Our secularist democratic party

Public Interest, Fall, 2002 by Louis Bolce, Gerald De Maio

ANYONE who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same time, the media's obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts public attention from the changing role of religion in political life today. In particular, the media overlooks the remarkable erosion of denominational boundaries that until a quarter century ago defined the religious dimension of partisan conflict, with Catholics, Jews, and southern evangelicals aligned with the Democratic party and nonsouthern white, mostly mainline Protestants forming the religious base of the Republicans. Also, the media mistakenly frames cultural conflict since the 1970s as entirely the result of fundamentalist revanchism. In so doing, the media ignores the growing influence of secularists in the Democratic party and obfuscates how their worldview is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditionalist outlook.

Overlooking the big story

Consider, for example, the New York Times's coverage of two high profile "religious issues" during the 2000 presidential campaign: the Bob Jones University controversy and the historic nomination of Joe Lieberman for the vice presidency. Between the South Carolina primary in February 2000 and the beginning of the Republican convention on July 31, the Times published over 125 articles, editorials, and op-eds discussing the Bob Jones scandal, which arose when candidate George W. Bush spoke at a fundamentalist college whose founder had expressed a strong antipathy to Catholics. The college had taught that Catholicism was a "cult" and, until shortly before, had prohibited interracial dating. In its coverage, the New York Times emphasized fundamentalist anti-Catholicism (and anti-Semitism), Religious Right intolerance, and efforts by Bush's opponents to alert Catholic voters about the Texas governor's cozy relationship with Christian fundamentalists. The clear implication of the Times's coverage was that Christia n fundamentalists, particularly white southern fundamentalists, felt animus toward Catholics, and that the association of fundamentalists with the Bush campaign would set back recent Republican gains among white Catholic voters. The trouble with this narrative, which recalls pre-Kennedy-era denominational antagonisms, is that it is incorrect.

Survey data from the 2000 American National Election Study (ANES), carried out by the Center for Political Studies (CPS) at the University of Michigan, reveal that the stereotype of Christian fundamentalist antagonism toward Catholics is nothing more than a specter from the past. The ANES survey results also indicate that white Catholic voters continued their shift toward the GOP, despite the sort of associations conjured up by the Bob Jones stories. Included in the ANES questionnaire are "feeling thermometers," a standard quantitative measure used by social scientists to assess intergroup enmity and amity. Feeling thermometers ask respondents to rate social groups and political leaders on a scale ranging from 0 degrees (extremely cold) to 100 degrees (extremely warm). A thermometer rating below 35 degrees (the average score that whites express toward illegal aliens) is commonly considered to reflect antipathy; scores above 50 degrees indicate varying degrees of warmth. The thermometer results show that whit e fundamentalists have positive feelings toward Catholics. Their score of 62 degrees was identical to the average score that Jews gave to Catholics and significantly warmer than the mean rating given to Catholics by the religiously nonaffiliated or by secularists.

Answers to the voting questions included in the same ANES study point to another fact about Catholics and fundamentalists that was wholly at odds with the tenor of the Bob Jones news stories. In the South, whites from both religious groups favored Bush over Gore with more than three-quarters of their ballots, and both were significantly more supportive of the Republican ticket than were mainline Protestants from the region. Though, nationwide, Catholics were not as supportive of Bush as were Christian fundamentalists, the 2000 election was the first time ever that white Catholics, still regarded by some election analysts as a mainstay of the Democratic party, gave a larger share of their votes to a Republican party presidential candidate than did white mainline Protestants, the traditional denominational pillar of the GOP. (The religiously liberal Episcopalians backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes in the 2000 election and have voted against every Republican presidential ticket since 1992.) During the 2 000 election cycle, the Times provided its readers with plenty of tidbits about Bob Jones III's father's archaic view of the Vatican (as well as the changing status of interracial dating on the Bob Jones campus), but offered not a scrap of information about this historically significant inversion of the denominational base of the two major parties.