Transcript
E.J. DIONNE: When I started this paper, I was determined to prove that religion's influence on politics was vastly exaggerated, that everybody got it wrong, and that if you controlled for everything else, you could show that religion was really an artifact. With a lot of data and help from a friend at the Washington Post, I analyzed and analyzed and analyzed and discovered, sorry, there is simply no way to get rid of the religious effect. It is a real thing in our politics. It does contribute, to some degree, to polarization. But in the process of looking at all these other factors, it became clear that, number one, religion is not all that matters; number two, I believe that religion is not why President Bush got reelected in 2004; and number three, the impact of religion, it matters in more complicated ways than we might sometimes think.
First of all, religion matters not in splits between faith traditions. That used to be the case in our country; most dramatically, the difference between John F. Kennedy's vote among Catholics and Protestants in 1960 was very large. Historically, there were differences between the more liturgical and the more Evangelical churches in the United States. Lutherans and Baptists often voted the other way from each other. Episcopalians voted differently than Evangelicals. Obviously, Jews had specific traditions of voting earlier on, much more Republican than we remember, and then after the New Deal, much more loyally Democratic with actually a strong Socialist vote in New York and a few other states.
The religious differences now are not split along those lines. They are rather split both within the faith traditions themselves: liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews voting together; conservative Catholics, Protestants, and, to some degree, Jews voting together. Muslims have actually shown an awful lot of swing in recent elections. If we want to get into that, we can talk about that; enormous swings between 2000 and 2004. Secondly, there is definitely a difference between the more religiously observant and the less religiously observant. Put simply, and we will get to that on Table 1, people who attend religious services more frequently tend to be more Republican; people who never attend religious services tend to be much more Democratic; and that holds up across all sorts of groups.
The second point I want to make is that race matters, and race actually matters more than religion. It has bothered me for quite a while. In a very interesting new book called The Truth About Conservative Christians, Father Andrew Greeley and a co-author make the very strong point that everything we say about conservative Evangelical Christians is, in part, wrong because African-Americans are simultaneously one of the most theologically conservative demographic groups in the Country and also the most loyally Democratic constituency in the Country. You might say that white Evangelicals and African-Americans pray in rather similar manners on Sunday and vote very differently, come the next Tuesday. So I think it is very important when we talk about conservative Evangelical Christians to realize that a lot of the public conversation is really about white Evangelical Christians and leaves out the religiosity of African-Americans. There are also some very interesting things happening with America's growing Latino community which we will get to when we go to the charts.
The third point is that class matters, and actually the role of class measured by income, for example, is going up, not down over a series of elections. This is the point where Bill Galston's instruction was extremely helpful in that when you look at data over a rather long series of elections, class has become more important. But, as I said, no matter how hard you try to press the data, the religious observance still was one of the most important factors. As we will see when we go through the numbers, class and religion interact in very interesting ways.
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