Religious commitment lead vote indicator, says study | May 04, 2005

May 4, 2005
Catholic World News

Washington, DC, May. 03 (Culture of Life Foundation/CWNews.com) - Polling data continues to show that people committed to their faith are abandoning the Democratic Party in historic numbers. The shift has become so significant that according to a report from the Pew Research Center, church attendance is a greater indicator of how one voted in the 2004 presidential election than "such demographic characteristics as gender, age, income, and region" and is "just as important as race."

The Pew study, "Religion & Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide," reports that in the last election people who attend church more than once a week, such as Catholics who go to daily Mass or Evangelicals who attend Wednesday night services, supported Republican President George W. Bush over Democrat Sen. John Kerry 64 percent to 39 percent. Such voters made up 16 percent of the electorate. For those that attend church weekly, support for President Bush was 58 percent versus 41 percent for Kerry. Among those who never attend church, 62 percent voted for Kerry; 54 percent of those who attend church a few times a year voted for the senator. Monthly church-goers evenly split their vote.

The study notes that while this so-called "God gap" has become conventional wisdom in American politics, it is a historically unique trend. The twist is that the new data reveals that the level of commitment to one's faith is a more significant indicator of how one will vote than what one's specific religion is, a break from the past trends. "Historically, religious fissures in the political arena have tended to break along denominational lines rather than by level of religious commitment."

One poll divided Christians of various denominations into traditionalist, centrist, and modernist classifications. Traditionalist Catholics, it found, are "closer to traditionalist Evangelicals than to modernist Catholics in their views on issues such as abortion or embryonic stem cell research. The survey also found that traditionalists in all three major faith groups [Catholics, Evangelicals, and Mainline Protestants] overwhelmingly identify with the Republican Party ..." Traditionalists were identified as "those with the most orthodox theological beliefs within their respective traditions."

In 1960, 71 percent of Catholics identified as Democrats largely because of the New Deal policies of the party. In 25 years that number has dropped a stunning 27 percent with Catholic party identification being split almost evenly with 44 percent of Catholics identifying as Democrats and 41 percent as Republicans.

The Pew study reports that the shift was precipitated by two key Supreme Court rulings and continues to be centered on cultural issues. "[A] trigger was a pair of US Supreme Court decisions: the 1962 decision that banned organized prayer in public schools, and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion. Those rulings generated a backlash among religious conservatives that reverberates to this day. For the past generation, the Republican Party has become the standard-bearer of a social conservative agenda and the natural home for those who are traditionalist in their religious views. In particular, the GOP has embraced the antiabortion movement, making it a central pillar of the party's platform." Issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and prayer in schools have "pushed the religiously observant into one political corner and the more secular into another," according to the study.