Politics still polarized by religion
By Steven Thomma
Knight Ridder News Service
DES MOINES, Iowa — Want to know how Americans will vote? Watch what they do the weekend before Election Day.
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 fairly 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 remain or even grow in 2004.
A poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center For The People & The Press, conducted on the U.S. Mainland this fall, confirmed that the gap remains: 63 percent of voters who frequently attend religious services tilt to
George W. Bush; 62 percent of those who never attend lean 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."
At least one political pundit thinks that's the case in Hawai'i, too.
"I think it's just as true here," said Dan Boylan, a professor of history at the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu. "We're going through a period of revival of religious conservatism that translates into political conservatism. ...
"In Hawai'i, I'd add a second element: ethnicity. If you are Caucasian, you are very, very likely to vote Republican. If you are Japanese American, you're very, very likely to vote Democrat. If you're Hawaiian or Filipino, you're more likely to move between the two."
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 visits to African-American churches.
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. He also 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-minority 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."
Information about Hawai'i was reported by Mary Kaye Ritz, Advertiser religion & ethics writer.
