How Americans’ Politics Drives Their Religious Views

Republicans are now a lot more religious than Democrats, but they may not mean our religious views drive our politics. Instead, people may be choosing their religious or secular affiliations, communities, and beliefs on the basis of their partisanship. Michele Margolis finds that young adults tend to move away from religion, but only Republicans and Black Democrats come back when they start a family—leading to a big over-time decline in religion among White Democrats. But what is replacing religion for Democrats? David Campbell finds that an aversion to the religious right makes Democrats adopt secular identities and principles. Both say we should expect continued religious and political polarization, as secular and Democratic identities become more closely aligned.

Transcript

Grossmann: This week on Political Research Digest, how politics is changing our religious views. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.

Republicans are now a lot more religious than Democrats, but that may not mean our religious views drive our politics. Instead, people may be choosing their religious or secular affiliations, communities and beliefs on the basis of their partisanship. I talked to Michele Margolis of the University of Pennsylvania about her new University of Chicago Press book, From Politics to the Pews.  She finds that young adults tend to move away from religion, but only Republicans and black Democrats come back when they start a family. Leading to a big over time decline in religion among white Democrats. But what is replacing religion for Democrats?

I also talked to David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame about his new American Journal of Political Science article, with Geoffrey Layman, John Green and Nathanael Sumaktoyo, “Putting Politics First.” They find that an aversion to the religious right, makes Democrats adopt secular identities and principles. Margolis reverses the traditional notion that religion affects politics.

Margolis: The single biggest takeaway is that your partisanship or your political outlooks can actually affect religious decisions that individuals make. So rather than thinking about religion affecting politics, how you view the political world and what party you align with can shape religious decisions and how active you want to be in a religious community and which community you want to be involved in.

Grossmann: And Campbell takes away the same message from his research.

Campbell: Contrary to the conventional wisdom (that it’s religion that drives people’s political views), we find evidence that the arrow also goes the other way. That people’s politics can drive their religious views and their religious identity. So much so that you can even find Americans pulling away from their own religious identity as a allergic reaction to the religious right. And we’re able to show that experimentally which we think is a pretty compelling way to make that case.

Grossmann: The conventional wisdom according to both is more of an assumption than a theory.

Campbell: Every time you utter a sentence along the lines of “the percentage of Catholics who voted for Donald Trump was x,” or “the percentage of Evangelical Protestants who voted for George W. Bush is x,” you are implicitly putting religion before the politics. We don’t usually flip those sentences around. We don’t usually suggest that voting for George W. Bush makes you an Evangelical Protestant; we think it goes the other way. And that’s certainly true. But we find is evidence that at least among some pockets of the population, it can go the other way. That’s especially true for people who are on the political left who are driven away from religion and into either the short-term form of secularism where they walk away from a religious identity. Or over, maybe we’ll call it the medium-term that can even be pushed into what we call “active secularism.” So they’re not just not religious, they’re actually actively secular. They think of themselves as secular. They act in a secular way. They think in a secular way.

Margolis: Right. So the conventional wisdom is that, as I just said, is that religion affects politics. Whether that’s your religious beliefs, whether it’s your levels of religiosity, how frequently you go to church. Whether it’s your religious affiliation, that those things drive your political attitudes, your political identification, and your vote choice. And so that’s sort of the conventional wisdom when we talk about the God gap where more religious people are Republicans and less religious people are Democrats. The assumption is that gap exists because religious people have become or are Republicans and less religious have become or are Democrats. As opposed to what I’m arguing which is that Republicans in fact are become more religious by virtue of being Republican and that Democrats are less religious by virtue of being Democrats.

Grossmann: Margolis says there’s good reason to think that parties should come first.

Margolis: Party identification is really strong and it’s very powerful. And we think a party identification as something that’s a driver of vote choice, but now we have this growing amount of literature that shows how important party ideas for how we evaluate things like the economy and elected officials, but also other people, whether we like someone or don’t like someone. Whether we want to be generous toward them or not. How we view political leaders. It all gets wrapped up how we evaluate the same external events, whether we think it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Our partisanship is this lens through which we the world, and we’re interpreting the world around us through politics or through these political lenses. And so in that sense, interpreting religion through this political lens is maybe not so surprising.

Grossmann: Today’s religious gap in partisanship was not pre-ordained. It developed after the 1960’s.

Margolis: It was only in the 60’s or early 70’s that there was basically no relationship between levels of religiosity that is how religious you are, how often you go to church, and these political variables. There were denominational differences right? Catholics used to be Democrats and Southern Protestants used to be Democrats and Northern Protestants were Republicans, but over time that gap has changed from being about denominations to being about religiosity. That religious people regardless of whether you are a Protestant, a Catholic, an undifferentiated Christian, the more you go to church, the more likely you are to a Republican. The less you go to church, the less likely you are.

And what we see over time is this relationship between religion and politics changing over time. Where as there wasn’t a religiosity gap whether you measured it by church attendance, whether it’s about religious non-identification. So when I say a religious none, I mean a n-o-n-e. A non-identifier, not a habitwearing nun. And also rates a biblical literalism, while those variables used to be uncorrelated with party ID, now they’ve become strongly correlated and specifically that Republicans are more likely to be more religious on any dimension than Democrats and that Democrats are becoming less religious over time.

Grossmann: The aggregate pattern shows Democrats losing faith and Republicans steady. But it’s Republican stability that stands out more across the secularizing world.

Margolis: There are other people who have been working in this kind of politics affecting religion and the emphasis has been on this rise of religious non-identification and this kind of lack of religiosity among Democrats. But we also know there’s evidence in other countries of a general secularization idea. That everyone in the country is becoming more secular. That is the U.S., we’ve actually been this unique nation that has an advanced Western democracy that we’re still a very devout country. And so while Republicans have not become more or less religious over time, I actually think it’s important to think about … We don’t want to take their stability as evidence of non-movement, right? This presents an opportunity of well, what would have happened without politics? Is it possible that Republicans would be less religious today if it weren’t for politics and religion being linked in the way that it is.

Grossmann: From Politics to the Pews draws on the usual life cycle of religiosity and partisanship. It turns out religion usually wanes just as we’re developing our partisan identities.

Margolis: The religious socialization literature comes largely out of the sociology of religion. The old, where they talk about religion and religiosity not being a stable identity right? It’s not this kind of static thing that never changes, which is how we as political scientists largely think about it. But instead, you can think about it as waxing and waning, let’s use that phrase, over time. So when you’re young, you have no agency, your parents choose whether you go to church, whether you go to Sunday school, you just kind of do what your parents do. Then upon reaching adolescence and young adulthood, a lot of people move away from religion and importantly, this isn’t a time when … I’m not saying everyone becomes an avowed atheist during this time. But it’s a time during which people are more likely to move themselves away from religion and distance themselves from the organized practices in which they were raised.

And there’s a lot of reasons for this. And a lot of it has nothing to do with hostility toward religion. Some of it has to do with asserting independence from your parents and some of it has to do with this, this is just a crazy time in your life where you may be leaving home to go to college. You may be leaving home and starting work, your social circles are changing, your communities ties from once you came are weakening as you’re kind of going off into the world. Your graduating high school and you’re either entering the workforce or some sort of higher education, or both.

And during this time, religion just gets pushed to the back burner. And there’s been some great sociology work noting that this is the time when religiosity decreases. So being a religious non-identifier increases. And we see this across religious faiths. So no one faith is immune from this, even if you were raised in a very devout religious community. This trend holds. So what we see is that people are just kind of on the outskirts of religion during this time.

But when people get married and have children, this represents a time where they have to start making decisions about whether or not to come back to religion. Because they start thinking about how they want to raise their children? It doesn’t mean that everyone comes back to religion at this point, although sociologists do note that it’s having school-aged children that religious participation peaks. And a lot of this has to do with wanting to give one’s child a religious upbringing. But, we also know that we’re not … We don’t practice religion in the same way as adults that raised us. That we pick and choose. Especially in America where we have so many options when it comes to religion. We’re going to pick and choose beliefs and practices and we’re going to find communities that fit our pre-existing needs and identities and outlooks.

And so it’s during this time that I make the argument that our political identities, which the political scientists know form in adolescence and young adulthood. That represents a time in which our politics can affect our religious decision making. That there’s this critical juncture when you’re making decisions, when your religious identity is still influx, but your political identity already exists. And once you’ve made that decision about religion, then we’re in a world where religion is more stable. It’s never completely stable, but your levels of religiosity do stabilize. And so politics affecting religion at a specific point in your life can have long standing consequences because the decisions you make at that time can follow you for many years to come. So that’s sort of a theoretical underpinning of when and why we might expect to see this reverse relationship occurring.

Grossmann: She finds a stark pattern: only Republican politics makes it easy for people to come back to religion.

Margolis: Some evidence that we see Democrats at a particular point in their life leaving religion, but what I also find evidence of is that at this time period, Republicans are more likely to return to religion than Democrats. So now we’re kind of seeing it on both fronts, so that religion can in fact push Democrats away and push Republicans toward religion. But in this case, we also see that it’s not just Democrats leaving religion, it’s that Republicans are saying, “I’m married, I have children. How do I want to raise my child? What kind of religions upbringing do I want to give him or her?” And they say, “Well, I’m a Republican” and they look around and they see Republicans are known as the party of religion, I’m going to go back to religion, or I feel no cognitive dissonance.

And so that makes it easier for them to return to the pews, whereas Democrats on the other hand might feel this tension, particularly white Democrats might feel this tension when they look around and see a political landscape that links conservative religion and conservative politics together and say, maybe this isn’t for me.

Grossmann: Margolis looks at three different measures that all show similar trends. Whether you go to church, whether you identify with a religion and whether you take the Bible literally.

Margolis: Using church attendance or religious service attendance is a key indicator in order to understand if this “God gap” or “Religiosity gap” that we see is American politics is being driven by church attendance affecting people’s political outlooks or whether political outlooks are actually affecting to what extent people go to church. So that’s the church attendance.

And then the second one that I do is religious non-identification. And I choose to go with non-identification rather than try to measure are you an Evangelical or are you not because that measurement is very tricky and highly problematic.

And what I really care about is your willingness to signal that yes, I’m part of a religious community. I’m part of a faith as opposed to saying, you know what? I’m not. I’m not into organization religion. I’m nothing.

In certain places in the book where I’m collecting my own data, I actually create a measure a little bit like partisanship where after saying okay yes, you say you’re a Christian, do you identify strongly or not strongly as a Christian? And then if you say you’re actually nothing, I ask if you feel if you feel closer to one religion or another. So it creates this kind of four-point scale that differentiates between strong and weak religious identifiers and then kind of pure non-identifiers and then these kind of leaning religious people. And so for me, part of this distinction is understanding people’s willingness to sign on and say yes, I’m part of this religious faith.

And then Biblical literalism I use whenever possible. I want to put a caveat around that, I don’t necessarily think politics directly affects people’s religious beliefs. I don’t think that being a Republican makes you more likely to be a biblical literalist, it’s possible. But I think what’s more likely going on is that politics is affecting the religious communities you join and how involved you are in those religious communities. And that in turn, might shape your religious beliefs.

Grossmann: But African-American Democrats do not fit the same tends because they are embedded in a very different set of relations between politics and religion.

Margolis: Black Protestants are the most religious group in the United States, whether you’re measuring it by frequency of prayer, frequency of church attendance, saying that religion is important to you. Black Protestants even more so than white Evangelicals are the most religious group in the United States. They are also the most loyal Democratic group in the United States and so that obviously everything that we’ve been talking about up until this point about the God gap and more religious people being Republicans, less religious people being Democrats, that doesn’t apply when African-Americans are both single-handedly the most religious and the most Democratic.

And so what I do show is that over time, they do engage in sort of this religious life cycle affect. They fall away from religion in young adulthood, but they actually return similarly and similar rates to white Republicans. So they don’t have this … They are returning in a way that white Democrats aren’t. And so I spend part of a chapter exploring why we think that’s the case. And it really builds on great literature in political science but also sociology and also just the religion literature that’s unique to the U.S. context, which is that churches in the U.S. are still incredibly racial segregated.

And that has really important implications because it means that most people who are African-American are going to churches with other African-Americans and people who are white are going to churches with people who are white. And so this dissonance that a white Democrat might feel in church whether it’s talking to other folks or hearing messages from the pews or watching things on the news that make it sound like Republicans are in fact the religious party and Democrats are the secular party. That doesn’t apply as much in African-American community and American Grace and David Campbell and Bob Putnam’s book, they show that the most religiously active churches are actually black Protestant churches. So it’s not white Evangelical churches that are getting up and doing all this mobilizing, it’s black churches. And it’s doing this mobilization on the left.

African-Americans when they think about religion and politics mixing together, they’re actually thinking about it mixing on the political left. They’re thinking about religion and politics on the left mixing, whereas white Americans, especially white Democrats are not. They’re thinking about religion and politics mixing on the political right and so that’s giving rise to why a white Democrat might feel uncomfortable going to church or might seek out a very specific kind of church. Whereas a black Democrat that dissonance isn’t there for them.

Grossmann: Margolis relies on a long term panel study that followed different generations as they aged.

Margolis: What’s great about panels is that rather than interviewing the different individuals over time, you’re interviewing the same individual at multiple points in time and so things that we think we might not be able to account for in a statistical model, that some people for instance might just be more religious than others, we can’t just control for this underlying level of religiosity, that’s kind of unobservable. We can get around that a little bit by looking at the same people over time. Because we’re comparing the same individual at the same points in time, and so as long as those underlying, unobservable variables don’t change and their relationship to other variables don’t change, we can have a better sense that the changes we see may actually be driven by politics or their actually driven by religion. As opposed to something that we can’t measure.

So they use parent socialization panels, this spectacular data set that’s incredibly special that interviewed an entire cohort of about 1500 respondents who were all the graduating class of 1965. They were all graduating from high school and then they were all re-interviewed when they were 25, which was in 1973. When they were 35, in 1980 and then again in 1997 when they were 50. And in addition to that one cohort, they also interviewed their parents. So we have kind of two generations over

from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/how-americans-politics-drives-their-religious-views/