Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion
.pdfPART FIVE
Religion, Political Behavior, and
Public Culture
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Religion and Political Behavior
Jeff Manza and Nathan Wright
In the history of social science research on group-based political alignments, religious cleavages have often been shown to be a more powerful predictor of individual voting behavior than class location (e.g., Rose and Urwin 1969; Converse 1974; Lijphart 1979; Dogan 1995; Brooks and Manza 1997). Yet it has received significantly less attention than studies analyzing class politics, and even when acknowledging the existence of religious-based political divides, scholars have often assumed that some other, nonreligious antecedent factor lays behind it. As Demerath and Williams (1990: 434) put it, “While students of voting do cite religious affiliation as a significant variable, they often tend to interpret its effects less in terms of theology and ecclesiastical influence than in terms of ethnic, class, and regional factors lurking beneath the symbolic surface.”
Since the late 1970s, however, dramatic religious mobilizations around the world – including a fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran, the visibly active role of the Catholic Church in the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980–1, growing publicity about “liberation theology” movements in Latin America, and, in the United States the rise of politically active conservative Christian organizations such as the Moral Majority – have made it more difficult for scholars to ignore the ways in which religion shapes political action and behavior. And indeed, over the past fifteen years there has been considerable growth in research on (and scholarly controversies about) the association between religious group memberships, doctrinal beliefs and practices, and voting behavior.1
This chapter dissects what we have learned from this scholarship about how religion and political behavior are linked. We should note two limitations of our analysis at the outset. First, we consider only one type of political action – voting – and not other types of religious influence on political life, such as participation in social movements, political lobbying, or the impact of religion on public opinion. Second, our analytical focus is limited to the postindustrial democracies of Western Europe and North America, with special attention to the (arguably “exceptional”) American case. Lack of space
1There is, unfortunately, no systematic overview of the growing literature on religion and political behavior. This chapter aims to fill that gap. See Wald (1996) and Leege (1993) for overviews of the research on the American case; a good textbook treatment, again for the United States, can be found in Corbett and Corbett (1999).
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precludes a broader consideration of religious impacts on voting behavior in the newer democracies in Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia. This should not be taken to mean that the impact in those latter countries is modest. Quite the contrary: The spread of democratization processes around the world (e.g., Markoff 1996) has frequently been influenced by social movements rooted in churches (not least the civil rights movement in the United States; see Morris 1984; more generally, see Smith 1996a); and in a number of countries a government with direct or strong indirect ties to fundamentalist (or quasi-fundamentalist) religious organizations is in, or has recently been, in office (the list of such countries would include Iran, Turkey, India, and Algeria). These issues are explored more fully elsewhere (Arjomand 1993; Marty and Appleby 1993).
This chapter is in three parts. We begin with a discussion of the diverse ways in which religion may influence political behavior, and how these differences may manifest themselves in different polities. Part two examines, in some detail, the U.S. case, where the most extensive social science research literature has developed, and it provides the case that can most easily be related to all of the analytical elements introduced in part one of the chapter. Part three surveys the comparative evidence from Western Europe, including the factors that strengthen or weaken the religious cleavage across different national contexts.
HOW DOES RELIGION INFLUENCE VOTING BEHAVIOR?
Religion as a Social Cleavage: A General Model
Any enduring and significant social cleavage, whether based on class, race/ethnicity, linguistic preference, region, gender, or religion, will find varying degrees of expression in political conflicts at four distinct levels: (a) social structure; (b) group identity; (c) political organizations and party systems; and (d) public policy outcomes (cf. Coleman 1956; Bartolini and Mair 1990; Manza and Brooks 1999: Chapter 2).
“Social” cleavages are always grounded in the social structure of a given society. In the case of religion, there is of course wide variation in the types of religious divisions found in different countries. In some countries, a single denomination (the Catholic Church in Italy, Ireland, or Belgium, the Anglican Church in Britain, the Lutheran Church in Sweden, and so forth) has the allegiance of most citizens who claim a religious identity. Here the social basis for a cleavage lies in the division between devout or practicing adherents versus secular or nominally affiliated church members. In other countries, however, there is much greater competition between denominations or religious traditions with large memberships (e.g., Germany, the Netherlands, the United States). Religion can, in such societies, provide a basis for social stratification and inequality, in which members of a “dominant” denomination have privileged access to valued positions (e.g., in the long dominance of “WASP” denominations in the United States).
The existence of group divisions at the level of social structure may not matter much for political life unless these are mobilized in some fashion. Actors have to perceive these divisions as meaningful and unequal (Ebersole 1960; Koch 1995). Religious group identities reflect the degree to which religious differences, whether between competing religious denominations or, alternatively, between citizens with and without religious identities, come to be the basis for group consciousness. Here, the question is to what
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degree do adherents identify with a particular religious tradition, and perceive it to be in conflict with other traditions.
The mechanisms that strengthen or erode religious group conflict have been well charted. Religious movements can activate new or dormant identities and make salient group-based conflicts. High levels of religious homogamy and religious mobility are particularly important for sustaining a sense of group identity (particularly in societies with competitive religious markets), and the decline of either can be expected to produce declining religious conflict in general (Wuthnow 1988: Chapter 5; Kalmijn 1991). Similarly, moves toward ecumenicism and away from explicit denominational competition may reduce group-based identities, although ideological differences between religious liberals and conservatives may be enhanced as a result (Wuthnow 1988: Chapter 12; Wuthnow 1993; Lipset and Raab 1995).
It is through the organizational form of party systems that religious divides in social structure and group identity take on electoral significance. In most early democracies, one or more major parties emerged with the explicit or tacit backing of powerful churches. These parties often came to be called Christian Democratic parties (usually in countries with strong Protestant or mixed Protestant/Catholic traditions, but also in Catholic Italy), while Catholic parties appeared under a variety of names (the Catholic People’s Party in Austria and the Netherlands, the Popular Republican Movement in France, and so forth).2 These religious parties initially sought to mobilize voters on the basis of religious identity, although over time the more successful parties (most notably, the Christian Democratic parties of West Germany and Italy) became “catchall” parties of the right or center-right, with ambitions of appealing to an electoral majority. In other countries, however, the modern party system was secularized – and direct links between parties and churches were cut – but even in some of these countries adherents of particular religious traditions sometimes lined up consistently with one party (with electoral campaigns making more or less explicit attempts to mobilize voters on religious grounds).3 In the United States, the allegiance of Catholics and Jews with the Democratic Party, and evangelical Protestants with the Republican Party, exemplify this pattern.
Finally, the policy outputs of states provide a crucial feedback mechanism that reinforces the relevance of religious divisions for political life. The historical origins of religious parties can often be traced to “state-church” conflicts in which the growing power of secular states on societies posed a direct threat to church power. More recently, conflicts over public policies, particularly on issues such as education, gender equality, or reproductive rights, have the potential to divide voters on the basis of religious orientation. Such policy conflicts, when they emerge, provide a feedback mechanism by activating latent religious divisions at the group and organizational level.
Types of Religious Cleavages
There are four distinct religious cleavages that have been shown to be associated with voting behavior: (a) church attendance; (b) doctrinal beliefs; (c) denominational groups;
2For a comprehensive list of postwar religious parties in Europe, see Lane and Ersson (1994: 103).
3 Examples here would include France, Ireland, and Britain. We discuss this issue later.
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and (d) local/contextual aspects of congregational memberships. The first and most basic of these cleavages is between voters who attend religious services and consider religion important in their lives, from those who are not engaged in religion. The most straightforward measure of engagement is attendance at religious services. Church attendance may be important for political preferences for several reasons: (a) it provides reinforcement of religious beliefs and ethical precepts; (b) it may reinforce group identities, especially in ethnicallyor linguistically rooted churches; and (c) it connects religious beliefs to the larger world, including politics. This “religiosity” cleavage has been shown to be especially powerful in many countries in Western Europe (Heath et al. 1993), but it has long been understood as significant in the United States as well (e.g., Wright 2001).
The second, and most commonplace, way in which the religious cleavage shows is to examine differences between denominational families, at least in those countries where at least two or more denominations claim the allegiance of substantial proportions of the population. In North America and Western Europe, these divisions are often cast as Protestant versus Catholic, although in some countries divisions among Protestants or with other major religious denominations (notably Jews) may also hold some significance.
A third religious cleavage concerns the impact of religious beliefs held by individuals, as opposed to denominational memberships or identities. Probably the most salient division here is between religious traditionalists, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and religious modernizers, who adopt a context-bound interpretation of the teachings of the Bible (Hunter 1983; Smith 1998; but cf. Wright 2001). Traditionalists – once politically engaged – may seek to apply narrowly defined biblical concepts to solve social problems, while modernizers adopt more flexible, context-bound interpretations of the Bible. Divisions based on the content of religious beliefs, including those within religious denominations, have frequently been said to be rising in importance relative to traditional lines of denominational influence.
Finally, a number of analysts have examined the “contextual effects” of local religious communities or individual churches. Individual church leaders provide sources of information and opinions to lay members that may sometimes be at odds with national denominational positions. Local congregations sometimes engage in political projects that draw in members into various forms of political action and experience (e.g., Wuthnow and Evans 2001). Churches can frequently be settings in which friendship networks form, especially in conservative churches, leading to distinct subcultures (Smith 1998). Such networks provide a basis for political discussion and reinforcement of individual beliefs. For all of these reasons, local congregations may have distinct impacts on political behavior (Wald, Owen, and Hill 1988; Gilbert 1993).
The Dynamics of Secularization
At the center of many scholarly debates about religious influences on political behavior has been the question of secularization. Although a number of distinct social processes are often subsumed under the secularization label, the basic assumptions underlying the model of secularization are that one of three processes has occurred (or is occurring) over time: (a) a decline in the importance of religion in the lives of individuals; (b) a decline in the social and political influence of religious organizations; or (c) a decline
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in engagement in political life by religious organizations (what is sometimes referred to as the “privatization” thesis).4 These secularization processes imply different things for political behavior. The first suggests individual-level change: As education levels and general societal affluence increase, voters may become less reliant on simple religious heuristics to govern all aspects of their lives, including how they vote (e.g., Dalton 1988, 1990; Inglehart 1990; Dogan 1995). The second and third suggests organizational-level change: As church attendance declines or religious organizations lose members (in absolute or relative terms), the capacity of churches to influence elections and the shape of political debates can be expected to decline (e.g., Wallis and Bruce 1992). Similarly, if churches become less involved in worldly affairs, their capacity to influence the voting behavior of members will likely decline.
The secularization thesis has been widely debated (see, for example, Chapters 5, 8, and 9, this volume), and we cannot take up all of its implications in relation to political behavior here. Evidence of declining levels of religious voting would be consistent with a secularization thesis. Yet correlation is not causation, and we cannot assume that declining religious voting is necessarily the result of the declining religious commitments of individuals, the declining aggregate strength of religious beliefs, or the declining influence of religious organizations, in the absence of other information. For example, changes in party systems (such as the merging of religious and nonreligious parties into new officially secular parties), or the changing shape of national or local issue agendas (such as the declining salience of a particular issue) can sometimes have dramatic and independent impacts on the levels of religious voting independent of secularization processes (Van Kersbergen 1999).
RELIGION AND POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES:
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM?
Viewed from a comparative perspective, the United States has long appeared exceptional in the degree and level of religiosity found among its citizens (Greeley 1991; Tiryakian 1993). Foreign observers – including most famously de Tocqueville and Weber – have long reported evidence of unusually high levels of religiosity in defiance of Enlightenment theories of religious decline. Post–World War II survey data appear to confirm that, when contrasted with other comparable developed capitalist democracies, religiosity among U.S. citizens appears unusually high. Americans routinely claim higher levels of church membership and attendance at religious services, are more likely to believe in God, and to claim that religion is of considerable importance in their lives, than citizens in other postindustrial capitalist democracies (Wald 1996: Chapter 1). They are much more likely to hold fundamentalist beliefs, such as God performing miracles (a belief held by 80 percent of Americans) (Lipset 1996: 61). The evidence also suggests little or no decline in religious affiliation or belief in the post– World War II period, and overall, higher levels of religious participation in the twentieth than in the nineteenth century (cf. Finke and Stark 1992; Lipset 1996: 62). American political leaders of both major parties now routinely declare their devotion to God.
4For sophisticated overviews of the secularization model, see especially Casanova (1994) and Yamane (1997). The most plausible contemporary defenses of the model would include Chaves (1994), Yamane (1997), and Wallis and Bruce (1992).
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The typical European pattern of religious organization – in which a state-sanctioned religious body dominated the religious landscape – failed to materialize in the United States. The absence of a state church has resulted in the flourishing of an unprecedented range of denominations and sects since the beginning of the Republic. The remarkable history of denominational growth and schisms has long interested sociologists of religion (e.g., Liebman, Sutton, and Wuthnow 1988). Alongside periodic moves toward ecumenicism (particularly among the largest and most well-established denominational bodies) has been a long-term process of denominational change that has continually expanded the options for religious practice available to most Americans (Finke and Stark 1992).
Historical Evidence of Electoral Impacts
Religion has long been understood to be an important source of political division in the United States.5 The “new political history” that developed in the 1960s and 1970s established quantitative evidence of the growth and persistence of religious cleavages in shaping voter alignments throughout the nineteenth century (e.g., Benson 1961; Jensen 1971; Kleppner 1979; Swierenga 1990). “Ethnoreligious” cleavages, as they came to be known in this literature, reflected the intersection of denominational memberships and ethnicity in shaping political behavior. Controversies over the disestablishment of official state churches provided the earliest source of religious political division, beginning virtually at the founding of the Republic (Murrin 1990). Supporters of state churches, especially the Congregationalists, were generally aligned with the Federalist Party, while members of lower status churches challenging the hegemony of the traditional churches were more likely to line up with the Jeffersonian DemocraticRepublicans. The antebellum period (1828–60) is generally conceded to have been loosely characterized by the alignment of voters from “liturgical” or “ritualist” religious traditions with the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and his heirs, and voters from pietist and evangelical denominations with first the Whig Party and later the Republican Party (Jensen 1971: 62–73; Kleppner 1979; Howe 1990; Swierenga 1990: 151–5).
In the post–Civil War period, party competition in the North and Midwestern sections of the country for white votes appears to have been even more decisively structured by ethnic and religious divides (Kleppner [1979: 196] even goes so far as to describe late-nineteenth-century parties as “political churches.”) Up until 1896, the Republican Party received very strong support from Episcopalians, Congregationalists, New School Presbyterians, and Methodists; while the Democrats drew support most heavily from Catholics, and less broadly from Lutherans and Unitarians (Swierenga 1990: 157). In the “system of 1896,” Republican domination of the North and Midwest involved strong support from nearly all Protestant denominations, while with rare exceptions the Democrats were limited to the votes of Catholics and the relatively small unionized working class. The post-Reconstruction South, of course, was a very different matter;
5In American Commonwealth, Bryce (1891: 36) claimed, for example, that “Roman Catholics are normally Democrats, because, except in Maryland, which is Democratic anyhow, they are mainly Irish. Congregationalists and Unitarians, being presumably sprung from New England, are apt to be Republicans.”
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the Democratic monopoly through World War II made religious differences of little consequence in that region.
With the coming of the New Deal, many analysts assumed that the sharp ethnoreligious cleavages in the North would decline in strength as class factors appeared to be increasingly important. But it appears instead that the increase in class divisions during the New Deal largely developed alongside, not in place of, traditional religious cleavages. Roosevelt generally performed better among all electoral groups than Democratic candidate Al Smith did in 1928, leaving mostly unchanged relative levels of support from most key religious groups (except for Jews; e.g., Gamm 1986: 45–74). The core of the Democratic coalition continued to be defined by working class Catholic and Jewish voters in the North and Midwest (and white voters of all religions in the oneparty South). The greatly weakened Republican coalitions of the 1930s and 1940s, by contrast, continued to receive disproportionate support from Northern white mainline Protestants (Sundquist 1983: Chapter 10; Reichley 1985: 225–9).
The early post–World War II period was one of unusual religious stability but, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, important changes were taking place in nearly every major religious denomination. The mainline Protestant denominations had been experiencing a relative membership decline (in which they were losing religious market share) for many decades, and beginning in the late 1960s this decline accelerated. Long associated with the political and economic status quo, these denominations were deeply influenced by the great moral crusades of the period: The Civil Rights Movement (CRM) and the demand for racial justice, protests against the war in Vietnam, and the women’s movement. A growing split between liberal Protestant clergy supporting the CRM and other 1960s’ movements and a more conservative laity appeared to generate intradenomination (or intrachurch) tensions (see the studies collected in Wuthnow and Evans [2001] for a broad overview of political tensions within mainline Protestant churches). The evangelical Protestant churches also reacted sharply – but very differently – to the social and cultural movements of the period. Resisting most of the trends of the period, many leaders of evangelical churches became involved in organizing or promoting new Christian Right movements and discourses which sought to defend “traditional values” (Bruce 1988; Himmelstein 1983; Smith 1998). Among Catholics, internal reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s produced profound transformations within the Church, as have rapidly changing social practices among Catholics (and all Americans) which fundamentally challenge Church teachings on issues such as sex, abortion, and other social issues (Greeley 1985: 55ff). In addition to the changes within the major religious traditions, there also appeared during this period numerous new religious movements of dizzying variety (Wuthnow 1988), large unaffiliated evangelical churches (e.g., Shibley 1996) as well as the rapid growth of more established religious groups outside the mainstream (such as the Mormon Church).
Empirical Research on Recent Trends in Religious Voting
The availability of survey data that go beyond the crude (and largely uninformative) Protestant versus Catholic divide has largely constrained systematic scholarly investigations of religious influence on voting behavior in the United States to the period after 1960 (Manza and Brooks 1999: 102–03). However, this is precisely the period in which the most rapid changes have been hypothesized to have occurred, and not
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surprisingly a number of empirical questions about these changes have vexed analysts. Four questions have been central in recent debates: (a) What has been the impact of the political mobilization of evangelical Protestant groups since the 1970s?
(b) Have Catholic voters become less Democratic, and if so, why? (c) To what extent has a political realignment toward the center occurred among mainline Protestants, and why? (d) How have doctrinal divisions, especially between religious liberals and conservatives and often within denominations, produced changing patterns of political alignment?
Rise of a New Christian Right? Perhaps the most widely debated thesis about religion and politics in both the mass media and among political analysts in recent decades concerns the possibility of a political realignment among conservative Protestant voters. The sudden emergence of the new Christian Right (CR) in the late 1970s as an organizational force in U.S. politics, and the visible role of some early CR groups such as the Moral Majority in the 1980 elections seemed to herald a new type of political conflict in which conservative religious values were becoming increasingly important in the political system. The confluence of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election (and even larger victory in 1984), the 1980 recapture of the Senate by the Republicans for the first time in nearly thirty years, and the intense media attention given to early CR leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others led many observers to draw the conclusion that these events were closely related.
In the relatively brief period since 1980, however, the varying fortunes of the CR at the national level have cast doubt about these hypotheses. The initial social science search for a mass base to the CR in the 1980s unearthed both very modest support for groups such as the Moral Majority and little evidence that the CR mobilized a significant group of voters (see Manza and Brooks [1999: 95–6] for references). Indeed, by the late 1980s, many informed observers were emphasizing the sharp decline of the CR, at least as a force in national politics (e.g., Bruce 1988; Jelen 1991: 135–55).
In the 1990s, the cycle of debates over the CR came full circle around yet again. The rapid growth of the Christian Coalition, a multidenominational organization that grew out of Pat Robertson’s failed 1988 presidential bid helped to revive scholarly interest in and respect for the political power of the CR. The Coalition has emphasized state and local politics, working up to the national level by gaining influence with the state-level Republican Party (Rozell and Wilcox 1995). In 1995, the organization claimed some 1.6 million members organized in sixteen hundred chapters across the country. These chapters were said to have distributed some thirty-five million voter guides in the 1994 midterm elections alone (Wald 1996: 233; cf. Regnerus et al. 1999). With the renewed prominence of the CR in politics, a new spate of studies appeared, many advancing arguments or evidence of a recent shift of evangelical voters toward the Republican Party (e.g., Green et al. 1995; Wilcox 1996; Kellstedt et al. 1994: 308). However, the recent organizational decline of the Christian Coalition has again prompted a retreat from scholarly and popular attention to the CR and pessimism about its electoral impact (see, e.g., Green, Guth, and Wilcox 1998; Kohut et al. 2000).6
6A final set of debates about the impact of the CR concerns the mobilization of evangelical voters and its impact on turnout. To the extent that it has been examined, the general conclusion has been that evangelical voters did increase their turnout in 1980 and thereafter (see, for