Our secularist democratic party

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

That the Times and the Post paid relatively little attention to the increased religious polarization of the electorate does not mean that these newspapers wholly ignored the religious factor in political conflict. What they overlooked was the active role played by secularists. We compared the number of news stories appearing in the Times and the Post between 1990 and 2000 that identified evangelical or fundamentalist Christians as supporters of the Republican party with the number of stories that identified secularists as supporters of the Democratic party. We also compared the number of stories that identified fundamentalists and evangelicals as being pro-Republican and opposed to abortion with the number of stories that identified secularists as being prochoice and pro-Democrat.

The most striking finding to emerge from these comparisons is the paucity of news stories and commentaries that identify secularists or the secularist outlook with the Democratic party, particularly when contrasted to the large number of stories and editorials in both papers about the Republican party's relationship with evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (43 stories and 682 stories, respectively). During this period of increased party polarization along a secularist-traditionalist divide, readers were 16 times more likely to encounter a story about evangelical-fundamentalist clout in the GOP than to find one about secularist clout in the Democratic party. There were more stories published by the Times about the influence of evangelicals in the Republican party in 1992 alone (93 stories) than were published by both the Times and the Post throughout the entire decade about the importance of secularists to the Democratic party (43 stories).

We found a similar imbalance when we selected stories that associated a fundamentalist or secularist outlook with both a stance toward abortion and a party identification (283 stories versus 16 stories). The skewed coverage, most pronounced during election years, also extended to other issues and controversies-delegates at national party conventions, prayer at football games, partial-birth abortion, school vouchers, gay adoption, judicial or cabinet nominees, and special-purpose activist groups such as the Christian Coalition or People for the American Way. If a general worldview was mentioned in the story, the Post and the Times overwhelmingly emphasized Christian fundamentalism and missed the secularist side to the story. The impression conveyed by both newspapers is that traditional religious beliefs motivate people to oppose abortion, back conservative Republican candidates, support conservative social movements, and adopt intolerant attitudes, but that a modernist or secularist outlook apparently has li ttle or no connection to the reasons why someone supports abortion rights, opposes vouchers, joins culturally progressivist organizations, expresses antipathy toward evangelical Christians, and votes for liberal Democratic candidates.