Hostility to Religion Doesn’t Pay
Culture & Cosmos has the latest polling showing that frequency of attending church services is a better indicator of what party people vote for. The more people go to church, the less they vote Democrat.
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CULTURE & COSMOS
May 3, 2005 Volume 2, Number 39
Religious Commitment Is Lead Voting Indicator According to New Pew Study
Polling data continues to show that people committed to their faith are
abandoning the Democratic Party in historic numbers. The shift has become
so significant that according to a report from the Pew Research Center,
church attendance is a greater indicator of how one voted in the 2004
presidential election than “such demographic characteristics as gender,
age, income and region” and is “just as important as race.”
The Pew study, “Religion & Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide,”
reports that in the last election people who attend church more than once
a week, such as Catholics who go to daily Mass or Evangelicals who attend
Wednesday night services, supported President Bush over Sen. John Kerry 64
percent to 39 percent. Such voters made up 16 percent of the electorate.
For those that attend church weekly, support for President Bush was 58
percent versus 41 percent for Kerry. Among those who never attend church,
62 percent voted for Kerry; 54 percent of those who attend church a few
times a year voted for the senator. Monthly church goers evenly split
their vote.
The study notes that while this so-called “God Gap” has become
conventional wisdom in American politics, it is a historically unique
trend. The twist is that the new data reveals that the level of commitment
to one’s faith is a more significant indicator of how one will vote than
what one’s specific religion is, a break from the past trends.
“Historically, religious fissures in the political arena have tended to
break along denominational lines rather than by level of religious
commitment.”
One poll divided Christians of various denominations into
traditionalist, centrist and modernist classifications. Traditionalist
Catholics, it found, are “closer to traditionalist Evangelicals than to
modernist Catholics in their views on issues such as abortion or embryonic
stem cell research. The survey also found that traditionalists in all
three major faith groups [Catholics, Evangelicals and Mainline
Protestants] overwhelmingly identify with the Republican Party. . .”
Traditionalists were identified as “those with the most orthodox
theological beliefs within their respective traditions.”
In 1960, 71 percent of Catholics identified as Democrats largely
because of the New Deal policies of the party. In 25 years that number as
dropped a stunning 27 percent with Catholic party identification being
split almost evenly with 44 percent of Catholics identifying as Democrats
and 41 percent as Republicans.
The Pew study reports that the shift was precipitated by two key
Supreme Court rulings and continues to be centered on cultural issues.
“[A] trigger was a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions: the 1962 decision
that banned organized prayer in public schools, and the 1973 Roe v. Wade
decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion. Those rulings generated
a backlash among religious conservatives that reverberates to this day.
For the past generation, the Republican Party has become the
standard-bearer of a social conservative agenda and the natural home for
those who are traditionalist in their religious views. In particular, the
GOP has embraced the antiabortion movement, making it a central pillar of
the party’s platform.” Issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and
prayer in schools have “pushed the religiously observant into one
political corner and the more secular into another,” according to the
study.
Copyright 2005—Culture of Life Foundation.
Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.
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