Our secularist democratic party

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

Media spin

What would Americans have learned about the new religious divide, arguably the most important development in the American party system over the two past decades, had they gotten their information exclusively from two prominent newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post? What would readers have discovered, for example, about the importance of secularists to the Democratic party, or the bearing of religiosity on abortion attitudes?

To find out, we identified (using the Lexis-Nexis database) every domestic political news story, editorial, and op-ed piece published by these newspapers between 1990 and 2000 in which the keywords "secular," "unchurched," "nonreligious," or "nonbeliever" (henceforth referred to as secularists), and "Democrat" appeared. We also read every political news item in which the keywords "evangelical" or "fundamentalist Christian" and "Republican" turned up in the Lexis-Nexis database for the Times and the Post. These 11 years mark the height of the culture wars, from the controversial 1992 Republican National Convention through the religiously polarized elections of the Clinton era and Bush vs. Core.

Most Americans do not get their political information directly from either the Post or the Times; rather, they get it from television. But many media analysts, among them Michael Kelly and Edward Jay Epstein, have written about the influence of the Times and the Post in shaping the perspectives of other media. The importance of these two newspapers is aptly summarized by former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg: "Many TV journalists simply don't know what to think about certain issues until the New York Times and Washington Post tell them what to think. Those big, important newspapers set the agenda that network news people follow." At the very least, these papers' coverage of religion in politics can be considered bell-weathers of elite understandings of the religious divide in the electorate.

If the amount of coverage devoted to a topic can be viewed as a rough barometer of how a newspaper views its importance, then it appears that the importance of the religion gap paled when compared to other cultural or demographic cleavages in the electorate. Between 1990 and 2000, the Times and the Post published a total of 14 stories that pointed out that the Republican and Democratic parties were split along a traditionalist-secularist divide. Readers of the Times and Post were more than twice as likely to find news accounts about clashes between religious traditionalists and moderates within the Republican party than stories about religious divisions between Republicans and Democrats.

The minimization of the religious divide between the parties is also apparent when compared to the amount of press attention devoted to other "gaps" in the electorate. During this same time span, the Times and Post published 392 articles on the gender gap. In the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections, white women on average gave Democrats 9 percent more of their vote than did white men; the average gap separating secularists and religious traditionalists in these same elections was 42 percentage points.