Religion and voting

One of the favorite Republican clichees, and one that like so many of them the mainstream political press corps echo thoughtlessly, is that more religiously devout Americans tend to vote Republican.

Ruy Teixeira has been looking at this assumption and is pointing out one of the problems with this notion: Church Attendance, Values and Politics 06/03/04.  The argument is often made based on frequency of church attendance.  Now, measuring frequency of attendance is probably the best way for pollsters to get some kind of "objective" measure of religious devotion.  It's particularly useful in comparing different countries or areas.

But the problem with that is that it's a leap unsupported by the data to assume that religious people with less frequent church attendance are less serious about their religious beliefs, or less influenced by them in their voting behavior.  Teixeira notes that "less observant people tend to have less traditional morality--prizing tolerance, diversity and women's rights--and have moved in a liberal direction."  And he describes the political implications this way:

Which means it's high time Democrats started contesting the idea that the only folks who take values--including religious values--seriously are those that attend church every week. That's neither logically nor empirically true and certainly runs counter to what the Democratic party stands for. Instead, we should defend diversity in attendance practices just as we defend diversity in other areas. After all, most Americans believe the key aspect of religion is not how often you attend church but rather how you practice the values your religion teaches. Sounds like an idea Democrats should embrace and promote, rather than worrying unduly about the attendance gap.

Matthew Yglesias at TAPPED picks up on Teixeira's post and argues that the conventional wisdom is Getting the Gap Backwards 06/04/04.  He suggests this as an alternative way to look at the data:

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that you can't reduce all these debates over political strategy to just political strategy. Campaigns based on appealsto gay rights, women's rights, and "postmaterial" issues like the environment are going to produce very different policy outcomes than would campaigns based on pocketbook appeals and moving right on "values" issues. A lot of the time when you see people advocating one strategy or another, they're really engaging in a policy dispute that's only pretending to be a dispute about policy. I would also note that church attendance is correlated with gun ownership, and that if the polling data in Stanley Greenberg's The Two Americas is to be believed, rural whites are much more friendly to the NRA than to pro-life groups, while highly-educated white women are much more hostile to pro-life groups than to the NRA, so if you're looking to square the circle, guns might be a more fruitful source of compromise than the more obvious sexual ethics issues.

Incidentally, Amy Sullivan at Political Aims regularly blogs about politics and religion.  In this post, for instance, she looks at some of the typical political stances of James Dobson, head of the rightwing Protestant group Focus on the Family: Happy James Dobson Day! 06/02/04.