Let’s assume, faithful readers, that you have heard that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Citizen Donald Trump in the 2016 election. It’s been in all the papers.
Now, if you have been reading GetReligion over the past 17 years you are also familiar with another important trend, which is the growing number of Democrats who fit into a very different faith-defined (sort of) political niche. That has been part of our call for increased coverage of the Religious Left, especially on the evolution of doctrine over there (including the whole “spiritual, but not religious” theme).
Of course, we are talking about the famous “nones” — “religiously unaffiliated” is the better term — who crashed into American headlines in 2012, with the release of the “Nones on the Rise” study by the Pew Research team. That launched thousands of headlines, but not many — this is actually pretty shocking — on how this trend has affected life inside the Democratic Party.
That was the subject of our discussion on this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The podcast chat grew out of my post earlier this week with this headline: “How powerful are ‘nones’ in Democratic Party? That’s a complex issue for reporters.”
The talk, as often happens, took us back through quite a bit of GetReligion history, much of it linked to the work and wisdom of pollster and scholar John C. Green of the University of Akron and the now omnipresent political scientist (and GetReligion contributor) Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University (must-follow Twitter handle here).
Here are a few crucial dates on this timeline.
First, there were the studies done by political scientists Gerald De Maio and Louis Bolce, who were intrigued with the rise — inside the machinery of Democratic Party life — of what they at first called the “anti-fundamentalist voters,” but later changed that to “anti-evangelical.” Here’s a bite of an “On Religion” column from 2004.
Many are true secularists, such as atheists, agnostics and those who answer “none” when asked to pick a faith. Others think of themselves as progressive believers. The tie that binds is their disgust for Christian conservatives.
“This trend represents a big change, because 40 or 50 years ago all the divisive religious issues in American politics rotated around the Catholics. People argued about money for Catholic schools or whether the Vatican was trying to control American politics,” said Bolce, who, with De Maio, teaches at Baruch College in the City University of New York.
“That remains a concern for some people. But today, they worry about all those fundamentalists and evangelicals. That’s where the real animus is.”
I caught up with Bolce and De Maio again in 2017, when they released some some new data noting that this trend in American political life had received next to zero attention in the mainstream press.
Our second stop was the 2007 Washington Journalism Center seminar with global journalists in which Green previewed some of the polling that would eventually come out in “Nones on the Rise.” This was the first time I heard him note that the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans — atheists, agnostics and “none of the above” citizens — was about the same size as the number of Americans who actively practice a traditional religious faith in their daily lives.
Green wondered out loud: Would this create tensions with another powerful, grassroots congregation in the Democratic Party coalition, as in church-going African Americans?
The third stop revisited the Green comments in 2012 when the “nones” study came out. Here is that familiar passage from my “On Religion” column at that time, with a public statement of his thesis about the impact of this trend on Democrats:
The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the “Nones” skew heavily Democratic as voters – with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
“It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters.
The fourth stop brought us to the GetReligion post this week and the new podcast, which reacted to a Religious News Service piece ( “‘Humanists for Biden-Harris’ to mobilize nonreligious vote”) that quoted Burge.
Here is my question: Do we need to change this timeline yet again, adding a stop in 1996?
That would be a reference to the polling data gathered about Democrats and Republicans that ended up in the 2003 Atlantic Monthly piece entitled “Blue Movie” that I quote all the time here at GetReligion. And here is that relevant quote, once again:
Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton’s advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter’s life.
Respondents who took the “liberal” stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a “conservative” stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn’t look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors — and better indicators of partisan inclination—than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter. …
Is it fair to say that Morris and Penn had bumped into the “anti-evangelical voters” and, perhaps, an early sign of an emerging coalition of secular voters that could partner with the small, but vocal, choir of doctrinal progressives on the Religious Left — because they shared a common enemy, as in traditional religious believers in pews?
Will that growing coalition, to echo Green, eventually lead to tensions with active believers — mostly Black and Latino — who remain in the Democratic Party? Ask Joe Biden if Black church voters mattered in the most recent Democratic primary in South Carolina. They saved his political neck.
What think ye?
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