Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics

David C. Leege, Lyman A. Kellstedt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315485676
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: History

This text addresses whether and how religion and religious institutions affect American politics. For some time, analysts have argued that the conflicts of the New Deal era rendered cultural differences trivial and placed economic interests at the top of the political agenda. The authors and their collaborators - John C. Green, James L. Guth, Ted G. Jelen, Corwin E. Smidt, Kenneth D. Wald, Michael R. Welch, and Clyde Wilcox - disagree. They find that religious worldviews are still insinuated in American political institutions, and religious institutions still are points of reference. The book profits from the new religiosity measures employed in the 1990 National Election Studies. Part 1 discusses the study of religion in the context of politics. Part II examines religion as a source of group orientation. Part III takes up religious practices and their political ramifications. Part IV does the same for doctrinal and worldview considerations. Part V explores the sources of religious socialisation. In conclusion, Part VI reviews the research on religion and political behaviour and looks ahead to where work should proceed.

Part I
Why Study Religion in the Context of Politics

Chapter 1
Religion and Politics in Theoretical Perspective

David C. Leege

Religion in Studies of the American Electorate

There are many reasons why social scientists should examine religion in studies of the American electorate (see Wald 1992, 7-38). Most American adults—between three-fifths and three-fourths—"belong" to churches, synagogues, or other religious assemblies. This is a much larger proportion of Americans than is attracted to any other kind of voluntary organization, whether it be unions, professional associations, neighborhood groups, alumni associations, clubs, or lodges. Depending on which survey one examines, somewhere between 82 and 93 percent of all adult Americans are willing to use some religious designation—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or other.

Religion is not only an affinity. It is something that people act out in public and private ways. In a normal week, 29-39 percent of Americans, depending on the survey, attend religious services, and 48-89 percent, again depending on the survey, offer prayer to God; smaller proportions watch religious television and listen to religious radio.

Churches inculcate beliefs and shape worldviews. They provide plausibility structures—i.e., ways of dealing with life's puzzles—and they offer social norms. They make different assumptions about the innate goodness or depravity of humankind, formulate rationales for the design and purpose of political systems, and generate expectations about the end of time and the outcomes of salvation. Some religious worldviews are world affirming, while others are world denying. Some churches and belief systems are universalistic and tolerant. Others are particularistic and shun all those who fail to follow their singular way. Some show respect and compassion to all human beings, but others see the hand of a judging God in the misfortunes of others.

Churches often are contexts for the development of consciousness-of-kind. Such group identities may come from credal precepts, ritual sharing, or social exchanges. Churches usually provide many opportunities for interaction beyond worship services; most have collective instruments for governance, ministries, programs, and activities. Consciousness-of-kind may also develop through stigmatization. When others in the larger society, particularly the elites, discriminate against people because of their religious affiliations, beliefs, or practices, those stigmatized share a common bond and often interpret their religious life through metaphors of deliverance.

Religious institutions often overlay ethnic or regional backgrounds. For most Americans, historically, religion did not precede politics; politics preceded religion. That is, if they came from Ireland or Italy or Poland, they were Catholic; from Saxony or Hanover or Scandinavia, they were Lutheran. If they grew up in Utah or the Great Basin, they were Mormon, or if they lived in the Deep South they were Southern Baptist. As Garrison Keillor, the modern-day cultural commentator, queried, "Why would you move to Lake Wobegon if you don't believe in God?" Everything around you falls in place and is nicely summarized by a religious affiliation.

Religion is also important in American politics because, if all politics is local, surely much of religion is local. In the early 1980s, religious leaders worried that the electronic church would replace the local assembly, but these fears turned out to be groundless when it was realized that the effect of religious television was not substitutional but cumulative. Even the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, often considered the epitome of organizational hierarchy, experienced a republican phase; until about the 1830s, it was a loosely connected collection of parishes and house-churches under lay trusteeship, which the Irish church leadership eventually consolidated into dioceses (Dolan 1985). Still, local parish loyalties are much more significant in the minds of Catholic parishioners than the church at large (Leege 1987).

American religious culture can be described as a marketplace (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Hertzke 1988). In any given locale, a person who feels called by the Holy Spirit can hang out a shingle for preaching and other services. While charisms are routinized by denominational hierarchies and ordination is required in most churches through time, it is still the local congregation that determines how effectively those charisms can be used.

Local religious structures parallel the many points of access and the diffusion of power in the American political system. Even elected Beltway insiders must develop a home style if they want to remain in the seats of the powerful. And because of an antistatist political culture, Americans are prone to think of other institutions such as local churches when it comes to solving social problems—George Bush's "points of light" metaphor, for example, has its origin in the Psalms.

There is good reason to think, then, that the dimensions of American religion constitute fertile soil for explanations of the American electorate. There are, however, several reasons why social scientists ignore religion as an explanatory factor.

American social science, and American political science in particular, has imbibed deeply from the wells of (1) the German university as a model; (2) economic interpretations of society, whether Madisonian or Marxist; and (3) the progressive movement. The German university model is philosophically rooted in those manifestations of Hegelianism incorporated in Kulturprotestantism. At an earlier time, so goes this version of Hegelianism, the divine Mind was known through Scriptures and churches. In the progress of human history, however, the Spirit is manifested in all human institutions, but particularly those that rely on reason and science. The state, the university, the administrator, the theologian, the scientist—all read and implement the divine plan for an age. Many American universities—state and private—began as sectarian institutions with emphasis on chapel and rectitude; most of their presidents and many of their professors were clergy. In the spirit of deism and transcendentalism, however, they could be transformed—still serving the Spirit of God through sanctified yet secular learning (Marsden and Longfield 1992). The Hopkins History Seminar under Daniel Coit Gilman and Herbert Baxter Adams (Somit and Tanenhaus 1967, 1-35) and the Chicago School of Social Sciences under Charles E. Merriam (Merriam 1925) both justified their "missions" through Hegelian language.

The religious consensus that drove the major academic institutions until the late nineteenth century—what we now call mainline Protestantism—dissolved from its own secularizing reinterpretation, the rise of explicitly state institutions, new national needs, and the presence of many more Catholics, Jews, and eventually non–Judeo Christians in the professoriate and student body. Religion became a boring subject at best, a curious hangover from a past put aside. Rooted in superstition and tribalism, it was thought that religion would soon give way to the inevitable secularization of society. But it did not. Much of the resurgence of interest in religion and politics has come through (1) the realization that a golden age had not arrived through the collaboration of state and university, (2) disillusionment with the notion that a divine Spirit is unfolding in both imperialistic wars and well-meaning social programs, (3) the recognition that the general American public never did secularize, (4) the reinstitution of religious studies programs on state and private campuses, and (5) the acknowledgment that, in a culturally diverse society, religion can be a force that alternately unifies and tears asunder, and, therefore, we ought to know something about it.

Economic interpretations of American history have also had long acceptance in American social science. The Madisonian impact on American political institutions was based on assumptions about the acquisitive nature of humans. Left to their own deserts, factions would rule in their own economic interests. Thus, the scope of governmental activity needed to be limited, and interest needed to check interest. Yet, the assumption that humans are acquisitive also had a positive value: it drove people to seek power and thus created the capacity to govern. Societies could achieve collective goals. But unrestrained governance is always dangerous.

From Charles A. Beard to Frederick Jackson Turner, Madisonian assumptions about the economic underpinnings of American society and the American political system have held sway in the academy. Under the circumstances, it was at least plausible to take Karl Marx seriously, because social class was a form of faction and class rule was itself evidence that the system of checks and balances had become a facade behind which the "real" system, based in industrial capitalism, operated. Even if one is not a thoroughgoing Marxist, long-term trends in participation and electoral choice appear intelligible as the consequence of hegemonic economic institutions and the lack of true partisan, i.e., class-based, conflict (Burnham 1965).

Further, economic assumptions appealed to American social scientists because of their architectural elegance. For example, in Downs's (1957) theory of democracy, only three concepts need to be manipulated: rationality, uncertainty, and ideology. Economic terms could easily be integrated into both formal arguments and mathematical estimates. The behaviors of bureaucrats, policymakers, and voters alike could be understood by retrenching from the concept of rationality to the concept of satisficing, i.e., settling for the first acceptable alternative (Simon 1957; Fiorina 1981). On the other hand, religious worldviews and group identifications are more clumsy; often social scientists do not know what it is about religion that should be measured or how to measure it; and certainly no government agency—no Bureau of Religious Statistics in the U.S. Department of Religious Beliefs—would devote tax funds to collecting such statistics.

The progressive movement also discouraged the examination of religion and politics, except as a pathology. Many progressives, almost in a German idealist or New England transcendentalist tradition, became secular carriers of essentially mainline Protestant values. While their church was something of the past, their social and political reforms bristled with religious images (cf. Crunden 1982). Two types of religion remained problematic for them—Catholicism and evangelicalism. Both demanded particularistic credal commitments and drew their adherents' attention away from problems of the here-and-now to faithful preparation for the afterlife. The progressive ethos was more universalistic and found true religion in the commitment to social reform.

Implicated in the progressives' anti-Catholicism was a substantial amount of nativism. The Catholic ethnic groups that had flooded American cities late in the nineteenth century were easily kept by priests, so it was thought, and politicians. The corrupt machines, it seemed, were headed by Irish or other Catholic ethnic bosses, and the church was in cahoots with them. (Never mind that Boss Tweed of Tammany was of Presbyterian stock or that Baptist bosses emerged in the South.) In time, public-regardingness, i.e., all those good things associated with urban reform, indexed the extent to which WASPs or WASP values had reasserted control over civic life and public policy. So long as mainline Protestants did not take religion seriously, i.e., particularistically, they would rule for the public good.

The evangelicals, on the other hand, were from the backwoods and small towns of America. They still lived by prescientific notions that ill fit progress as defined by progressives. Since political scientists in the founding era of the discipline were heavily influenced by progressive ideals, to ignore the effects of religion on politics was actually a decision rooted in judgments about the religion of ethnic tribe and primitive superstition. It was distasteful for earlier generations of American political scientists to study religion. And yet mainline Protestant beliefs were imbedded in the "deep culture" of the social science of their day.

Further, it was thought dangerous to the fabric of society to give religion much credence in political interpretations. Religion seemed to divide people. Populist politicians played to the ignorance of people through the use of religious metaphors in campaigns. A people so diverse, so heterogeneous, could be divided irreconcilably by religion. The "wall of separation" of church and state took on a meaning different from its meaning for Thomas Jefferson (Dreisbach 1991). The later generations of constitutional scholars who had moved beyond the secularizing ethos of the first generation of progressives and social scientists began to see the "wall" argument as "no advantage for religion over irreligion" rather than "no advantage for one religious body over another." By the 1970s and 1980s, First Amendment issues remained but were overshadowed by one of the most divisive issues of the era—abortion. The abortion policy crisis became the fulcrum for concern about the mingling of religion and politics.

While many social scientists would rather ignore religion in explanations of the American electorate, neither voters nor politicians think it is irrelevant. A recent typology of the American electorate (Ornstein, Kohut, and McCarthy 1988) moves beyond the traditional measure of party identification ranging from Strong Democrat through Independent to Strong Republican; it uses a wide range of value, interest, and issue questions to construct groups and then relate them to the core and periphery of each party. In the Republican core are the Enterprisers and the Moralists, the latter being defined primarily by particularistic religious beliefs and being quite intolerant of other ascriptive groups. In the Democratic core are New Dealers, 60s Democrats (peace and justice Democrats), the Partisan Poor, and the God and Country Democrats. The first three Democratic groups are well defined by religious values, ranging from the economically welfarist but socially intolerant New Dealers to the economically welfarist but socially tolerant 60s Democrats. The God and Country Democrats are disproportionately black evangelicals from the South. Thus, in both parties' cores are voters who resonate to religious positions; swing voters among the Democrats in 1988 came disproportionately from the ranks of those for whom religion and life-style were salient (Times-Mirror 1988, 22-42, 1990).

Political elites develop campaign themes and use religious imagery to build coalitions based, in part, on religious appeals. In the 1960s a handful of conservative activists reacted to the defeat of Barry Goldwater by merging militant anticommunism, free market economics, and cultural traditionalism (Crawford 1980; Blumenthal 1986); the resulting New Right has dominated the national agenda beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan. Kellstedt and Noll (1990) have traced the realignment of the fastest-growing religious tradition, evangelical Protestantism, from Democratic identification to Republican identification. The shift is every bit as important to Republican presidential candidates as was the earlier realignment based on race (documented by Carmines and Stimson 1989). The mobilization of African-American voters under the Democratic banner since 1964 has been an important task for black churches (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). Just as Democratic candidates work the black churches in the current era, so Republican candidates work white evangelical churches and religious media. Liberal language deeply embedded in the American political culture—like "freedom to choose"—is used by Republican politicians and evangelical activists alike to mobilize voters, not on abortion but on school-related issues: prayer, vouchers, secular humanism, etc. Supreme Court nominations become the bait for attracting moral traditionalists in all church bodies. In short, current American politics involves symbiotic relationships between elites and voters not only on economic issues but on issues that connect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Part I. Why Study Religion in the Context of Politics
• Part II. Religion as an Orientation toward Group
• Part III. Religion as a Set of Public and Private Practices
• Part IV. Doctrinal, Experiential, and Worldview Measures
• Part V. Leadership Stimuli and Reference Groups
• Part VI. Does Religion Matter in Studies of Voting Behavior and Attitudes?
• Index