Our secularist democratic party

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

The two groups in the front lines of the culture wars are evangelical Christians, including fundamentalists, characterized by their high levels of religiosity and conservative attitudes on cultural issues, and secularists, who reject traditional religious values and tend to espouse liberal views on cultural and church-state issues. Much has been written in the popular media about the traditionalist side and its alignment with the Republican party since the 1980s. Although considerable attention has been devoted to religious and cultural conflict in American political life, few in the mainstream media have acknowledged the true origins of this conflict-namely, the increased prominence of secularists within the Democratic party, and the party's resulting antagonism toward traditional values.

Secularists first appeared as a political force within a major party at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Prior to then, neither party contained many secularists nor showed many signs of moral or cultural progressivism. Moreover, prior to the late 1960s, there was something of a tacit commitment among elites in both parties to the traditional Judeo-Christian teachings regarding authority, sexual mores, and the family. This consensus was shattered in 1972 when the Democratic party was captured by a faction whose cultural reform agenda was perceived by many (both inside and outside the convention) as antagonistic to traditional religious values. The political scientist Geoffrey Layman has defined this block, the largest in the party, as "secularists,"--that is, self-identified agnostics, atheists, and persons who never or seldom attend religious services. Over a third of white delegates fit this description, a remarkable figure considering that, according to James Davison Hunter, only about 5 percent of the population in 1972 could be described as secularists.

Layman's research was based on the 1972-92 Convention Delegate Survey (CDS), the most comprehensive study to date of the political attitudes and religious orientations of national party convention delegates. Analyses of the 1972 CDS dataset by Jeane Kirkpatrick, and more recently by Layman, show that degree of religious commitment was among the most important characteristics distinguishing supporters from opponents of the progressivist planks in the platform relating to women's rights, abortion, alternative life styles, and the traditional family. Secularists strongly favored the progressivist positions; religiously traditional Democratic delegates opposed them. The differences over policies and candidates between traditionalist and secularist Democrats had less to do with disagreement over the future course of New Deal liberalism than with the divergent moral outlooks animating their competing worldviews.

The religious and cultural cleavages that roiled the Democrats in 1972 were nonexistent at the Republican convention, where mainline Protestants still dominated. The GOP platform that year merely reiterated cultural positions the party had endorsed in past platforms, for example, support for school prayer and the Equal Rights Amendment. The Republicans, by default more than by overt action, became the traditionalist party. "The partisan differences that emerged in 1972," writes Layman in his book The Great Divide, "were not caused by any sudden increase in the religious and cultural traditionalism of the Republican activists but instead by the pervasive secularism and cultural liberalism of the Democratic supporters of George McGovern."