Faith in numbers - religious beliefs of voters - NR Guide to the 1996 Election

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by Michael Barone

IF YOU want to know whom the voters are for, ask what they believe -- believe, that is, in the religious sense of belief. For nothing -- not economic status, not region, not even race -- divides American voters as starkly as their religious beliefs. You need only look at the exit polls to see. In the 1992 Clinton vote there was a 5-point gender gap, a 2-point gap between North and South, a 9-point gap between age groups, a 23-point gap between the top and bottom income groups, and a 43-point gap between blacks and whites. But Jews voted 78 to 12 for Clinton while white born-again Christians voted 61 to 23 for Bush: a 55-point gap. Similarly, in 1994, Republican percentages differed by 23 points by income groups, 48 points by race, and 53 per cent by religion. Americans are often uncomfortable with the thought that politics divides them along religious lines. But it is entirely natural that in a country where political debates are more often cultural than economic, political divisions should run along lines of our deepest beliefs.

But those beliefs are not the ones we grew up with. Nearly forty years ago Will Herberg described an America that was, in his book's title, Protestant - Catholic - Jew. These three faiths were not of course equal in numbers. More than half of Americans were Protestant, a quarter were Catholic, and perhaps 3 per cent Jewish (though in the 1930s and 1940s Jews accounted for as much as 5 per cent of all voters, more than blacks at that time). But one of Herberg's points was that we were no longer a basically Protestant country, and indeed in the year his book appeared Americans elected the first Catholic President.

Today Herberg's three-faith formula no longer describes the major categories of religious belief. Instead we have four major religious groupings, of approximately equal size, each politically distinct. Protestants have split into two groups, Mainline Protestants, in the numerically declining old denominations, with low intensity of belief, and Evangelical Protestants, in new and rapidly growing denominations and churches, with strong intensity of belief. Labels and definitions are a problem here, but as Potter Stewart said of pornography and might have said of the difference between his native Episcopalianism and the Protestantism of the Christian Coalition, I know it when I see it. Each of these two groups of Protestants makes up about one-quarter of the electorate.

Another quarter is made up of Catholics, who are now a larger percentage of Americans than they were in 1960 when John Kennedy was elected. Catholics were a monolithic group then, voting 78 per cent for Kennedy, according to Gallup (white Protestants were 63 per cent for Richard Nixon), and, with their large families and bursting parishes, visibly obeying the Church's prohibitions on birth control and divorce, requirement of weekly Mass, and encouragement of vocations. But at just about the time Kennedy was elected and Pope John XXIII convened the Vatican Council, these distinctive behaviors started to vanish, and Catholics today, on average, are not very different from everyone else. That "average," however, masks a real divide among Catholics, with about half still observant and culturally conservative and the other half relatively secular and open to cultural liberalism.

The fourth American religious group today is even more various: Others. It includes Jews and Moslems, Hindus and Sikhs and Jains. It includes those who identify themselves as secular or having no religion: a group in most polls now larger than Jews, and similar in political behavior.

How do each of these four groups vote? The table is adapted from the 1992 and 1994 exit polls. What emerges is a portrait of a politico-religious nation very different from that of 1960 and even 1980. Evangelical Protestants, now the base of the Republican Party, were a much smaller and less assertive percentage of the electorate, Democratic generally because they were disproportionately white Southerners or blacks, but variously so -- not so much in 1960, when the Democratic nominee was a Roman Catholic, very much so in 1976, when the nominee proclaimed himself a born-again Christian. Others, now the base of the Democratic Party, were also a much smaller and less assertive percentage of the electorate. They were swing voters in national politics, attracted to literate Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits. In the meantime the partisanship of Mainline Protestants and Catholics, which towered over the landscape of the 1960 election like the jagged peaks of the Rockies over the Great Plains, has been worn down over the years like the Appalachians by the shifting winds of issues and equivocal feelings engendered by the new issues raised by Evangelical Protestants and Others.

Look now at this year's election through the prism of these groups. Start with Evangelical Protestants, who, according to a U.S. News survey conducted July 21 to 23, were split evenly between Dole and Clinton in both two-and three-way contests. This was obviously disastrous for Dole, and it strongly appears that he made significant gains among this group at the San Diego convention: consolidating the base. Unlike George Bush in 1992, he did it not by supplying hot convention rhetoric from the likes of Pat Buchanan but by avoiding controversy by propitiating conservative activists with a conservative platform and a pro-life running-mate and by projecting his own tax cut. And he began the search, which is still on, for a cultural issue capable of energizing the base while massaging the majority (candidates include teenage drug use, racial quotas, English as the official language, tougher judges). He depicted his traditional values as growing not out of angry ideological manifestoes but out of the hard-working everyday Great Plains where he grew up.