chapter five

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND THE 2008 OBAMA VOTE

Anthony J. Blasi, Barbara Kilbourne and Oscar Miller

The 2008 election and 2012 re-election of Barack Obama, an African Ameri- can, as President of the United States was not only an historical event but an indicator of social change. Eighty years before 2008, in 1928, the American electorate would not elect Al Smith, a Catholic, as president. Fifty-six years before the election of Barack Obama, the voters elected the  rst non-WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant), Dwight Eisenhower, whose descent was German, as president (1952).1 The  rst Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, was elected forty-eight years before Barack Obama. Religion was clearly a factor in the 1928 and 1960 elections, while the 2008 election obviously also reects a change in racial strati cation in the nation. This chapter focuses on a religious dimension to this latter social change, though it is the religious identity of the voters, rather than that of the candidate, that is relevant. In bracketing such traditional voting predictors as class identity, ethnic- ity and union membership to focus on religious polarization, we agree that these, especially social class (Van Der Waal 2007), manifested in class cul- ture, have a major inuence on voting behavior. However, while education is the primary cultural attribute efecting voting behavior in Van Der Waal’s analysis, we argue that religion may be a more efective cultural predictor of voting behavior in the Obama era. While the Kennedy election and the fact that four years later the partially Jewish ancestry of Barry Goldwater was not an issue in the Lyndon Johnson election suggest that the religious identity of a candidate was declining in political salience, it can be argued that religion has become increasingly important in issue politics. Catholic Church leaders politicized abortion, to the bene t of the Republican Party, which under Ronald Reagan began to make inroads into the once solidly Democratic Catholics. The political

1 Technically, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were of Dutch ancestry, but by the time of the earliest of these, Van Buren, who was elected in 1836 as the hand-picked successor to Andrew Jackson, the New York Dutch families were well integrated into the dominant culture. 96 anthony j. blasi, barbara kilbourne and oscar miller genius of it all was that the presidency has little to do with that issue, hence President Reagan did not really have to deliver anything. Similarly, candi- date Reagan expressed his opposition to the theory of evolution, gaining the backing of theologically conservative Protestant church leaders; again the presidency is not involved with the science curriculum in the schools, hence President Reagan did not have to deliver anything. Catholics did not mas- sively follow their bishops, who implicitly supported the Republican Party; one might speculate that the educational attainment of Catholics, spurred on by Catholic education, worked against their accepting the implausible economic theories of late twentieth and early twenty- rst century Republi- canism, as well as the rejection of the theory of evolution. However, Protes- tant Evangelicalism and an Evangelical minority in the Catholic Church became Republican activists. The upshot of these developments is that by 2008 religion was salient in American presidential politics. The change from 1928 was that issues rather than the religious identity of the candidates was the focus of religiously- inspired activism. However, the heightened salience of religion after 2008 has the potential of making the candidates’ religious identities important again; for example, Mitt Romney had trouble gaining the support of Evan- gelicals in the Republican primaries leading up to his eventual nomination because of his Mormon religious identity. With Evangelicalism becoming the Republican Party membership at Sun- day worship, what inuence did religion have on the 2008 presidential elec- tion?2 The issues in the election were war and economics. The public blamed the Republican establishment for seemingly going to war at the behest of the oil companies rather than focusing on terrorists who had used Afghanistan as a base of operations, and it blamed the Republican establishment for subverting the  nancial regulatory system and thereby bringing about the great  nancial collapse of 2007 and the consequent deep recession. Was there a relationship between Evangelicalism and attitudes toward race? Our present suggestion is that we must set aside questions of attitudes and deal with organization and activity. That what people say is not what they do is well established in sociology (see Deutscher, Pestello and Pestello 1993; Chaves 2010); what people say may well be what they truly believe, but such actions as voting may not be a direct function of attitudes and beliefs. Vot- ers experience multiple identities, their religious identities being but one among many (Read and Eagle 2011), and identities often serve as the basis

2 It is too early to analyze the recent 2012 national election.