Our secularist democratic party

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

Broadcast news coverage during the 1990s was no better. According to our analysis of network news programs selected from abstracts from the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive, viewers were given a very lopsided picture of the increased religious polarization in the electorate. While someone who caught the TV news every night would have found out plenty about the political identities and policy preferences of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, that same viewer would have heard nothing about the increased importance of secularists in the Democratic party. We could not find a single story pointing to the tendency of secularists to vote for Democratic candidates or about their participation in culturally progressive activist groups and support for socially liberal policy positions. Most of the TV news stories about religion and partisan politics (with the exception of those about the black church) focused on the influence of evangelicals and the Religious Right in the Republican party, conflict s between fundamentalists and moderates inside the GOP, or the involvement of the Religious Right in policy disputes over abortion, gay rights, and education. Three-fifths of all television news stories mentioning evangelicals or Christian fundamentalists identified members of these religious groups as the Religious Right, half identified them as Republican, more than a third indicated their opposition to abortion, and over a quarter contained themes that implied that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are intolerant.

Studies by public-opinion researchers have shown that the news media powerfully shapes the way the public views social groups. And thus it is not surprising that ANES survey results indicate that the more attention a person pays to the national political news media, and especially to television news, the more likely is that individual to believe that Christian fundamentalists are ideologically extreme and politically militant. Those who read and watch national news media are also more likely to conflate evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists with Religious Right organizations and to make voting decisions and judgments about public-policy issues based on the antipathy they feel toward both these groups. For many people today, how they view evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians depends, in large measure, on how they view Pat Robertson or the Christian Coalition. This despite the research by sociologists Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout showing that 86 percent of fundamentalists oppose various aspects of the Religious Right's political agenda.

Explaining media silence

The survey results reported in this essay show that the public has been politically divided over religion since the 1980s. Moreover, this new religious cleavage occurs more often between secularists and traditionalists than between denominations. But despite the reams of data documenting the alignment of secularists with the Democratic party and the countermovement of religious traditionalists into the Republican party, the media, particularly network news, has tended to emphasize only the latter phenomenon.