The Brookings Institute has released a revealing report about the role of religion in the 2010 elections. The report is co-authored by E.J. Dionne and William A. Galston and can be read here. In case you do not have time to read the entire report, here is a summary of the findings:
Economic convulsions have a way of changing the priorities of voters. Although concerns for their own and their families’ well-being are never far from citizens’ minds, these matters are less pressing in prosperous times. At such moments, voters feel freer to use elections as ways of registering their views on matters related to religion, culture, values and foreign policy.
But when times turn harsh, the politics of jobs, wealth, and income can overwhelm everything else. Thus did the focus of the country’s politics change radically between 1928, a classic culture war contest dominated by arguments over prohibition and presidential candidate Al Smith’s religious faith, and 1932, when the Great Depression ushered in a new political alignment and created what became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.
The Great Recession has had a similar effect in concentrating the electorate’s mind on economics. But the evidence of the 2010 election is that it has not—up to now, at least—fundamentally altered the cultural and religious contours of American political life. Religion and issues related to recent cultural conflicts, notably abortion and same-sex marriage, played a very limited role in the Republicans’ electoral victory. Overwhelmingly, voters cast their ballots on the basis of economic issues, while the religious alignments that took root well before the economic downturn remained intact. Democrats lost votes among religiously conservative constituencies, but also among religious liberals and secular voters. They did not, however, lose ground among African-Americans of various religious creeds and held their own among Latino voters. To see issues related to religious or cultural issues as central to the 2010 outcome is, we believe, a mistake.
But there is a new constellation of issues related to religion that looms as a troubling and potentially divisive element in American political life. The attack of September 11, 2001 has left the country divided in its view of Islam and Muslims, and these divisions reinforce the cleavages between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Americans are also sharply divided in their perceptions of President Obama’s own religious faith.
It also suggests that American Muslims are in a situation similar to that of Catholics, who in earlier periods of our history were seen by a significant share of America’s population as representing principles at odds with equality and democracy. There may be lessons for American Muslims in the experience of the Catholic community and its ultimate success in breaking down barriers and entering the mainstream of American political life.
Finally (and related to these findings): while there is considerable overlap between the Tea Party movement and religious conservatism, there is evidence that the Tea Party may represent not so much a more libertarian alternative to the Christian Right as an embodiment of a more critical or even hostile attitude toward multiculturalism, immigration and the idea of compassionate conservatism put forward by former President George W. Bush. We offer this conclusion tentatively. The Tea Party is a diverse movement with a core commitment to a smaller federal government. Measures of its size have varied considerably. And many in the Tea Party also identify with Christian conservatism—an alliance embodied in the word “Teavangelical,” coined by the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody. But to the extent that the two movements are distinctive, they are likely to split less around issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage than in their attitudes toward minority groups, immigrants and social programs for the poor. We will offer evidence for this distinction from both the PRRI survey and from exit polling in the 2010 Colorado Governor’s race, which featured the candidacy of Tom Tancredo, one of the country’s most vocal and extreme opponents of illegal immigration.
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