential race still isn't dead -- it has just taken on new forms. Over the past 30 years, evangelical whites in the South and Midwest have left the Democrats in droves, thanks in no small part to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other conservative preachers who seem to think G-O-D is spelled G-O-P. In the past four years, President Bush's constant claim to see the Almighty's hand in everything from his tax cuts to war with Iraq has only underscored his own highly partisan idea of the divine.
But does that mean -- as many fear -- that this November America's "religious vote" will go Republican, and thereby place America's secular tolerance at risk?
It seems a sensible question -- after all, in 2000 didn't 91 percent of Bush's voters tell pollsters they were "religious"? It's a stunning number -- until you realize that 81 percent of Al Gore's voters told the same pollsters they were "religious" too. Contrary to conservatives' heated claims, America hasn't really been fighting a new "culture war" between the "religious" right and the "secular" left these past 30 years. Instead, this remarkably religious country -- where nine out of 10 Americans profess to believe in God -- has more accurately been fighting the same old culture wars it's fought since the 1600s, between tolerance and exclusivity, between those who welcome pluralism and disagreement and those who don't. Massachusetts has known those battles from the start. The Salem witch trials, and the beating of Quakers and banishment of Baptists by Puritans in the 1600s were followed after the American Revolution by fierce (though nonviolent) battles between the Congregationalists and their Unitarian offspring. Then, in pre-Civil War Boston, a virulent anti-Catholicism gave the Know-Nothing Party control of every seat in the state Legislature save one. Yet today the Bay State, still quite religious, is among the most liberal in the nation -- as its recent expansion of marriage rights will attest.
This year, the political battles are being fought along much the same "Red" and "Blue" lines they were two centuries ago. In the 1840s the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians -- America's biggest denominations at the time -- split in half along North-South lines, over abolition and Biblical literalism. When war finally came, Union soldiers -- as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" attests -- fought with as much religious zeal as their Confederate brothers, who used the Bible's innumerable passages condoning slavery to justify their own cause. Then as modern industrial, urban America was born in the Civil War's aftermath, the country's white Protestant majority once again divided. The mostly Northern Social Gospelers embraced science, industrialization, immigration, and urban pluralism as the way to Winthrop's "City on the Hill" while the mostly Southern and Midwestern Fundamentalists struck back in fury, against "Darwin, dancing, and decolletage" -- all the urban (and urbane) depravities that to them spelled the coming of Armageddon.
But hasn't the country's religious landscape changed since then? Hasn't the "religious right" been growing significantly? It's true that roughly 40 percent of Americans now identify themselves as "born-again" Christians -- but that's not synonymous with "religious right." First, about a quarter of those "born-agains" are African-American Democrats, while another significant percentage are Hispanic Democrats, who may worship as Pentecostal Protestants or as "charismatic" Catholics. Even among white evangelicals -- who make up 60 percent of the "born-again" -- one in five regularly vote Democratic.
As for the claims of dramatic growth among conservative denominations (and "collapse" of the more liberal Mainline Protestants), more recent surveys instead tell a story of remarkable stability over the past 40 years, at least in terms of religious affiliation. White Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics today each make up about a quarter of the population, with African-American Protestants adding another 10 percent, Jews and Mormons 2 percent each, and Orthodox Christians and "other religions" 1 percent each -- roughly the same breakdown as when Kennedy was President.
The difference is that while "affiliation" has remained stable, "attendance" hasn't. As the baby boomers came of age millions delayed marriage (or never married or soon divorced) and had fewer children. Consequently, Mainline churches did lose significant numbers of active -- and especially younger -- members up through the 1980s . Similarly, regular attendance among Euro-American Catholics has also declined, and been only partly made up by Hispanic and Asian immigrants. By contrast, 71 percent of white evangelicals report worshiping weekly. That helps explain why there's been a growing Republican majority among "frequent attenders" generally, while among the "less frequent attenders" margins remain solidly Democratic. But that's far from meaning that the Republicans will own the religious vote this year.
In fact, 1960 may prove a more interesting guide to 2004 than 2000, because this year (like 1960) an incredibly tight race will be decided by just a few voters in just a few states. White evangelical voters are now solidly Republican, but they're also concentrated in "red" GOP states certain to vote for Bush. This year, the big key swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida all have bigger Catholic than evangelical populations. And that could make this year's "religious vote" a surprise.
In 1960, 81 percent of America's Roman Catholics voted for John F. Kennedy, a phenomenal partisan swing they've never repeated. That won't happen this year. But if only a few thousand more Catholics than usual opt in each of those swing states for a Catholic Democrat over a "born-again" Republican, it could easily turn the vaunted power of the Religious Right upside down -- and set America on a new political course.
Richard Parker teaches religion, politics, and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. 