Nov.
30, 2003
American voters increasingly
split along religious lines
Knight Ridder Newspapers
DES MOINES, Iowa - Want to know how Americans will vote next
Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before.
If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will
vote Republican by a 2-1 margin. If they never go, they likely will vote
Democratic by a 2-1 margin.
This relatively new fault line in American life is a major reason
that the country is politically polarized. And the division over religion and
politics is likely to continue or even grow in 2004.
A new poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center For The People
& The Press this fall confirmed that the gap remains; voters who frequently
attend religious services tilt 63-37 percent to Bush and those who never attend
lean 62-38 percent toward Democrats.
"We now have the widest gap we have ever had between
Republicans and Democrats," said Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew
survey.
"It's THE most powerful predictor of party ID and partisan
voting intention," said Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings
Institution, a center-left Washington research center. "And in a society
that values religion as much as (this one), when there are high levels of
religious belief and commitment and practice, that's significant."
President Bush is a churchgoing Christian who often mixes theology
with public policies ranging from the war on terrorism to a ban on a specific
type of late-term abortion. By contrast, most leading Democratic candidates for
president keep their campaigns secular, seldom mentioning God, religion or
attending church, except for the occasional well-publicized visit to an
African-American church.
The most notable exception among top-tier candidates is Sen. Joseph
Lieberman of Connecticut, a Jew who frequently invokes God, casts policy issues
in moral terms and refuses to campaign on the Sabbath.
The
Rev. Al Sharpton is religious too, of course, but polls show he's favored by
fewer than 1 percent of likely Democratic voters in New Hampshire, the first
primary state.
In contrast, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, former
Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, said recently that he prayed privately, but quit being
an Episcopalian in a dispute with his parish over a bike path, recently linked
God with guns and gays in a list of issues that shouldn't influence voting and
doesn't regularly attend church. Nor do most of his chief rivals.
It wasn't always so. Most Democratic candidates through the 20th
century were openly religious. Born-again Christian Jimmy Carter ran in 1976 as
much a moral messenger ("I will never lie to you") as a champion of
the Democratic policy agenda. Bill Clinton could quote the Bible as readily as
the party platform. The one exception: John F. Kennedy played down his Roman
Catholic faith in 1960, when anti-Catholic bias was still common.
Voters weren't split by the frequency of their visits to church,
synagogue or mosque until recently. The gap started growing in the 1990s and
became clear in the 2000 election between Bush and Democrat Al Gore. Voters who
attended religious services more than once a week went for Bush by a margin of
nearly 2-1. Those who never went to services went for Gore by the same margin.
The schism began as a countermovement to the culture wars of the
1960s. By the late 1970s, conservative Democrats, notably evangelical Christians
in the South and ethnic Catholics in the North, found many of their values under
assault, particularly in regard to legalized abortion and gay rights, according
to Dennis Goldford, a political scientist who teaches a course in religion and
politics at Drake University in Iowa.
Many disaffected voters became Republicans, who cast their party as
the champion of conservative religious values with the help of the Rev. Jerry
Falwell's Moral Majority and the Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.
Democrats reacted by pulling away from public discussion of
religion.
"Liberals thought the ayatollahs were taking over the
country," Goldford said. "The Democrats haven't figured out how to
talk about it. Many just aren't comfortable with the talk of God."
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who managed Gore's 2000
campaign, recalled recently that she felt uncomfortable even mentioning her
religion while working in the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis.
"I couldn't talk about my faith," she said, adding that she thought
the party got better under Clinton and Gore.
"It is a problem," said Dick Harpootlian, a Democratic
strategist and former state party chairman in South Carolina. He said Democrats
should be more comfortable talking about religion, particularly as it relates to
principles such as tolerance and helping the poor and weak.
"Democrats have a much more Christian, religiously friendly
message," he said. "But if you go to a Democratic meeting, they don't
open it with a prayer."
The biggest exception among Democrats is African-Americans. They
tend to be religious and regular churchgoers. Democratic candidates frequently
attend African-American churches to appeal for support.
While in Detroit to attend a nationally televised debate on a
recent Sunday, for example, most Democratic candidates spent the morning in
black churches. Pumped up by a backdrop of drums, music, singing and dancing,
Dean told the congregation at one church, "It's going to be a long time
before I go to a white church again."
Indeed, Dean isn't a regular churchgoer. Baptized Catholic, he
later became an Episcopalian. He quit that denomination because he had what he
called "a big fight" with a Vermont Episcopal church over plans for a
bike path on church-controlled property. He became a Congregationalist, but said
recently that he didn't attend church very often.
On a recent visit to Tallahassee, Fla., Dean all but lumped God
with other divisive social issues. "We have got to stop having our
elections in the South based on race, guns, God and gays," he said,
"and start having them based on jobs and health insurance and a foreign
policy that's consistent with American values."
Dean
isn't alone among major Democratic contenders who're rarely seen at church.
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts occasionally attends Catholic
Mass, but is "very private about his religion," said aide David Wade.
"If he's in someplace like Davenport or Dubuque, with a big Catholic
community, he'll go to church."
Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, another major contender, mentions
when campaigning that he had a Baptist church scholarship for college. But he
doesn't mention God or religion beyond that. "He is a religious
person," said aide Erik Smith. "He does not regularly go to
church."
Smith conceded the political challenge. "Republican
candidates," he said, "have been talking to those who worship
regularly in a language they can relate to. Too often, Democrats speak a more
secular language that they're unable to relate to."
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark's father was Jewish, but Clark was raised
first as a Methodist, then as a Baptist, converted to Catholicism as a young
adult and now attends the Presbyterian Church. "I'm spiritual. I'm
religious. I'm a strong Christian and I'm a Catholic, but I go to Presbyterian
Church," Clark said in an interview this week being circulated by his
campaign.
Lieberman, who does speak the language of faith and religion, said
his party should set aside its aversion to religion and embrace it as a message
harmonious with its core principles. But he insisted that any such stance must
be born of principal, not politics.