Wrestling Against Flesh and Blood: Social and Psychological Influences on the Evolution of the New Christian Right
Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation
Authors Ridenour, Joshua
Citation Ridenour, Joshua. (2020). Wrestling Against Flesh and Blood: Social and Psychological Influences on the Evolution of the New Christian Right (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA).
Publisher The University of Arizona.
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Download date 05/10/2021 13:02:36
Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/656821
WRESTLING AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD: SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL
INFLUENCES ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE NEW CHRISTIAN RIGHT
By
Joshua C. K. Ridenour
______
Copyright © Joshua C. K. Ridenour 2020
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC POLICY
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2020
2
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Joshua Ridenour, titled “Wrestling Against Flesh and Blood: Social and Psychological Influences on the Evolution of the New Christian Right,” and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
______Date: 1/8/2021 Christopher Weber
______Date: 1/8/2021 Samara Klar
______Date: 1/8/2021 Frank Gonzalez
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
______Date: 1/8/2021 Christopher Weber Dissertation Committee Chair School of Government and Public Policy Ridenour | 3
Acknowledgements
A dissertation is a long journey and for me, one longer than my graduate career. As such, the number of people to whom I give credit for this product—it is perhaps unfair to hold them responsible—is extensive. My gratitude extends beyond those named here to the countless conversation partners and (perhaps too often) opponents since before my undergraduate years.
They have done much to shape the manner in which I approach my research endeavors.
Four mentors from my undergraduate institution must be thanked for their role in sparking an as-of-yet undying interest in social scientific research. These are Ms. Kim Freeman, who introduced me to the magic of statistics; Dr. Patty Slaughter, whose ever-feared regimen of statistics and research design laid the groundwork for my later interest in scholarly pursuits; Dr.
Teresa Jones, who still encourages me to dig deeper; and Dr. Robby Franklin, who helped me navigate the tenuous beginnings of my first research projects and the transition to rigorous scientific work. I owe each of you my deepest gratitude, for you were the signposts directing me to where I have arrived today and without your guidance, none of this would have happened.
Without the love and support of my fellow graduate students, I would not have survived these past five years. Emily Bell, Paul Bezerra, Tiffany Chu, Matthew Cobb, Joseph Cox, Kelly
Gordell, Michael McCamman, Leah Pieper, Georgia Pfeiffer, Elizabeth Schmitt, Isabel Williams,
Alexis Work deserve my thanks for their constant emotional and academic support. You have helped me more than I have been able to say.
Successfully guiding someone like myself through a graduate program can be no easy ordeal, and I am thankful for my chair and advisor, Dr. Christopher Weber, along with Dr. Samara
Klar and Dr. Frank Gonzalez. Their constant support and advice opened the door to many opportunities that have profoundly impacted my research and career for the better. Ridenour | 4
I also give special thanks to Dr. Amanda Friesen at IUPUI, an important mentor as I began
to navigate the world of religion and politics. Your introductions, understanding advice, and
regular check-ins were immensely helpful. I carry the mantle of your first academic fanboy with
pride.
Finally, though they often knew the least about my goings-on and were occasionally (and rightfully) frustrated with extended periods of radio silence, my family’s support has been greatly appreciated. Dad, Katelyn, Jocelyn, and Cassaundra—I love you all. From the occasional surprise gift, to the patience in waiting to get a text back, to the relieving absence of “so how far along you”-type questions, you have made an arduous journey more bearable. I hope to share more with you, now that I’ve reached the end of the tunnel. To Maxwell, my roommate from day one, you deserve many cans of tuna and all the catnip the world has to offer. And to Taryn, who has borne the witnessed most of my moodiness, I give you all my love and thank you for yours. Ridenour | 5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FIGURES AND TABLES ...... 7 ABSTRACT ...... 8 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 9 Evangelicals ...... 10 Modern Explanations ...... 12 Chapter 2: Theory and Historical Background ...... 17 Identity ...... 17 Threats to Identity ...... 20 Evangelicals and Perceived Identity Threats ...... 21 Cognitive Dissonance ...... 28 Summary ...... 33 Chapter 3: The Data ...... 36 Coding Publicly-Available Data ...... 36 American National Election Study ...... 36 Cooperative Congressional Election Study ...... 38 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project ...... 38 Demographic Indicators and Statistical Controls ...... 39 Local Sampling and Data Collection ...... 40 Sampling Frame ...... 40 Survey Advertisement ...... 42 Survey Administration ...... 43 Determining Evangelical Status ...... 44 Chapter 4: Empirical Tests of the Threat Hypothesis ...... 47 The Study and Measurement of Threat ...... 47 Threat and Evangelicals’ Political Evaluations ...... 52 Sample Characteristics and Experimental Design ...... 63 Measures ...... 66 Experimental Results ...... 66 Manipulation of Threat ...... 66 Effect of Threat ...... 69 Ridenour | 6
General Discussion ...... 70 Chapter 5. Evangelicals and Cognitive Dissonance...... 73 Finding Evidence of Dissonance in National Surveys ...... 73 Pilot Study ...... 80 Experimental Design ...... 80 Manipulation ...... 81 Measures ...... 83 Results ...... 83 Discussion...... 87 Local Churches Experiment ...... 89 Data Collection ...... 90 Sample Characteristics ...... 90 Procedure ...... 90 Analysis and Results ...... 91 General Discussion ...... 97 Chapter 6. Evangelicals in 2016...... 101 Evangelical Political Commitment in 2016 ...... 102 Evangelicals’ Issue Priorities in 2016 ...... 105 Evangelical Support and the Access Hollywood Tape ...... 116 General Discussion ...... 120 Chapter 7. Conclusion ...... 123 APPENDIX A: EXPERIMENTAL MANIPULATIONS ...... 131 Control Condition ...... 131 Gay Condition – No Threat ...... 132 Gay Condition – Threat ...... 133 Race Condition – No Threat ...... 134 Race Condition - Threat ...... 135 APPENDIX B: TABLES OF STATISTICAL MODELS ...... 136 Chapter 4...... 136 Chapter 5...... 141 Chapter 6...... 149 REFERENCES ...... 155
Ridenour | 7
FIGURES AND TABLES
Figure 4.1……………………………………………………………………………………..53 Figure 4.2……………………………………………………………………………………..54 Figure 4.3……………………………………………………………………………………..55 Figure 4.4……………………………………………………………………………………..57 Figure 4.5……………………………………………………………………………………..58 Figure 4.6……………………………………………………………………………………..60 Figure 4.7……………………………………………………………………………………..62 Figure 4.8……………………………………………………………………………………..62 Figure 4.9……………………………………………………………………………………..68 Figure 4.10…………………………………………………………………………………....71 Figure 5.1……………………………………………………………………………………..75 Figure 5.2……………………………………………………………………………………..76 Figure 5.3……………………………………………………………………………………..77 Figure 5.4……………………………………………………………………………………..77 Figure 5.5……………………………………………………………………………………..78 Figure 5.6……………………………………………………………………………………..78 Figure 5.7……………………………………………………………………………………..80 Figure 5.8……………………………………………………………………………………..80 Figure 5.9……………………………………………………………………………………..85 Figure 5.10…………………………………………………………………………………....88 Figure 5.11…………………………………………………………………………………....94 Figure 5.12…………………………………………………………………………………....96 Figure 6.1……………………………………………………………………………………104 Figure 6.2……………………………………………………………………………………108 Figure 6.3……………………………………………………………………………………111 Figure 6.4……………………………………………………………………………………112 Figure 6.5……………………………………………………………………………………116 Figure 6.6……………………………………………………………………………………120 Figure 7.1……………………………………………………………………………………127 Figure 7.2……………………………………………………………………………………128
Table 4.1……………………………………………………………………………………...64 Table 4.2……………………………………………………………………………………...67 Table 4.3……………………………………………………………………………………...68 Table 5.1……………………………………………………………………………………...83 Table 5.2……………………………………………………………………………………...86 Table 6.1…………………………………………………………………………………….114 Table 6.2…………………………………………………………………………………….114
Ridenour | 8
ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the motivations behind the political attitudes and behaviors of
Evangelical Christians in the United States. I develop a theory of Evangelical politics that blends theories of social identity threat with a theory of cognitive dissonance. I argue that Evangelicals felt acute identity threats to their religious institutions beginning in the 1980s, and these threats motivated to participate in politics, searching for and supporting culturally conservative candidates that championed their religious liberties. Repeated disappointments in the political realm, however, generated considerable cognitive dissonance that needed to be resolved. Across two original experiments and three national surveys, I test the argument that threat motivates
Evangelicals to political action, and the experience of political disappointment and dissonance lead them to pursue dissonance reduction strategies in the form of denigrating political opponents and adopting alternative issue priorities to justify their support of political conservatives. Ridenour | 9
Chapter 1: Introduction
In the United States, religion is predominately understood to have a conservatizing effect
on one’s political orientation. Higher levels of religious orthodoxy and religious commitment are
associated with higher levels of political conservatism and Republican voting (Layman 2001;
Putnam and Campbell 2010). Evangelical Christians in particular, a subset of American
Protestants, have been the focus of extensive scholarly work documenting the rise of a “New
Christian Right” and the emergence of a political agenda rooted in a social rather than exclusively
economic conservatism (Hunter 1983; Neuhaus 1987). Indeed, a majority of self-identified
Evangelical voters have supported the Republican candidate in each presidential election since
1980, and in 2016 they favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton 81-16 (Smith and Martínez
2016). There are two primary reasons why one might be interested in understanding the
motivations for this alignment. The first is that Evangelicals comprise approximately a quarter of
the U.S. population (Cooperman, Smith, and Ritchey 2015), and twenty-five percent of American
voters. The second reason for the attention is that a number of scholars fear that some forms of far
right extremism may bandwagon onto a religiously-motivated political agenda and gain
mainstream attention as a result (Brittain 2018; Claassen, Lewis, Djupe, and Neiheisel 2019;
Gorski 2017; Whitehead and Perry 2020). Given the size and cohesiveness of Evangelical politics, and the feared potential for anti-democratic behaviors, the political influence of Evangelicals deserves understanding and explanation.
This dissertation develops an explanation for Evangelical political activity that treats their political motivations as dynamic, shaped by both psychological and social considerations. In brief,
I rely upon a theory of threat-induced mobilization to explain why Evangelicals so suddenly and forcefully participated in politics. Once active, Evangelicals’ continued participation was the result Ridenour | 10
of political forces and psychological motivations that worked to cement their alliance with
conservatives, contributing to a lopsided political loyalty. This theoretical argument will be
outlined in full in Chapter 2. Before I turn to that discussion, however, I want to turn to two
important foundations. First, I will describe who exactly Evangelicals are, distinguishing them
from other American Protestant religious groups. Then I will outline the two major explanations
for their political activity thus far.
Evangelicals
Scholars have long recognized the conceptual ambiguity that surrounds the terms
Evangelical. Perhaps the reader has heard of right-wing preachers being described as
“fundamentalist.” The two terms are related, but should be distinguished when discussing their religious roots. This is because Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are closely intertwined, and because the movements’ characteristics in the United States are unique. Fundamentalism is best understood as a separatist movement within the Evangelical tradition, a separatism motivated by a militant opposition to liberalization of church theology and cooperation with members of other
Protestant denominations (Marsden 1991). Aside from these differences, however, fundamentalists and Evangelicals hold to largely the same orthodox beliefs. Both groups believe in the divine authority of the Scriptures, the belief in individual conversion, and the necessity of saving souls from eternal judgment (Balmer 2010; Hunter 1983). Evangelicals, though, are more willing to cooperate with like-minded (if doctrinally wrong) members of other faith traditions such as Catholics and the liberal Mainline Protestants. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, are uncompromising. Thus, while Jerry Falwell, Sr., actively distanced himself from the Evangelical
Billy Graham, Falwell himself was eschewed by Bob Jones III for being a “pseudofundamentalist” on account of Falwell’s political networking (Marsden 1991). In case you wonder how one could Ridenour | 11 make Jerry Falwell himself appear a “moderate” fundamentalist, one need only be reminded that
Bob Jones III only rescinded his private university’s ban on interracial dating in 2000 (Ivey 2000).
Given that this dissertation focuses on the political power of these groups, I will speak of fundamentalists and Evangelicals as members of the same political movement. The fundamental characteristic that would most cleanly separate a fundamentalist from an Evangelical—which is rooted in their theology—would be in the decision to avoid political action altogether. Thus again,
Falwell, Sr. claimed to be a fundamentalist although others refused to accept the label due to this activism in the political realm. This distinction would necessarily preclude a discussion of fundamentalists’ political power, and so I will refer to the politically-relevant group as Evangelical, but may reference their fundamentalist tradition and religious beliefs.
Historically, Evangelicals are identified by their positive affirmation of two critical beliefs
(Hunter 1983; Marsden 1991). The first is in the final authority of Scripture and its application to all aspects of everyday life. The second is in the necessity of a personal conversion, or “born again” experience in order for one to be redeemed. In data where these items are available they will be used as the primary identifiers of Evangelicals. Where these individual items are unavailable, an alternative classification system is available from Steensland and colleges (Steensland et al. 2000;
Stetzer and Burge 2016; Woodberry et al. 2012). This measure of religious tradition (RELTRAD) traces the historical origins of each religious denomination in the United States and groups them into seven religious traditions: Evangelical Protestant, Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant,
Catholic, Jewish, Other, and Unaffiliated. This measure has become the standard for assessing religious affiliation, and is widely available in most national surveys.
Having clarified who is and who is not considered an Evangelical, I now turn to the two leading explanations for why Evangelicals became active in American politics. Ridenour | 12
Modern Explanations
Traditional accounts of Evangelical political activity trace their mobilization to one of two
sources. The first is the “culture wars” perspective. Under this view, a divide in American politics
emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that pitted the morally traditional against the morally progressive
(Hunter 1991). The former saw a growing secularism that threatened the very core of the nation,
and this motivated Evangelicals’ entrance into politics (Layman 2001). As a result, the
traditionalists launched a political agenda centered upon opposing the legalization of fetal
abortions and homosexual marriage, as well as leading attempts to place God back into public
spaces through public prayer in school or displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouse and
capitol buildings (Adams 1997; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Moral progressives, on the other
hand, viewed the Religious Right’s agenda as fundamentally threatening to civil liberties in a
secular state and opposed efforts to—in their mind—favor certain religious traditions over others
(Shields 2011). Much of political conflict, in this theoretical perspective, is due to the battles
between the morally permissive and the morally traditional.
A second explanation argues that cultural divisions originate primarily from
sociodemographic changes and the role of civil rights in shaping American politics (Claassen
2015; Claassen and Potvak 2010). According to this argument, individuals did not necessarily
perceive greater division between the parties on the cultural issues of abortion or gay marriage,
nor were these motivating political issues. Rather, religious individuals—and specifically
Evangelicals—experienced sociodemographic gains in terms of education and income that allowed them to participate more forcefully in the political realm. Importantly, their participation would have occurred regardless of the cultural-versus-economic tone of the national agenda. Since
Evangelicals tended to be disproportionately located in the South at the time of their upward Ridenour | 13 economic mobility, their support for the Republican Party was based on issues concerning the urban-rural divide, economic redistribution, and the civil rights movement that drew Southerns from the Democratic Party into the GOP (Carmines and Stimson 1989). To the extent that political strategy facilitated an Evangelical transition to the Republican Party, it was primarily the result of
Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” not the result of cultural warfare (Claassen 2015).
The two perspectives above, which I will refer to as the “culture wars” and “demographic changes” models, have two important limitations that my own theoretical account intends to surmount. The first is that political mobilization on the issues of abortion and gay marriage is not well-explained. Neither legalized abortion nor the allowance of homosexual marriage unions directly impacts the lives of Evangelicals who are morally opposed to such activities. In fact, much of the decline in Evangelical political activity prior to the 1980s was due to a belief that the world would become increasingly morally depraved and concerted action on behalf of rectifying these ills would be futile and unsupported by Scripture (Balmer 2010; Marsden 1991). Moreover, many
Baptists were initially lukewarm is not supportive of the outcome in Roe v. Wade (Balmer 2010;
Garrett 1973). The reticence by many fundamentalists to join Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority indicated a view, rooted in their recent religious history, that would eschew political activity on these issues, not support it. At the same time, however, Evangelicals eventually did begin to care about abortion and gay marriage to the point of these issues becoming staples of both party’s national platforms. Neither the culture wars model, nor the demographic changes model can adequately explain why Evangelicals would mobilize without the emphasis on cultural issues, nor why they would eventually incorporate these policies into a mainstay of their political agenda. An explanation for why Evangelicals would shift their theological focus on separatism is absent. Ridenour | 14
The second limitation concerns the evolution of issues for the New Christian Right. Many
scholars and pundits have pointed to early motivating issues of school prayer and abortion—
though whether these issues truly motivated initial participation is debatable. Court-stripping bills
that disallowed the Supreme Court to adjudicate on abortion or prayer controversies were popular
pieces of legislation to introduce, though they never succeeded (DelFattore 2004). Senator Robert
Byrd of West Virginia introduced a school prayer amendment 8 times from 1962 to 2—6, but only
once—in 1983—did it make it to the floor of the Senate for a vote before it failed.
Views about homosexuality and marriage equality have moved increasingly toward the left
(Ridenour, Schmitt, and Norrander 2019), and Evangelicals are no exception. Although white
Evangelicals are still the most likely group to report that homosexuality is “almost always wrong,”
there has been a steady and significant decline in the likelihood of expressing this view. The belief
that homosexuality is never wrong has conversely increased. The trend for support for marriage
equality is similar. There is a clear, rising acceptance of marriage equality among Evangelicals.
The transition away from discussions of school prayer, the increasingly liberal views on
homosexuality, and the growing acceptance of legal marijuana are intriguing, especially for the
case of Evangelicals. In the case of homosexuality and marijuana, it is important to note that
increasing acceptance is likely to be understated, as some individuals may no longer identify with
the Evangelical faith as they adopt more progressive views. Moreover, the liberalization of those
that remain faithful is not explained by either the culture wars or the demographic changes model.
The culture wars model, emphasizing the motivating power of “culture issues,” should expect
Evangelicals’ views to become more entrenched and their political activity to become even more
intense as both these issues become more nationally-prominent and legally available. The demographic changes model, on the other hand, has little reason to expect Evangelicals’ Ridenour | 15 demographic changes to correspond to changes in their issue positions. If, as Claassen (2015) argues, the Republican Party was not captured but represents a growing constituency, it is unclear why that growth would also correspond got a slow abandoning of the very issues that purportedly attracted Evangelicals to the Republican Party in the first place.
Even on the issue of abortion, where Evangelical opinion is largely unchanged or more conservative than in the 1970s, it is unclear why this would serve as a primary reason for
Evangelical loyalty. Roe v. Wade was generally supported by Evangelical denominations in the early years after its Republican attempts to mobilize a Christian constituency were unsuccessful to the extent they emphasized abortion as a partisan issue (Balmer 2010; Cromartie 1993).
In sum, the current theoretical accounts for the rise of Evangelicalism as a political force in the United States do not answer two important questions. First, why did Evangelicals mobilize in the first place, given their economic and theological preclusions to that mobilization? Second, what factor facilitated a continued influence in politics, even as the core constituency of those movements began to adopt increasingly liberal attitudes on so-called “competing moral visions”
(Hunter 1991, p. 43)? In the following chapter, I expand upon my theoretical explanation that offers an answer for these two questions. This dissertation departs from the explanation above in an important way. The argument I present views the relationship of Evangelicals to politics as resulting from both psychological and social factors that are interactive by nature, not simply additive. By placing a premium on understanding the interrelationship of psychological and social forces that propelled Evangelicals onto the political stage, this dissertation develops a coherent explanation for both the unique arrangement of policy issues on the social conservative menu as well as its progression from the 1970s to the present. Ridenour | 16
Chapter 2 will more fully describe the foundation of my theoretical argument. My reliance on social identity theory and threat to explain Evangelical mobilization, and the role of cognitive dissonance theory in sustaining their political activity necessitates an explanation of these concepts. Furthermore, I will provide a richer historical and empirical backdrop that illuminates the existing limitations in the culture wars and demographic changes models. Before turning to the empirical tests of my argument, Chapter 3 will provide an overview of the publicly available survey data as well as the original experimental data collected and used in the remaining chapters.
Chapters 4—6 will make up the bulk of the empirical tests of my theoretical argument, tackling the role of threat and dissonance, respectively, as well as exploring the behaviors and attitudes of
Evangelicals in 2016. Chapter 7 will conclude this dissertation, providing a holistic story of
Evangelicals emergence into, evolution, and continued presence within American politics.
Ridenour | 17
Chapter 2: Theory and Historical Background
In this chapter, I begin laying the theoretical foundation upon which my later experiments
are built. Because there is a temporal component to Evangelical politics—participation must
precede demonstrated commitment—I first explicate the role of threat in motivating political activity. I will then turn to a discussion of the psychological process that has sustained much
Evangelical political activity, cognitive dissonance. Evangelicals’ entrance into politics and their continued involvement are two separate phenomena. Consequently, they require two separate explanations. I argue that Evangelicals were suddenly motivated to participate in politics because of a direct and highly salient identity threat that was, at its inception, solidly political and thus requiring a political response. There are two reasons this identity threat was particularly effective at mobilizing Evangelicals. The first is that Evangelicals as a group have historically held very tightly to their social identity, for reasons I will discuss shortly. The second reason this threat was so effective is because the communication of the threat was almost entirely partisan from the beginning. Republican candidates and activists were highly successful in framing the nature of discussion in terms that elevated political disagreement to clashes between worldviews, simultaneously requiring political countermobilization. Before I describe how threats to a social
identity can influence individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, let me clarify the concept of identity,
and then explore the nature of threats to identity.
Identity
One’s identity can be understood as “…the individual’s knowledge that he belongs to
certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him of this group
membership” (Tajfel 1972, p. 292). There is both a cognitive and an affective element to
identification. Originally, membership in a social group—identification—was theorized to satisfy Ridenour | 18
needs to elevate one’s self-esteem (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Turner 1975). More recent work,
however, challenged this claim and instead argued that individuals join groups as a way of
managing the psychological discomfort associated with uncertainty (Hogg 2007). Groups, as social
categories, have associated characteristics of their members and their members’ behaviors. Thus, joining a group creates a sense of certainty about who oneself and others are. Group identification, then, serves to satisfy several epistemic motivations (Grieve and Hogg 1999; Mullin and Hogg
1998; Reid and Hogg 2005).
The motivation for identification is important for understanding its consequences. Indeed,
early work on social identity (e.g., Tajfel and Turner 1979; Taylor 1981) was motivated by a desire
to understand prejudice and (hostile) intergroup relations. Tajfel’s social identity theory surmised that hostility toward outgroups derived from the psychological need to believe one’s group is superior to another. In contrast, Hogg’s uncertainty-identity theory suggests that intergroup
hostility results from individuals desires to maintain a certainty about their self-concept (Hogg and
Adelman 2013). Nonetheless, in both theoretical vein the motivations for group identity are also
closely associated with later intergroup processes.
For the purposes of this dissertation, the exact process of identification is less important
than its consequences. Indeed, membership in that group “Evangelical” can offer a multitude of
benefits that conform to the expectations of both social identity and uncertainty-identity theories.
For instance, studies of sectarianism in American Evangelicalism have described how
identification with the Great Awakening-style movements often served to provide meaning and bolster the self-esteem of individuals otherwise neglected and ignored in society (Clark 1949;
Demerath 1965; Lynd and Lynd 1929; Niebuhr 1954). The rigidity of Evangelical beliefs also certain serves to reduce uncertainty associated with the morality of certain behaviors as well as Ridenour | 19
epistemic concerns about the meaning of life and death (Hood, Hill, and Williamson 2005; Kelley
1972; Marsden 1991; Prosser 1999).
As a result, individuals that identify as Evangelical should be fundamentally motivated to
protect their social group. This is especially true due to the nature of Evangelical identification. As
described earlier, Evangelical membership is based upon affirmative identification with two
religious belief statements—belief in a literal Biblical interpretation, and the experience of a
conversion moment. Thus, Evangelical identification is a conscious act (Hunter 1983; Marsden
1991) that is likely to generate greater commitment because acquired identities are typically more
closely held and vociferously defended than are descriptive social memberships (Turner, Hogg,
Turner, and Smith 1984). For Evangelicals, this often manifests in enforcing rigid boundaries
concerning their doctrinal beliefs (Hunter 1983; Marsden 1991). Fundamentalists have historically
been motivated by an unwillingness to tolerate or cooperate with religious groups that do not
adhere to the same tenets concerning the authority of Scripture and the nature of individual
salvation. The root of this intolerance derives from fundamentalists’ reliance upon their sacred text
for meaning and that text’s elevation “to a position of supreme authority” (Hood, Hill, and
Williamson 2005, p. 13). For fundamentalists, consensus on the details of Biblical interpretation
is necessary for what they believe to be the preeminent goal of fundamentalists: unity and
fellowship (Bauder 2011). Homogeneity of belief is necessary among break-away sects and fundamentalists (Prosser 1999).
But under what circumstances do these closely-held identities translate into sustained political action? I make the argument that the answer to this question is two-fold. The task of politicizing and aligning an identity group is accomplished using threats to identity. That loyalty is then sustained through a separate processing of resolving cognitive dissonance. In the next Ridenour | 20
section, I explain the dynamics of identity threat and why Evangelicals might have felt particularly
threatened in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Threats to Identity
Given that social group membership satisfies fundamental needs like self-esteem or managing uncertainty, it should be unsurprising that such memberships are often associated with specific patterns of political behavior and attitudes (e.g. Citrin and Wright 2009; Dickson and
Scheve 2006; Jackson 2011). These identities, however, are only influential to the extent that individuals feel those identities are relevant for the choices they face. Moreover, individuals often hold multiple identities and in some cases these identities may generate conflicting pressures for an individual (Klar 2013). Although there are multiple avenues for making an identity salient for a given decision, threatening that identity is one of the most effective (Klar 2013; Miller and
Krosnick 2004). Threat is a powerful motivator due to the negative emotional reaction that it
generates (Brader 2005) and its ability to uniquely arrest human attention (Öhman 2005; Schupp
et al. 2004). When threatened, then, members of an identity group should be particularly attentive
to that group’s interests when evaluating a political opinion.
Threats to group identity can motivate a variety of compensatory responses, particularly
processes of ingroup conformity, deindividuation, and aggression toward outgroups (Fischer,
Haslam, and Smith 2010; Jugert and Duckitt 2009; Sibley, Wilson, and Duckitt 2007). There are several types of identity threats, including categorization threats, distinctiveness threats, value threats, and acceptance threats (Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, and Doosje 1999). Of particular import here is a threat to a group’s value. Much of the rhetoric from politically-active Evangelicals focuses on two types of value threats: symbolic threats such as liberalization on marriage equality and abortion are viewed as undermining the traditional value system that is a defining feature of Ridenour | 21
Evangelical identity (Hunter 1991), and morality threats such as tax “punishment” for sincerely- held religious beliefs are viewed as attempts to marginalize Evangelicals to the fringes of the social world because of their “intolerant” and “immoral” practices (Balmer 2010; FitzGerald 2017).
Simply being threatened, however, is not enough of a force to motivate negative social behaviors. The nature of the threat and the nature of the perceiver are important factors that must be considered when evaluating the effect of a threat. First, reactions to a threat are strongly tied to the ambiguity with which the threat is portrayed. Generalized threats that rob the victim of a sense of control tend to lead those individuals to feel greater anxiety, motivating heightened information processing and evaluation (Tiedens and Linton 2001; Valentino, Hutchings, Banks, and Davis
2008). The individual’s surveillance system is activated, and their reliance upon streamlined heuristic-based processing is reduced (Marcus and MacKuen 1993). In contrast, when the source of a threat is well-known, individuals are motivated to take directed action in order to reduce the threat and the negative sense of group esteem emanating from the threat (Lerner and Keltner 2001;
Tiedens and Linton 2001).
Evangelicals and Perceived Identity Threats
Above, I explained that Evangelicals are likely to be particularly strongly attached to their religious identity due to the acquired rather than descriptive nature of that identity. A second reason we would expect Evangelicals to hold more strongly to their identity is due to the particulars of their religious faith. Like political ideologies, flavors of religious doctrine and expression can be reflective of the social and psychological needs of its adherents (Troeltsch [1931] 1949).
Evangelicalism’s style of worship and their constellation of theological beliefs is no exception. As a group, Evangelicals have historically been overrepresented among the lower of the social classes
(Clark 1949; Lenski 1961). In this environment of social disadvantage, many were motivated to Ridenour | 22
attach themselves more strongly to their religious beliefs, placing a premium on the emotional
experience of spirituality (Demerath 1965; Lynd and Lynd 1929). As a result, the most successful
religious leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries were nearly always those that addressed the
emotional needs of their congregants. Religion, it seems, offered a way to prioritize spiritual experiences as a way of escaping from economic and social disadvantages that one faced.
Innovation in the religious domain has often arisen out of grievances by the poor and socially
marginalized (Clark 1949; Niebuhr [1929] 1954). Indeed, this focusing of energy into religious
experience and the emphasis on revivalism may explain the dominant trend among fundamentalists
of separatism that precluded sustained political action from the 1920s to the 1980s.
The Evangelical emphasis on apocalypticism serves as a clear example of the motivational
nature of religious belief. Believing the world will be judged and ultimately destroyed may reflect
an underlying hostility to the social structures that disadvantage them (Lipset 1960; Prosser 1999).
That hostility, however, was not translated into political revolution—as it would in a populist
framework—because of the fundamentalist’s belief in individual responsibility (Emerson and
Smith 2000) and the drive for separatism and doctrinal purity. The innovation of the theological
doctrine of millennialism resolves this contradiction by assuring the devout their suffering is
temporary, and that Christ’s return will institute an egalitarian society that Evangelicals themselves
cannot hope to achieve on Earth.
Let us look at a brief history of Evangelical social action to clearly demonstrate this motivational nature. The Second Great Awakening (c. 1790-1840) motivated decades of
Evangelical social activity, both politically and through religious missions (Hunter 1983). Much
of Evangelical social action—including progressive efforts to combat corporate corruption in the
Gilded Age, or the temporarily successful temperance movement—was motivated by Evangelicals Ridenour | 23
believing they were responsible for bringing the Kingdom of God to Earth (Marsden 1991). This
particular belief is termed post-millennialism, because it argues that Christ would return to Earth only after Evangelicals had successfully transformed the world through sustained social action.
Note the importance of this implication—Evangelicals must be socially involved in the world in order to transform it. This implication runs directly counter to the idea of fundamentalism separatism and apocalypticism.
Post-millennialism motivated much activity by Evangelicals, but its optimism soon came under assault. Most importantly, social conditions that appeared as evidence for post- millennialism’s success underwent dramatic change. Rapid urbanization, an influx of European
(Catholic) immigrants, an increase in general poverty, and the First World War began to weigh upon this progressive Christian belief system (Balmer 2010). Evangelicals’ claims of Christ’s imminent return appeared to be dissipating in the face of these demographic and cultural shifts. In this context, Evangelicals that believed a transformation of their world was quickly slipping from their hands were understandably attracted to the end times views of John Nelson Darby.
Dispensationalism was the idea that the history of the world was divided into distinct periods of time, called dispensations (Marsden 2006). Darby argued that rather than Evangelicals’ being responsible for ushering in broad social reform, Christ’s 1,000-year reign would only occur after his judgment of the Earth (Marsden 1991). True believers would be “raptured” out of the world and seven years of tribulation would come upon the Earth. The best-selling Left Behind series by conservative activists Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins popularized this pre-millennialist viewpoint. Rather than an increasingly secular world representing Evangelical failure, the trend was evidence of Christ’s imminent return. Ridenour | 24
This transition from post-millennialism to pre-millennialism satisfied several Evangelical needs. It absolved Evangelicals of a supposedly futile commitment to social reform and justified an eventual withdrawal into isolated communities of fundamentalists—separated and secure from potentially contaminating influences of wrong doctrine (Marsden 1991). Numerous scholars have documented the theological evolution of millennialism and its relationship to the broader social conditions of the time (e.g., Balmer 2010; Clark 1949; Marsden 1991; Prosser 1999). Perhaps the most lucid explanation comes from two conservative defenders of this new theology when they recognized that “many believers were dissatisfied with dominate views of prophecy at the end of the 1800s” and “Americans had difficulty retaining postmillennialist optimism in the view of…social conditions related to industrialization” (Bigalke and Ice 2005, p. xvii-xviii). Despite the seeming self-awareness, however, the theological innovation was seen more as a revelation of a doctrinal truth ignored by progressive theologians rather than as a development of the cultural times.
For these reasons, I expect to find that Evangelicals’ mobilization in the late 1970s and
1980s was fueled by perceptions of threat to their group identity. But what constituted this threat?
While there is no question that growing sexual permissiveness in the form of greater access to abortion, the feminist movement, and the growing awareness of homosexual lifestyles were viewed negatively by many Evangelicals (Layman 2001; Putnam and Campbell 2010), I make the argument that what uniquely propelled Evangelicals into the political foray was an issue much closer to home. The landmark Supreme Court cases concerning school prayer and abortion were decided in 1962, 1963, and 1973. Yet Evangelicals could not be budged from their partisan commitments until 1980 and beyond. I draw upon the argument that instead of these so-called
“cultural issues,” issues of federal taxation of private religious institutions was the primary driver Ridenour | 25
of Evangelical mobilization (Balmer 2010). Moreover, these unique threats came at a time
characterized by general social disruption that was encouraging Americans from all walks of life
to look to fundamentalist systems of meaning for direction and purpose (Hood, Hill, and
Williamson 2005; Marsden 1991). Yet the growth of conservative churches in response to this
desire for meaning was not merely enough to shift Evangelicals into a political machine (Kelley
1972).
Up until several political entrepreneurs (Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Howard
Phillips) were able to capture the ear of some well-known religious leaders, Evangelicals were
generally happy to isolate themselves from society and pursue their morally traditional life without
need of a political champion. When Roe v. Wade (1973) was decided, Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention, published an analysis of the decision that concluded,
“Religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision”
(Garrett 1973, p. 3). W. A. Criswell, just three years removed from his tenure as president of the
Southern Baptist Convention, remarked that he agreed with the decision due to his belief that abortion was a decision for the mother, not the government, to make (quoted in Balmer 2010). To put it succinctly, as one of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s right-hand men did, “The Religious New Right did not start because of abortion” (Cromartie 1993, p. 52).
What changed was Evangelicals’ perception that their religious group was under direct assault. In June 1971, the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the IRS could revoke tax exempt status for private institutions that engaged in racially discriminatory practices
(Green v. Connaly 1971). In December of the same year, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision (Coit v. Green 1971). Bob Jones University, a private religious college in South
Carolina, was subsequently informed that its prohibition of interracial dating was grounds for Ridenour | 26 revocation of its tax-exempt status. Bob Jones sued for an injunction and eventual relief, but the
Supreme Court denied both the injunction (Bob Jones University v. Simon 1974) as well as its claim of religious liberty to discriminate on racial grounds (Bob Jones University v. United States
1983).
The importance of this religious liberty issue in the private realm cannot be overstated.
Indeed, two recent Supreme Court cases could be considered direct descendants of the Bob Jones case, though with a different outcome (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby 2014; Masterpiece Cakeshop v.
Colorado Civil Rights Commission 2018). Paul Weyrich, a conservative tactician who worked on
Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, had been attempting to create a new coalition of
Republican voters. Roe v. Wade and school prayer, he recalls, were simply not mobilizing
(Cromartie 1993). Fundamentalists could retreat further into their homogeneous communities, and indeed their theological orientation supported this strategy (Marsden 1991). But the government’s revocation of tax benefits was a direct assault on the institutions that fundamentalists had been building for the previous 50 years—religious colleges and media empires (FitzGerald 2017). Said
Weyrich, “the realization that there are no enclaves in society…was what triggered that first enormous burst of energy and activity—and it will continue to spark it. After that, of course, the agenda of the Religious Right inevitably grows” (Cromartie 1993, p. 26). The intensity of
Evangelical backlash was only compounded by their strong attachment to their identity (Duckitt
1989). Threats to that group encourage uniquely punitive retribution against the perceived threat.
Now, whether the loss of tax benefits for educational institutions truly constitutes an intrusion into a private space is mostly irrelevant. What is important is the perception that a secular state was encroaching on previously uncontested space. Tax battles were not new in the late 1970s.
The Republican Party incorporated language decrying Democrats’ attempts at eliminating Ridenour | 27 charitable and church contribution deductions in 1954, though it disappeared from the next three party platforms (Republican Party Platform 1964). What was new was the face of that encroaching federal power, and its target. The issue resurfaced with a partisan bent when Ronald Reagan inserted the following language into the 1980 Republican Party platform, “We will halt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter’s IRS Commissioner against independent schools” (Republican Party Platform 1980, p. 14). The issue expanded further in
1984, when the platform referenced the cases of Hillsdale College and Grove City College as evidence for further “federal entanglements” the Republican Party opposed (Republican Party
Platform 1988, p. 28). In both cases, the funding of students at the college with federal tuition aid meant that the schools were subject to federal regulations under Title IX, something the private religious colleges strongly opposed. In the aftermath of Grove City College v. Bell (1984), both schools decided to disallow students from using federal scholarship money to pay for their education, securing their freedom from federal regulation.
For other Evangelicals, however, swallowing such a tax loss was unacceptable, and throwing themselves behind a political candidate that promised to support them was a natural response. By the late 1970s, Evangelicals felt that their subculture was being invaded by the IRS’ targeting of their religious educational institutions (Oldfield 1996). A message that focused on reigning in expanding government powers was equally attractive to religious separatists as it was to racial conservatives that continued to resent federal intervention in the domain of civil rights
(Williams 2010). Beginning with Reagan, Republican candidates became especially skilled in marketing themselves as the candidates for the religious (e.g. Weber and Thornton 2012), effectively making the case that political conflict was overpouring from clashes between cultures and worldviews rather than merely secular political identities (Domke and Coe 2008; Hunter Ridenour | 28
1991). At the same time, Reagan’s economic deregulation was framed in terms of reducing the reach of government power into individuals’ private lives. Together, Reagan was able to develop a coalition of diverse values and principles under a single brand of conservatism championed by the New Right.
One important consequence of this marriage, however, was that these candidates brought with them a host of other key conservative issues. For each of these constituencies, reduced government intervention in one domain was reflective of a broader ideology that served their own interest. Thus, while threat motivated Evangelicals to enter politics and stand behind Republican candidates, it was a separate process that led them to sustain that partisan commitment. Although they often felt that the Reagan administration under-delivered on issues of the family (Fowler,
Hertzke, and Olson 1999), still the principles of individual responsibility and human freedom of conscience manifested in massive tax cuts and removals of regulation were seen as executive support for their cultural agenda (Crouse 2013). I now turn to this phenomenon of cognitive dissonance and political evolution.
Cognitive Dissonance
Dissonance refers to a state of tension that results from holding two contradictory cognitions, or from attitude-behavior inconsistency. The earliest apparition of this theory was in the finding that individuals rated an appliance more positively if they had ended up deciding to purchase it (Brehm 1956). In a more related example, members of a religious cult redoubled their efforts to proselytize following a failed prophecy of apocalypse (Festinger, Ricken, and Schachter
1956; but see Hardyck and Braden 1962). The motivation underlying these behaviors is the need for cognitive consistency (Heider 1958). Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory has since Ridenour | 29
grown into an important contribution to the study of attitude-behavior inconsistency, as well as
motivated reasoning more generally.
According to the theory, individuals experience psychological tension when they are aware of an inconsistency between their cognitions, or their attitudes and their behavior. Classical dissonance theory (Festinger 1957) outlines several conditions that must be met in order to experience this tension,
1. A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves. 2. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo, and the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief. 3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief. 4. Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief. 5. The individual believer must have social support (p. 4). In the context of political decisions I explore in this dissertation, the belief is an individual’s
expectation that a political candidate will achieve policy goals relevant to a particular policy
attitude. Many Evangelicals tend to vote for Republicans on the basis of their views on abortion,
thus the belief is that voting for a Republican will lead to more restrictive abortion regulation. The
commitment in this context is the decision to support a candidate politically through the vote
choice, or the decision to affiliate with a party label. Disconfirmatory evidence would be, for
example, that Republicans did not pass a constitutional amendment on school prayer or abortion
in the 1980s when they controlled the Senate and the White House; that Republicans did not pass
family-friendly legislation in the 1990s and early 2000s when they controlled Congress (and later,
the White House); or that Republicans did not defund Planned Parenthood after the 2016 election
when they controlled all three branches of government. Individuals must also be aware of the
disconfirmatory evidence and have deeply-rooted social support to maintain their belief. Ridenour | 30
The experience of dissonance is uncomfortable, a state of aversive arousal (Fazio, Zanna, and Cooper 1977). A series of clever experiments by Zanna and colleagues demonstrated that dissonance is the combination of arousal generated by perceived inconsistency, and the cognitive attribution that the tension results from one’s inconsistency (Cooper, Zanna, and Taves 1978;
Zanna, and Cooper 1974; Zanna, Higgins, and Taves 1976). When individuals are able to attribute their elevated arousal to something other than the dissonance-inducing task, individuals are not motivated to pursue a dissonance-reduction strategy. When their arousal is attributed to inconsistency, however, individuals may engage in several potential strategies. Individuals can increase the number of consonant cognitions or decrease the number of dissonant cognitions.
Alternatively, individuals can change the salience of their cognitions—increasing the importance of the consonant ones, or decreasing the importance of the dissonant ones. Given the resistance of past behavior to change, individuals are motivated to change their attitudes rather than their behavior when the two are in conflict (Harmon-Jones and Harmon-Jones 2007). In the context of political support, voters that feel betrayed by a candidate may attempt to find other areas of agreement with that candidate. They can also downplay the importance of the conflicting issue, leading to a reprioritization of their motivating political attitudes.
In this dissertation, I argue that Evangelicals’ support for the Republican Party is sustained by this motivated reasoning process. Rather than abandoning their party—altering their behavior—
Evangelicals maintained consistency by adding additional policies upon which they agreed with their chosen candidates, and deemphasized inconsistency by shifting the priority and scope of political issues that were not realized. Is it reasonable to assume that Evangelicals have experienced—and continue to experience—dissonance concerning their political loyalties? While Ridenour | 31
I tackle the empirical tests of this question later, let us again review the historical record of
Evangelicals’ political activities.
Why might Evangelicals be experiencing dissonance in the first place? In brief, because
Evangelicals overwhelmingly supported candidates that did not deliver on the goods. In 1976,
Evangelicals were evenly split in their support for the Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Republican
Gerald Ford (Fowler, Hertzke, and Olson 1999). In 1980, 65% of white Evangelicals voted for
Reagan, a watershed moment for the alliance of traditionalist Evangelicals and political conservatives (CBS/NYT Exit Poll 1980). Yet immediately after Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority claimed credit for delivering Reagan’s win, the Religious Right was told that the social agenda for which they voted would take a backseat to economic issues (Winters 2012). Traditionalists backed by the faithful received precious few executive appointments and the nomination of Sandra Day
O’Connor to the Supreme Court—whom had previously indicated her support for abortion— invited immediate consternation. Although Reagan paid lip service to constitutional amendments on the right to life and school prayer, neither was accomplished. Finally, after public backlash from the non-evangelical crowd, the Reagan administration backed down from defending Bob Jones
University in the Supreme Court case concerning the loss of federal tax exemptions over a policy of racial discrimination. By the end of Reagan’s first term, Evangelicals’ best chances at legislative change had passed. No significant victories came to the Religious Right in Reagan’s second term
(Williams 2010). But Reagan would not be the last disappointment to Evangelicals.
George H. W. Bush was no more successful in the eyes of the Moral Majority and many
political Evangelicals like Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The appointment of David Souter,
who became a solid pro-choice vote on the bench, was another source of frustration. After
Evangelicals supported Gingrich’s “Contract with America” and the Republican takeover of Ridenour | 32
Congress, they were again disappointed by the inability to pass legislation on human cloning, gay
adoption, and funding cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts. Yet after eight years of a
Democratic president, Evangelicals were eager to play a role in electing the president in 2000.
James Robison, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson—popular televangelists each of them—all but
endorsed Governor Bush as they mounted scathing attacks on his opponent Senator John McCain
during the primaries. Yet after Bush’s narrow victory, Evangelicals would find themselves in the
familiar situation of feeling played. The establishment of the White House Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives was seen by many Evangelicals as a half-hearted attempt to please them. The failures of the more substantive Family Marriage Act in 2001 and 2004, the death of
Terry Schiavo, and miscommunication over the nomination of Harriet Miers deeply wounded the leaders of the Religious Right (Williams 2010). In 2006, Richard Viguerie, often called the
“founding father” of the New Right, published Conservatives Betrayed, a manifesto decrying what he called the hijacking of the conservative movement by double-talking politicians like George W.
Bush.
Now, this is not to say that the Christian Right was a complete failure. Indeed a variety of anti-abortion “riders” to restrict federal funding for abortion were passed, equal access legislation secured enough votes in Congress, and the Equal Rights Amendment was killed. However, these victories paled in comparison to the larger agenda items such as tax credit renewal, overturning
Roe, and passing a school prayer constitutional amendment (Moen 1992). Moreover, although the success was limited, issues that receive political attention generally tend to fall off the agenda
(Cobb and Elder 1983). This is what happened to the Evangelicals’ broad social agenda in
Congress. The lack of highly visible legislative successes generated discontent among many Ridenour | 33
religious leaders, who suddenly need to justify their extensive political effort—dissonance at work
(Aronson 1969; Moen 1992).
By the end of Bush’s second term, Evangelicals had publicly committed themselves to five
presidential candidates—three of whom won—yet had little to show for it. Roe remains precedent,
school prayer was unprotected by constitutional amendment, and marriage equality has since
become a recognized institution post-Obergefell. Evangelicals were especially incensed on the
abortion issue, with James Dobson proclaiming, “If they want our votes every two years and then
say ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you,’ then I will take the next step…If I go, I’ll take as many people
with me as possible” (quoted in Domenech 1998). More recently, Evangelicals have taken to
criticizing President Trump’s multiple spending deals that continue to fund Planned Parenthood—
a major symbol in the pro-life movement (Bowder 2018; Jeffrey 2017). Rand Paul, a Republican
Senator from Kentucky, attended a pro-life conference in June 2019 to tell attendees that
Republican legislators only pay lip service to the pro-life movement, drawing gasps from the
audience (Fearnow 2019). Evangelicals are unhappy yet, as we’ll see, appear to remain solidly
Republican.
Summary
Tying these two different psychological mechanisms to Evangelicals’ political behaviors
helps resolve the seeming contradictions that exist in the two theoretical perspectives I introduced
in the first chapter. Evangelicals’ separatism and pre-millennial apocalypticism largely precluded
them from feeling the need to be systematically involved in political affairs during the inter- and
post-war periods (Hunter 1991; Marsden 1993). This theological barrier, however, was removed once Evangelicals believed their very way of life to be under attack (Balmer 2010; FitzGerald
2017). Separatism was no longer a choice when private institutions were to be regulated. Once Ridenour | 34 threatened, Evangelicals were motivated to mobilize in an effort to protect their closed communities and way of life. The transition to public morality politics, through the regulation of abortion and marriage, efforts to “return” Christian values and symbols to places of public life, all cohere within the logic of being unable to separate oneself into a religious and cultural community free from outside interference.
But while threat mobilized Evangelicals, the necessity of justifying the efforts of the faithful originates in the need for cognitive consistency and the resolution of dissonance.
Evangelicals believe that Scripture is the ultimate authority for all aspects of life (Marsden 1993), meaning that their political efforts must also be justified by the teachings of the Bible in order to be righteous. When religious leaders ascribe divine support for political leaders, the failures of those administrations must be explained, and the desire for consistency and justification of effort invites a change to attitudes rather than behavior. Thus, as religious traditionalists rallied behind the Republican administration in the 1980s, only to have their cultural agenda largely dismissed, the faithful required a biblically-consistent explanation. Where others argue that the sanctification of secular politics fulfilled this role for some (Domke and Coe 2008; Winters 2012), in this dissertation I argue that policy prioritizations and political attitudes shifted to align Evangelicals with their chosen candidates.
I test these two empirical claims, each in turn, in chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 will tackle the role of threats in mobilizing Evangelicals, and in shaping their alignment with the Republican
Party. Chapter 5 will explore the contours of Evangelicals’ experience of dissonance, and test the effects of dissonance on Evangelicals’ political attitudes. Before I describe these tests, however, in the next chapter I will describe the types of data I will be using in the following chapters. I use large public surveys to explore the broader trends I would expect from the psychological Ridenour | 35 mechanisms in play. However, to test the direct effects of threat and cognitive dissonance, I rely upon an original survey of Evangelicals. The nature of this survey, as well as how Evangelicals and their attitudes are measured, is the focus of my next chapter.
Ridenour | 36
Chapter 3: The Data
The following three chapters are empirical investigations of the role of identity threat and
cognitive dissonance in motivating Evangelicals’ political attitudes and behaviors. They employ a
variety of publicly available datasets of Americans’ survey responses, along with one originally-
designed and collected experiment. Rather than describing each dataset every time I utilize them,
in this chapter I will provide an overview of each publicly-available dataset I used, including the particulars of their sampling and collection strategies and the manner in which I coded the data within to estimate the relationships I am most interested. Moreover, I will provide a general template for the statistical models I employ in later chapters. I will also describe in-depth the process I undertook to collect data from churchgoers in a mid-sized southwestern city for the experiment I designed. Because the experimental designs are slightly different, I refer the reader to chapters 4 and 5 to learn the specifics of the threat and dissonance designs, respectively.
Coding Publicly-Available Data
American National Election Study
The first publicly-available data I use in this dissertation is the most comprehensive survey
of Americans’ political attitudes, the American National Election Study (ANES). The ANES has
been fielded every presidential election year since 1948, with multiple additional midterm election
surveys and a variety of panel designs. Conveniently, the staff at the Survey Research Center at
University of Michigan has collected those survey items that feature regularly each survey year
and created a single cumulative file that spans the survey’s entire lifetime.
For my purposes, nearly every item I use in this dissertation can be found in this cumulative
file. The exception is the indicator for Religious Tradition (RELTRAD). As will be described in
the section on defining Evangelicalism, RELTRAD is a specific coding mechanism that traces the Ridenour | 37
lineage of the various denominations and sects of Christianity to identify Evangelical Protestants.
It makes use of denominational affiliations (or lack thereof), indicators for the individual’s beliefs,
and their intensity of religious commitment (Steensland et al. 2000; Woodberry et al. 2012). In
brief, others have developed specific procedures for classifying ANES participants using this
cumulative file, although the specific items used to achieve this classification change in the 1980s
due to an alteration in question wording (Stetzer and Burge 2016).
There are two minor differences in how I treat two dependent variables of interest. The
first is concerns what is called a feeling thermometer. Respondents are asked to rate on a 100-
degree thermometer how warm or cold toward a candidate they feel. Many studies of candidate
evaluations explore feelings toward one or both candidates. In the case of studying threat and
dissonance, however, I created an indicator for an individual’s evaluation of the candidate they
reported voting for. While naturally I expect these to be general high across the board—rather than
dependent on the partisanship of the candidate—such an estimate of the extent of one’s preference
allows for me to demonstrate, as in the case of chapter 6, how individuals’ feelings toward their
own candidates has increased or decreased over time.
The second dependent variable I alter slightly is vote choice. Oftentimes, scholars will
convert this variable into a binary indicator, either to indicate the decision to vote Republican or
to vote Republican instead of Democrat. However, voters are not given a dichotomous choice on
election day, or even in the voting booth should they decide to show up. Especially in 2016 where
Gary Johnson received more than 3 per cent of the popular vote and there was a credible attempt
to spoil candidate Trump’s chances in Utah with a bid by Evan McMullin, I opted to create a four- category indicator for an individual’s voting behavior. These four choices were to (1) vote for
Trump, (2) vote for Clinton, (3) vote for a 3rd party candidate, or (4) to abstain from voting for a Ridenour | 38 presidential candidate at all. This, of course, requires a slightly different statistical modeling technique—a multinomial logistic regression—in order to compare the probability of choosing a candidate relative to any of the other options available.
Cooperative Congressional Election Study
Where the American National Elect Study allows for an examination of broader political trends over time, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) allows for a much closer analysis of the 2016 presidential election. The CCES, which is administrated by researchers at
Harvard, allows for scholars around the world to buy private modules with questions that researcher team specifically wants. By purchasing these private samples, researchers also add their specific respondents into the CCES common content, thus diffusing the costs of a large sample design and collection across numerous research teams. In 2016, 60 research teams contributed to the CCES, allowing for a sample size of over 50,000 American adults.
My primary interest lies in the Common Content, which fields survey questions both before and after the November election. However, some items are only asked in either the pre- or post- election surveys, so for some statistical models, I am looking at a subset of the total sample. The statistical tables in Appendix B note the number of observations for each model. This affected only the model incorporating participants’ ratings of how important a specific issue was to them. Similar to the coding of RELTRAD in the ANES, Stetzer and Burge (2016) publicized the appropriate coding of religious traditions for the CCES.
Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project
The ANES and CCES above are large cross-sectional surveys of American adults, each with a pseudo-panel design that allows for comparison before and after the November election.
The Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) uses a similar buy-in design as the CCES, Ridenour | 39
but is instead a rolling cross-sectional survey from August 2016 through November 2016. Nearly
every week during this time period, the YouGov survey firm randomly sampled 1,000 adults for
the survey. Thus, while these are not the same adults each week (a panel design), they do represent
a random 1,000-person sample for each week.
Unlike the ANES and the CCES, the primary effect I am interested in when using the
CCAP data is the effect of a specific event during the campaign. In October 2016, a 10-year old
tape was released where then-candidate Trump was recorded making lewd comments about sexual
assault. While others have utilized CCES data to estimate an effect of this tape on individuals’
voting behaviors (Rhodes, Sharrow, Freenglee, and Nteta 2020), the CCAP allows for a much
cleaner distinction between respondents just before and just after the tape was released. Thus, the
primary independent variable of interest is essentially a simple indicator for what week of the
survey the respondent participated in. I provide greater details about the specific cut-points I use
in chapter 6, and why those cut-points offer a more compelling analysis than a before-and-after
analysis that covers several months.
Demographic Indicators and Statistical Controls
While I am interested in only a few effects, all of them are closely related to a plethora of
other demographic and related variables. To account for any potential statistical contamination of these other effects, in each non-experimental model, I include controls for the election year in
which the survey was conducted, the partisanship and/or ideological orientation of the respondent,
along with profile characteristics such as age, race, gender, education, and socioeconomic status.
In the case of partisanship, which was asked with a seven-point branching scale, I grouped partisan
leaners with the group toward which they leaned. A number of scholars have identified that a
growing number of Americans are choosing to identify themselves as “independent” in order to Ridenour | 40 avoid social disparagement (Keith et al. 1986; Klar and Krupnikov 2016; Wolfinger, Shapiro, and
Greenstein 1976). Each of these are likely to influence an individuals’ propensity for preferring
Republican or Democratic candidates, along with their willingness to participate in electoral politics. Every model used in this dissertation has a corresponding table in Appendix B that details the specific control variables used to not only estimate the effects of my variables of interest, but also generate the figures used in each chapter.
Local Sampling and Data Collection
The above sources of data are excellent in the breadth by which they can estimate the opinions of Americans on a variety of political topics. However, there are two drawbacks to relying on publicly-available data. First, the questions are not generally curated by the principal investigator—in this case, yours truly. Thus, they are not able to directly tap into the psychological constructs that I am interested in; namely, identity threat and cognitive dissonance. Second, the design of the survey makes causal inference significantly more difficult, as random assignment and experimental manipulation are absent. Thus, to allow for a direct examination of the causal effects of these two constructs, I conducted an original experiment using local Evangelicals as participants. While I discuss the design of the experimental manipulation and the resulting analysis in chapters 4 and 5, herein I describe the process by which I identified, contacted, and surveyed my participants.
Sampling Frame
To identify potential participants, I utilized three separate church-targeting strategies. First, using the list of denominations affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals, I used each denomination’s “Find a Church Near Me” tool to find churches local to a medium-sized southwest city. I added to this list of churches the major Baptist associations, specifically the Ridenour | 41
Southern Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Association, and the Missionary Baptist
Association.
Second, when meeting with pastors to discuss the nature of the experiment, I solicited their
personal recommendations for other Non-Evangelical churches they might recommend—a
snowball method. Finally, I contacted and partnered with three major Evangelical-led non-profit
organizations that were locally based. These organizations not only agreed to advertise my survey
to their staff and volunteers, but also to distribute the advertisement more broadly to their corporate
affiliates. The directors of these organizations also recommend additional networks and local
pastors to contact. One of the difficulties in identifying a church as “evangelical” is that often they
describe themselves as a “community church” or as non-denominational. As a result, these
churches would not be included in a list coming from a national website of affiliated churches.
Thus, having links to the local community through pastors and city organizations was
indispensable.
In addition to local churches and organizations, I also reached out to more than a dozen
online Evangelical presences, primarily blogs or newsletters from Evangelical ministries. Only
one organization agreed to share my survey through their weekly newsletter. These survey
respondents were significantly more liberal and Democratic than the local church sample.
However, the effects of dissonance and identity threat are expected to work regardless of the
individuals’ partisanship, even if the targets of their evaluations are different (Republicans should
react negatively to Democrats, and vice versa).
I ultimately identified 141 Evangelical churches using this method. I personally called and
e-mailed each church office—usually multiple times—in order to arrange meetings with the senior pastor. I informed each pastor prior to meeting that I was conducting a political survey of Ridenour | 42
Evangelicals, that I wanted to fully explain each component of my survey, and that I would be
willing to share church-specific and city-wide results with them should they be willing to advertise
the survey for me. I was able to contact a total of 84 of these churches, either through a confirmed e-mail or by speaking with an actual human. Fifteen of those I spoke or met with explicitly refused to participate in the survey or distribute it to their congregation or organization. Thirty churches in total agreed to participate. The remaining 39 churches failed to return my follow-up emails and calls, or were unreachable in any capacity. Ultimately, these did not participate. In additional to
the 30 churches that agreed to participate, an additional 3 non-profit organizations advertised the
survey through their newsletter, and the 1 Evangelical-oriented website advertised the survey to
readers of its blog through a special post.
For those that agreed, each pastor provided their approval after either: a) meeting with my
personally to discuss the specific manipulations and items used; or b) receiving a digital copy of
an annotated and complete version of the survey describing the intentions and rationale of the
project. Importantly, because these pastors were made fully aware of the nature of the survey and experiment, they were told they should not participate. Every pastor I met with had multiple questions about design decisions, and most expressed concerns about perceived implications of question wording or design. However, upon explanation and at the conclusion of our conversations, every pastor that approved of my project had a full understanding of the survey and had no objections to the survey as presented to them. Many described the survey as a welcome attempt to illuminate Evangelicals’ opinions and their motivations for them, and many more viewed the survey as a valuable opportunity to see what not only their congregants think, but also what Evangelicals in the rest of the city and county believed.
Survey Advertisement Ridenour | 43
Upon agreeing to participate, churches used a variety of strategies to recruit individual
participants from their congregations. I told pastors that what they believed to be the most likely
to recruit individuals was the strategy I would adopt. Seven churches invited me to speak during
their Sunday worship service and hand out cards with the survey link after the service. One church
recorded a brief video of me and played it for their multiple service times during the weekend. The
remaining churches relied on some combination of a pastor’s announcement during the Sunday
morning service, an e-mail distributed to individual church members through their listserv (to
which I asked not to have access), or a distribution of the survey to their small community groups
or religious classes.
Individual congregants were told that the survey was intended to explore the motivations behind Evangelicals’ political attitudes and behaviors. While they would not individually be able to receive compensation for participation, I did inform all survey respondents that their church
may be provided with an anonymous and aggregated profile of their congregation, as well as the
broader Evangelical community within the city. All of the pastors that agreed to assist in
advertising viewed the survey as a valuable opportunity to learn more about their congregation
and their city, and assisted me greatly by personally advocating for their congregant’s participation
in my survey.
Survey Administration
For all intents and purposes, individual church-goers that participated in my survey clicked
on or entered a survey link, viewed the necessary recruitment text, consented, and participated in
a single survey. Behind the scenes, however, each individual was randomly assigned to one of two
experiments. The first experiment explored the role of identity threat in shifting Evangelicals’
political opinions, and the analysis of this experiment can be found in chapter 4. The second Ridenour | 44 experiment explored the role of cognitive dissonance in strengthening Evangelicals’ political attitudes, and the analysis can be found in chapter 5.
In the course of recruiting churches, pastors were told about both experiments and told that participants would take only one of these surveys. Thus, the explanation of the design took nearly twice as long as it would take a participant to complete a single survey. (This relieved many of the pastors.) Using Qualtrics, upon accessing the survey link, survey participants were randomly assigned and thus viewed the appropriate recruitment, consent, survey, and debriefing for their specific experiment. They were not notified of the alternative survey to which they did not consent nor see. I randomly assigned participants to each survey in order to avoid two possibilities. First, the local churches varied dramatically in size, and similarly so in their participation numbers. Had
I assigned specific churches to specific experiments, it is very plausible that one of the two experiments would suffer from a severely low sample size. Second, I wished to avoid any potential effects at the congregation level. Again, due to the small sample sizes, attempting to account for these differences would lead to even greater issues of statistical power. By randomly assigning every participant to either one experiment or the other, I attempt to avoid these potential effects.
In total, 412 individuals agreed to participate across both experiments. In the corresponding discussions of the experimental results, I describe the specific patterns of participation, failure to treat, and compliance.
Determining Evangelical Status
In chapter 1, I outlined the historical development of the term “Evangelical,” clarifying who is and who is not considered an Evangelical Protestant. In line with this history, scholars have developed a coding typology for several publicly-available datasets like the ANES, CCES, and the
General Social Survey (GSS). In the case of the ANES and CCES, I utilize the RELTRAD Ridenour | 45
typology as it offers the most accurate identification of this identity group. However, in the CCAP
and experimental data, the items required to use this typology were not present. This is because
RELTRAD relies upon a fine-grained classification based on the denominational affiliations,
religious attendance, and beliefs of the church-goers. The Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project
did not include the full suite of items required to construct RELTRAD, and in the case of my
originally-collected data, I was similarly unable to include each of the items needed to reconstruct
the typology.
In the case of the experimental data, much of the problems of not using the RELTRAD
coding are alleviated due to my sampling method. That is, I specifically targeted churches affiliated
with Evangelical denominations, or churches that affirmatively described themselves as
Evangelical. However, I took this one step further in the coding and analysis of Evangelicals in
both the experimental data and the CCAP data. In both my survey and the CCAP, participants
were asked whether they considered themselves to be “born again.” Identifying as “born again” is an important cultural indicator for Evangelicals and—for the most part—is a unique label for the
Evangelical subculture. In the case of these two datasets—where the RELTRAD typology cannot
be created—I classify Evangelicals as people that either say they are “born again” or
“Evangelical.” Although there is not a perfect overlap between these two constructions, this self- identification method has been previously found to be a reliable indicator for Evangelical status where RELTRAD is not possible (Burge and Lewis 2018; Smith, Sciupac, Gecewicz, and Hackett
2018).
Having thus described the entirety of the data used for this dissertation, I now move to my three empirical arguments. First, in chapter 4, I explore the role of identity threat. Second, I test
whether cognitive dissonance explains Evangelical loyalty to one political party in chapter 5. Ridenour | 46
Third, I take a closer look in chapter 6 at the 2016 election specifically and evaluate Evangelicals’ motivations for their overwhelmingly Republican turnout.
Ridenour | 47
Chapter 4: Empirical Tests of the Threat Hypothesis
In the second chapter, I laid out a story of Evangelical politicization. Evangelicals were threatened by tax policy, this threat was particularly motivating due to Evangelicals’ strong attachment to their religious identity, and because the threat was partisan it resulted in Evangelicals moving into the Republican Party. This chapter provides a series of empirical tests of these implications. After describing how I conceptualize and empirically measure the concept of threat,
I explore whether Evangelicals became especially likely to perceive threats to their values and identity beginning in the 1980s, using data from national surveys. Second, I test whether the perception of threat is associated with political mobilization and alignment with the Republican
Party. That is, were the most threatened Evangelicals moving to the Republican Party? Finally, I use an original experiment to test whether the symbolic threat of “culture issues” was more or less impactful than the morality threat of federal intervention in the Evangelical community.
To roadmap, here are my specific predictions for how Evangelicals should approach politics from 1980 to 2004. First, Evangelicals should be especially likely to report feeling threatened—angry and anxious toward political candidates. Second, those angry and anxious
Evangelicals should be especially likely to report participating in politics. As part of that participation, these angry and anxious Evangelicals should be especially likely to vote for
Republican presidential candidates.
The Study and Measurement of Threat
The experience of feeling threatened is important for its effect on the emotional state of an individual, and the behaviors that emotional reaction encourages. Feelings of anxiety and feelings of anger have risen to the forefront of scholars’ considerations when assessing the degree to which Ridenour | 48 threats can shift attitudes and motivate behaviors. Anxiety is an aversive arousal state that tends to encourage the acquisition of additional information in order to reduce or avoid the discomfort associated with it (Brader 2006; Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, and Calvo 2007; Huddy, Feldman, and Cassese 2007; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000). Anger, on the other hand, is a characterized by quick decision-making and a preference for engagement over careful evaluation
(MacKuen, Marcus, Neuman, and Keele 2007; Valentino, Banks, Hutchings, and Davis 2009). In the face of threat, whether individuals become angry or anxious turns on the degree to which they feel a sense of control and ability to handle the situation themselves. When individuals feel that the situation is out of their control, and the context is characterized by uncertainty, individuals feel anxious (Brader 2011; Lerner and Keltner 2000, 2001; Smith and Ellsworth 1985; Steenbergen and Ellis 2006). When individuals feel a sense of efficacy in resolving the problem, and when they are aware of the cause of the threat, individuals become angry in order to eliminate the threatening stimuli (Carver and Harmon-Jones 2009; Frijda 1986; Lerner and Keltner 2001). In the context of identity-based conflict, this sense of efficacy is elevated to the status of one’s ingroup. When the ingroup appears weak in the face of threat, individuals respond by avoiding conflict and experience fear (Mackie, Devos, and Smith 2000; Smith 1993, 1999). When the ingroup is perceived to be strong, however, anger results.
These differences in emotional experience are related to individuals’ consequent attitudes and behaviors. By prioritizing information-seeking, anxious individuals tend to rely less on their priors when evaluating new information and making decisions (Marcus, MacKuen, and Neuman
2011; Redlawsk, Civettini, and Emmerson 2010). Thus, anxious individuals become more likely to search for even-handed information, and even become more willing to listen to political opponents (MacKuen, Wolak, Keele, and Marcus 2010; Redlawsk, Civettini, and Lau 2007). Ridenour | 49
Anger, on the other hand, is an other-focused emotion that encourages confrontation in order to
remove the perceived threat (Lazarus 1991; Mackie, Devos, and Smith 2000). Thus, anger is often
associated with a reduction in political tolerance, and a preference for adopting and propagating
negative stereotypes about an outgroup (Skitka, Bauman, and Mullen 2004; Weeks 2015).
In the context of threats to Evangelical identity, I argue that threats to Evangelicals
accomplished two objectives. First, existential fears about the moral direction of the country
generated feelings of anxiety among Evangelicals in the 1970s. In the wake of World War II and
the ongoing Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution of the 1960s,
Evangelicals were growing increasingly worried about the general trend toward modernism and
secularism (Wilcox and Robinson 2011). At the same time, Evangelicals had, for historical
reasons, chosen to remove themselves from politics. The removal of federal tax benefits for their institutions constituted a direct threat to their ability to remain secluded. Moreover, the threat was partisan from the beginning. Reagan successfully convinced the Republican National Committee to include the issue of “federal entanglements” in the party platform in 1980. In the face of growing existential and moral uncertainty, and the presence of a very tangible source of the threat—“Mr.
Carter’s IRS commissioner”—Evangelicals were willing to seek out threatening information in the
form of increased attention to issues of strong federal power and broader cultural issues, while at
the same time motivated to channel their anger into political activity. The effect was noticeable.
In 1976, Evangelicals were evenly split between Carter and Ford (Fowler, Hertzke, and Olson
1999). Just four years later, Evangelicals favored Reagan 65-35 (CBS/NYT Exit Poll 1980).
The addition of the partisan nature of this existential threat is critical. Although initially
Evangelicals were relatively unconcerned with issues like Roe v. Wade and school prayer
(Cromartie 1993; Garret 1973), by the time the IRS began enforcing federal non-discrimination Ridenour | 50
legislation, Evangelicals were already beginning to feel uneasy. At the same time, however,
Evangelicals had not forgotten the last time they had attempted broad cultural reforms through the
political institutions of the day. After the social changes described in chapter 2 weighed upon the
optimistic Evangelical belief of post-millennialism, the final nail in the coffin was the public
humiliation of Evangelicals in Dayton, TN.
In 1925, the trial was set to prosecute John T. Scopes, a high school teacher who had taught
the theory of evolution in a public school in Dayton. The teaching of evolution had been banned
under the Butler Act of 1925, and the Scopes monkey trial, as it came to be called, would become
the staging ground for a cultural battle that would affect the development of Evangelicalism for
more than 50 years. The former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan took the side of
the state, while the famous agnostic Clarence Darrow took the defense. The press, national and
local, covered the trial extensively, giving the controversy between fundamentalism and
modernism a glowing stage on which to battle to the death. And to the death it would be. Scopes lost the trial, and was fined $100. But the public ridicule in newspapers, and the caricature by which Jennings portrayed himself, meant the end of fundamentalism’s mainstream influence. That
Jennings fell ill and died just a few short weeks after the trial was a microcosm of the broader
fundamentalist movement (Harding 1993; Lienesch 1993; Sprague de Camp 1968). The public
humiliation was too much to bear, and for the next 50 years, Evangelicals devoted themselves to
creating their own unique subculture (Olson 2011; Smith 1998). They financed and built colleges
and seminaries, they created vast media empires through television and radio (FitzGerald 2017).
And in these apolitical, subcultural communities, they remained closed off from the interfering
influences of the secular nation. Ridenour | 51
Part of their success was almost certainly due to the lack of regulation surrounding their
private institutions and conferences. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, fundamentalist communities offered a refuge for those disenchanted with liberal trends, or those searching for moral certainty and guidance (Marsden 1991). The pre-millennialist approach of waiting patiently
for the return of Christ was well-suited to such a political strategy. Even the civil rights movement could not move many fundamentalists into action, whatever their views on racial integration. Jerry
Falwell, who founded the highly active Moral Majority Incorporated in 1979, preached thus in
1965:
“Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage ware against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudice persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such…When we as Christians see an existing evil, it is our responsibility to pray. It is also our responsibility to preach the message of a living Christ to those who are in bondage to such sin. But it is never our duty as servants of God to exert physical force or effort which constitutes striving.” For many Evangelicals at the time, separatism was the Biblically-prescribed solution to growing secularism. And so, Evangelicals remained largely removed from the political process.
The explosion of Evangelicals onto the public forum has clearly indicated, however, that a change occurred. For Falwell, it began as early as 1976, when he said at a revival rally:
“the idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. If [there is] any place in the world we need Christianity, it’s in Washington. And that’s why preachers long since need to get over that intimidation forced on us by liberals, that if we mention anything about politics, we are degrading our ministry.” When questioned on the contrast between his contemporary political affairs and his earlier sermons—nearly all of which were recalled and lost in 1970 (Harding 2000)—Falwell called the
idea of separation “false prophecy” without acknowledging his ownership of it (Winters 2012). In Ridenour | 52
the absence of understanding the role of clear and directed identity threats, such a profound change
on the theological and political fronts makes little sense.
Threat and Evangelicals’ Political Evaluations
Determining whether Evangelicals were experiencing identity threat, though, is an empirical question and the focus of Hypothesis 1. In order to credit Evangelical mobilization to perceived identity threats, we must first demonstrate that Evangelicals were in fact feeling threatened. To assess this, I opt to statistically model the likelihood that an Evangelical perceived
a threat. In 1980, the ANES began asking respondents whether they had ever felt angry with or
afraid of the presidential candidates. Since the outcome variable is dichotomous, I used a logistic
regression model and recovered the average marginal effect associated with being Evangelical. In
order to avoid other potential reasons why someone might feel angry and afraid, I included a
variety of usual control variables. I included demographic indicators for one’s racial identity, age,
income, gender, region of residence, and whether they held a bachelor’s degree. I also included an
indicator for the year of the survey, along with a squared time trend in order to capture potential
nonlinear changes in attitudes toward the candidates. These terms were included as they improved
the fit of the model to a significant degree, using a likelihood ratio test to justify their inclusion.
Finally, I included an indicator for the individual’s partisan affiliation.
The ANES asked about individual’s emotional reactions to both major-party presidential
candidates. Thus, I present the results from four separate models (found in Table B.4.1 in Appendix
B) representing the cross-tab of partisanship (Democrat/Republican) and emotion
(Anger/Anxiety). Figure 4.1 displays the results from these four models. The dark circles represent
the average marginal effect of identifying as an Evangelical on experiencing the respective
emotion toward the specified candidate. The lines represent the range extending from the 2.5th Ridenour | 53 percentile and the 97.5th percentile. In no cases do we observe these confidence intervals overlapping the horizontal and solid black line indicating the zero point. We see a clear pattern:
Evangelicals have been significantly more afraid of and angry with the Democratic presidential candidate than non-Evangelicals, exactly the converse to their feelings toward the Republican candidate. Although there are some small fluctuations in this effect, that Evangelicals have experienced greater threat from the Democratic presidential candidates since 1980 is clear.
Have these feelings of anger and anxiety translated into greater political activity, or an increased propensity to support Republican candidates? There are two related ways to assess whether this is the case. The first is to compare Evangelicals who report feeling angry at and afraid of the Democratic presidential candidate to those Evangelicals that do not report these feelings.
Do these feelings predict greater political activity or increase the likelihood of voting for a
Republican? The ANES asks respondents whether they engaged in a variety of political activities, including displaying yard signs or bumper stickers, donating money to a campaign, working on a Ridenour | 54
campaign, or trying to persuade someone else who they should vote for. I coded whether
individuals participated in any of these political activities or not, and the model in Figure 4.2
presents the effect of being afraid of or angry at the Democratic candidate on Evangelicals’
likelihood of participating at all. Overall, we see a very small and declining effect of threat on
Evangelicals’ likelihood of participating in politics. Notice the scale of the y-axis and its incredibly small change in the overall probability of participating. What about voting behavior? Many individuals report voting without having engaged in any extraneous political activities. We observe a similar relationship, as presented in Figure 4.3—an incredibly small and declining effect of negative emotions on Evangelicals’ voting behavior. The model results are displayed in Table
B.4.2 in Appendix B.
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While negative emotional experiences appear to influence Evangelicals’ voting behaviors and
political behaviors, the overall effect is tiny. Additionally, these effects have declined significantly
since 1980 and, in the case of voting behavior, appear to be unrelated to the decision to vote for
the Republican candidate in recent elections. While at first glance it would appear this undermines
a narrative of threat motivating Evangelicals’ behaviors, one should consider whether ceiling
effects might be present. A ceiling effect, in this case, would occur when Evangelicals are
uniformly loyal to one political party. That is, if Evangelicals are overwhelmingly supportive of
the same political candidate, variation in their levels of perceived threat would be unable to push
those Evangelicals toward being more likely to support that candidate. Given Evangelicals high level of support for the Republican candidate in recent years, this seems likely. In 2016, 88% of
Evangelicals reported voting for the President Trump (Smith and Martínez 2016). Moreover, we
have observed high levels of anxiety and anger toward political candidates regardless of the
individuals’ Evangelicalism and partisanship. Instead of presenting the average marginal effect as
I did earlier, Figure 4.4 presents the actual probabilities of feeling angry and afraid of the Ridenour | 56
Democratic candidate. This figure uses the results from the model of Evangelical emotional evaluations used previously (Table B.4.2). We see that anger and anxiety toward the Democratic candidate has increased significantly since the 1990s, regardless of one’s partisan or Evangelical status.
A related question is whether cultural issues might explain some of these feelings of anger and anxiety. The Culture Wars hypothesis expects that Evangelicals’ mobilization in the 1980s and 1990s was the result of greater concern with cultural issues. But were culture issues at the forefront of Evangelicals’ political concerns? Since 1960, the ANES has asked respondents what they like and dislike about the two major political parties, coding up to five responses for each party and category. I created an indicator for whether an individual mentioned a cultural issue in any of their responses. Comparing raw counts of how many individuals mentioned a culture issue is made difficult by the fluctuations in the number of people responding to the survey.
Additionally, some individuals simply did not answer any of the questions. Thus, to allow for comparison over time, I estimated the probability that an Evangelical mentioned a cultural issue for each year, and look at these probabilities across the time period from 1972 to 2004 (Table B.4.3 in Appendix B). Figure 4.5 displays the probability that individuals mentioned a cultural issue.
Each pane of the figure represents these probabilities for Democrats, independents, and
Republicans. We notice immediately that culture issues were on the rise during the 1980s and
1990s. However, this cultural concern was not unique to Evangelicals, or even to Republicans.
Instead, the nation as a whole appeared to be increasingly likely to use cultural issues in their evaluations of the political parties. Yet, despite this increase in mentions, the y-axis of the figure must be noted. In 2004, Republican Evangelicals had only a .15 probability of mentioning a Ridenour | 57 cultural issue, and Democratic Evangelicals slightly less so. On the whole, cultural mentions garnered greater attention, but still represented a small proportion of Americans’ evaluations.
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In addition to asking respondents why they liked and disliked the parties, the ANES has
also asked individuals which issues were most important to them, and then to pick the “most
important issue” of whatever issues they list. This question was asked routinely from 1960-2000.
Figure 4.6 represents a similar model as before, but this time predicting the probability that an
individual lists a culture issue as most important to them (Table B.4.3). Here we see a similar trend, with cultural issues rising in individual’s considerations over time. However, here we also see a noticeable distinction between Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals that we did not observe prior.
Although Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals appear equally likely to mention a culture issue in their political evaluations, Evangelicals are significantly more likely to rate that issue as most important to them. Yet once again, we must notice that while this probability rises over time, still it rests below .3 in 2000. Even among Evangelicals who mentioned a culture issue, for many of those it simply has not been their top priority in politics. Ridenour | 60
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Nevertheless, the salience of culture issues and the degree to which Evangelicals attach importance to those issues has increased since 1960. An important related question for the culture wars hypothesis is whether these changes in issue salience and prioritization are related to changes in political outcomes. Specifically, did Evangelicals shift their political loyalties and identifications during this period? I model the probability that Evangelicals identified themselves first as Republicans, independents, or Democrats, and second as liberals, moderates, or conservatives. Because these outcomes are no longer dichotomous, I use a multinomial logistic regression model to determine the probability of falling into each of the three categories.
Multinomial logistic models are difficult to interpret on their own, like standard logistic models.
Rather than presenting expected probabilities for different groups (i.e., Evangelicals and Non-
Evangelicals), instead I present the average marginal effect of being Evangelical on each outcome—in this case, on the probability of identifying as a Republican/conservative or any other category.
I begin with partisan and ideological identification (Tables B.4.4 and B.4.5 in Appendix
B). The story here is rather simple for both, actually. Since 1960, members of the Evangelical religious tradition have been significantly more likely to identify as Republican and conservative.
Moreover, the effect of Evangelicalism hasn’t appeared to change much since that time. So while cultural issues became increasingly important and salient, that change has not appeared to lead to a shift in the political leanings of Evangelicals. They leaned conservative and Republican before these issues came to the forefront, and this orientation remained after the issues did as well. The average marginal effects of Evangelicalism on each of these outcomes are displayed in Figures 4.7 and 4.8. The effect of being Evangelical, then, has remained rather constant since 1960. It stands Ridenour | 62 to reason, then, that changes in cultural salience had little impact on the political loyalties of
Evangelicals.
In sum, we observe a pattern of Evangelicals feelingly increasingly angry and anxious, especially with regard to the Democratic presidential candidates and the Democratic Party. At the same time, however, their political loyalties have not seemed to change, and the influence of these culture-specific threats has diminished over time. While I explore one explanation for these attenuating effects in the next chapter, I want to further explore the role of culture and threat in motivating Evangelicals’ political evaluations. One major limitation of the preceding Ridenour | 63
observational tests is that is quite difficult to untangle simultaneous effects and resolve the problem
of reverse directionality. Do culture issues threaten Evangelicals and motivate their political
participation, or is it perhaps the case that politically active Evangelicals are more likely to be
attuned to cultural overtones of campaigns to an extent not observed among non-participating
Evangelicals? Moreover, while an angry or anxious Evangelical might mention a cultural issue as
a reason for disliking the Democrats, it may be one among a litany of issues mentioned and, given
the relatively low probability of mentioning a cultural issue as the most important issue, it is
possible this is the case. Finally, questions of government intrusion are notably absent in the ANES
survey, and this issue of government intrusion plays an important role in the historical account of
Evangelical mobilization.
I attempt to overcome some of these limitations with an experimental design that answers
two related questions. First, does the mention of culture issues and/or government interference
threaten Evangelicals? Second, if these qualify as threats, do they motivate Evangelicals to latch
onto their partisan identities more strongly? That is, do they polarize politically in response to
identity threat?
Hypothesis 1: The targeting of Evangelical institutions will constitute a greater threat to Evangelicals’ identity than the mention of cultural liberalism. Hypothesis 2: The perception of threat to Evangelical identity will be associated with greater levels of partisan attachment and a polarization in the evaluation of political parties. Sample Characteristics and Experimental Design
In Chapter 3, I described the process by which I collected the data used in this experiment.
In brief, these data were collected in an online format from attenders of Evangelical churches in a
mid-sized Southwestern city, or from individuals affiliated with Evangelical service networks. A total of 211 individuals took the survey. However, 22 of those individuals failed to be exposed to Ridenour | 64 treatment due to a piping error. These individuals are excluded. Finally, 12 individuals failed to complete the survey in full. In total, 177 individuals fully participated in the survey. Seventy-eight of these individuals identified themselves as male (46.4 per cent). The sample was overwhelmingly comprised of non-Latino Whites (75.7 per cent), and overall quite highly educated. One hundred and four of the respondents indicated that they had a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education
(58.8 per cent).
The experimental design uses fictional news articles to make Evangelicals feel that they are being threatened, and then assess their attachment to their religious and political identities. I use a 2x2 design, illustrated in Table 4.1, where one dimension captures the directed nature of the threat (either it threatens Evangelicals, or it does not), while the second dimension varies the context of the threat (interracial dating, or homosexual dating). I include a fifth control condition where individuals read a news article about a mundane topic.
The two rows in each column are identical except for the contextual variation. In the
Directed Threat conditions, participants read about a candidate for Senate that says private religious schools that discriminate against gay/interracial couples should not be eligible for federal tax benefits. The fictional school, Arizona Bible College, is identified as having just kicked out two students to follow the relevant student conduct policy. In this way, the conditions are quite Ridenour | 65
similar to the real-world issue that I theorize was responsible for mobilizing Evangelicals. Recall
that the Supreme Court case concerning Bob Jones University was a direct result of the school’s
prohibition on interracial dating. More recently, the stance of private schools toward homosexual
couples is a greater point of contention than toward interracial couples, yet the principle of
religious freedom from government intrusion should remain the same.
The two Undirected Threat conditions are included to determine whether it is the directness
of the threat that activates Evangelical political activity, or alternatively the simple mention of a
salient cultural issue such as homosexual dating and marriage. Social identity theory should not
expect that a private educational institution being more accepting of gay/interracial couples would
generate Evangelical perceptions of threat. Evangelicals are not being targeted or even mentioned in this context. Moreover, the agent in the Directed conditions is a politician, thus tying the targeting of Evangelicals directly to a political context. Negative reactions to the politician in this story can be acted upon by acting against the actor in the story. In the case of the Undirected Threat conditions, there is not a political actor and one’s taken actions would likely involve avoiding this college, rather than seeking a political remedy. Recall from Chapter 2 that the Evangelical response to much cultural liberalization was to largely seclude themselves in their subcultural community.
It wasn’t until this liberalization was tied to perceived political consequences for Evangelicals that they became motivated to participate politically. Thus, I expect that only in the cases of Directed
Threat should Evangelicals be motivated to attach themselves more strongly to the Republican
Party. I further expect that this experience of threat should generate stronger feelings of political and religious attachment, and lead to more positive views of the conservative Republican party, and more negative views of the liberal Democratic party. Images of each condition’s associated news article is available in Appendix A. Ridenour | 66
Measures
I include three items intended to serve as manipulation checks. In effect, these are designed
to determine that individuals in the Directed Threat conditions report feeling more threatened and
uncomfortable than individuals in either the control or the Undirected Threat conditions. These
items ask how uncomfortable, how threatened, and how positive one felt after reading the news
article. Threatened individuals should report feeling more uncomfortable, more threatened, and
less positive.
After completing the manipulation checks, participants then responded a four-item scale
that assesses the degree of their Evangelical identification, and separately their partisan
identification. These items are adapted from Huddy and Khatib’s (2007) national identity measures
(see also Theiss-Morse 2009; Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015). I then ask for how often
participants experience four discrete emotions when thinking about the Republican and the
Democratic parties: fear, anger, pride, and hope. I also include a feeling thermometer for both
parties as well. The final section of the survey asks the respondent a variety of standard
demographic questions which are irrelevant for this experiment.
Experimental Results
Manipulation of Threat
Respondents were randomly assigned to one of the five conditions after consenting to
participate in the survey. To assess the manipulation of threat, I scaled the three items to range
from 0 to 1, and then took the mean of the individuals’ response to all three items. Note that the
question asking how positive the reader felt towards the information in the article was reverse-
scored. A one-way ANOVA test revealed significant group mean differences in the responses on the three items (see Table 4.2). Tukey’s Honest Significant Differences revealed that only the two Ridenour | 67
Directed Threat conditions resulted in statistically higher means than the control group on the
threat measures, in support of Hypothesis 1.
As a robustness check, I also estimated a two-way ANOVA, crossing an indicator for whether the article was threatening (Threat) with an indicator for the subject matter (Target). Only the indicator for Threat was statistically significant, suggesting that only in the case where the
threat to Evangelicals was both direct and political in nature did they appear to respond emotionally
in a manner consistent with experiencing an identity threat. Neither news article featuring a liberal
college becoming more accepting of homosexual and interracial couples elicited a significantly
higher threat response than an article about infrastructure. Equally important, this shift in threat
crossed over the midpoint of scale. Figure 4.9 displays the means and standard errors of the means
for each condition, along with plotting each respondent’s score on the threat manipulation
composite.
Pairwise comparisons between conditions revealed that both of the Threat conditions were
significantly different from the control, while neither of the Undirected conditions were different
to a statistically distinguishable degree (Table 4.3). Moreover, the difference between the two Race
conditions was statistically significant, suggesting that targeting schools for racial reasons
engendered greater discomfort on the part of participants. Ridenour | 68
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Effect of Threat
Although the news articles clearly worked as intended, their impacts on the outcomes of
interest are, unfortunately, far from clear. I began by estimating the effect of treatment on identity
attachments. The experience of an identity threat should lead individuals to latch on more tightly
to the identity that is being threatened. In this case, I would expect to see greater attachment to
both Evangelical and partisan identity. Similar to the threat manipulation items, I scaled each of the four identity attachment questions to range from 0 to 1, and took the mean of the participant’s responses. In both cases, a one-way ANOVA found no significant group mean differences (Tables
B.4.6 and B.4.7). Looking at the distribution of attachment in the control group, however, this may be an artifact of a high floor for Evangelical and partisan attachment (see Figure 4.10). Historically,
Evangelicals are marked by their high religious commitment in survey data. Moreover, the increased political polarization in the United States has similarly led to a general increase in the degree to which individuals feel loyal to their preferred political party. Although independents are not excluded from this analysis, only 7 per cent of respondents identified as a “pure” independent, and nearly half the sample identified as a “strong Republican”—the highest point on the 7-point partisanship scale. Although the manipulation appears to have effectively threatened respondents on average, it seems likely that there was simply not enough room to move them towards greater attachment to their political and religious identities.
This could be the result of a couple different factors at work. First, it may be that
Evangelical attachment to their political and religious identities operates without the motivation of identity threat. The control group reported a significantly lower level of discomfort than the
Directed Threat conditions, yet is as attached to their identities as those experiencing threat. A second explanation is that neither of these threatening stimuli are directly related to political and Ridenour | 70
religious identities. That is, Evangelicals may be experiencing a chronic sense of threat and thus
be more strongly attached to their religious and political identities (Smith 1998), yet the issues portrayed in these experimental conditions are unrelated to these outcomes even if they are perceived as threatening. Instead, other sources of identity threat hold constant Evangelicals’ political and religious loyalties and the sense of threat elicited in this experiment is simply unrelated.
General Discussion
In this chapter, I tested whether Evangelicals have been experiencing an identity threat, and whether that threat is associated with their political activities and loyalties. Observational survey data reveals that since 1980, Evangelicals have been experiencing a higher degree of threat than non-Evangelicals. On average, they report being more afraid of and angry with the
Democratic presidential candidate than non-Evangelicals. However, whether this perceived threat is the result of a cultural sensitivity is less clear. Both Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals across partisan lines became more likely to mention cultural issues. And in the experimental data, being made aware of cultural liberalization in the form of greater acceptance for interracial and homosexual couples did not trigger a threat reaction as one would expect. Instead, only in cases where a politician was seeking to revoke tax benefits for a religious school—and not merely cueing cultural issues—did Evangelicals respond in a threatened manner. Where the Culture Wars paradigm would expect the mere presence of cultural liberalization to trigger reactions to a symbolic threat, the experimental data indicate that the political context of the threat is an important consideration for explaining Evangelicals’ sense of perceived identity threat.
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At the same time, however, these dynamics of threat do not appear to have influenced
Evangelicals’ attachment to their preferred political party or ideology—at least, in recent years.
The effect of threat on political activity has declined since 1980. Moreover, the probability of identifying as a Republican or a conservative has remained largely unchanged among Evangelicals since 1972. The manipulation of threat in the experiment failed to trigger a higher reported level of attachment to Evangelical or political identities. Although this may indicate the presence of ceiling effects, it may also indicate a simple lack of a motivating relationship between cultural issue mentions and Evangelicals’ political proclivities.
One final alternative that I will explore is the role of cognitive dissonance. In the next chapter, I explore how the motivation for cognitive consistency might lead Evangelicals to remain loyal partisans even after an identity threat is no longer actively perceived.
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Chapter 5. Evangelicals and Cognitive Dissonance.
In the previous chapter, I explored the role of identity threat in uniquely motivating
Evangelicals to become political and partisan. In this chapter, I explore the role of cognitive
dissonance in maintaining Evangelicals’ loyalty to the Republican Party even in the face of policy
failures. Rather than abandon the Republican Party or politics altogether, I argue that Evangelicals
doubled-down on their chosen conservative politicians even when their cultural policy objectives
were unmet. Furthermore, I make the case that Evangelicals underwent a process of issue
reprioritization that allows them to justify their support for conservative candidates beyond cultural
reasons. To test this mechanism of dissonance, I use an original experimental design administered
to a non-random sample of Evangelical churches in a medium-sized southwest city. Before I turn to the experiment, however, I will leverage observational survey data from the 1970s on to demonstrate the presence of cognitive dissonance among Evangelicals.
Finding Evidence of Dissonance in National Surveys
Recall that cognitive dissonance is a state of tension resulting from consciously holding two contradictory cognitions, or from attitude-behavior inconsistency (Elliot and Devine 1994;
Festinger 1957). Most experimental studies of dissonance involve having individuals write counter-attitudinal essays, and then assess the degree to which attitudes are shifted by behavior
(Aronson, Blanton, and Cooper 1995; Bem and McConnell 1970; Steele and Liu 1983). The experimental manipulation is intended to reflect an individual’s awareness of inconsistent cognitions about an evaluative object (Festinger 1957). In an observational setting, however, tapping into this conscious inconsistency is more complicated. An individual’s responses on a survey are likely to occur after the resolution of such inconsistency. Of course, this would also rely upon the individual being made aware of that inconsistency in some form during the course of the Ridenour | 74 survey. While repeated observations from the same individual, such as in panel data sets, may reveal attitude change among individuals over time, it would still be unclear whether that change is evidence of a dissonance-reducing strategy or some other process. Political scientists have long studied the instability of individual opinion as a result of thin ideologies swayed by candidates and campaign peculiarities (Converse 1964; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017) or the idiosyncracies of survey design and context (Chong and Druckman 2007; Erikson and Stoker 2011; Zaller and Feldman
1992). Other research, however, has demonstrated that while individual opinion may be unstable, public opinion may be more stable and rationally representative of the political context (Page and
Shapiro 1992; Stimson 1991, 2004). Thus, to look for evidence of dissonance in the aggregate, I will rely on repeated cross-sectional data, specifically the American National Election Studies, which has repeatedly asked questions concerning voters’ attitudes on public policy and political figures since 1948. I focus my attention specifically on those surveys comprising presidential election years since 1968. Furthermore, I limit my analyses to exclusively those individuals that are identified as Evangelical Protestants using the religious tradition (RELTRAD) coding scheme
(Steensland et al. 2000; Stetzer and Burge 2016). This coding strategy has become the gold standard for identifying Evangelical Christians in national survey data. All models in this section include controls for respondent gender, racial identification, income, education, age, and partisanship. Regression table outputs can be found in Appendix B, within the section for chapter
5. For the technically-inclined, point estimates and confidence intervals were simulated with random draws from each model’s variance-covariance matrix following the procedure outlined by
Gelman and Hill (2006).
Since 1972, the ANES has included feeling thermometer items for the major presidential candidates. These scales are arranged from cold (0 degrees) to warm (97 degrees). Historically, Ridenour | 75 these ratings are closely associated with individuals’ candidate preferences (Granberg and Brown
1989; Sullivan, Aldrich, Borgia, and Rahn 1990). One indication that Evangelicals may have experienced dissonance when it comes to their political candidates is to assess their evaluations of candidates from their own party. Relying upon the religious tradition typology (Steensland et al.
2000; Stetzer and Burge 2015), I calculated Evangelicals’ feeling thermometer ratings of the candidate for which they voted from 1972 to 2016. Figure 5.1 indicates that since 1972,
Evangelicals have become less and less favorable towards the presidential candidate they actually reported voting for (see Table B.5.1).
While feeling thermometers are intended to represent an evaluative summary, some question what these items actually capture (Fiorina 1981). Others argue that these items are separate from true emotional and affective evaluation, and at best cover up important dimensions of affect (Marcus 2000). Affective Intelligence Theory, especially, emphasizes the role of anxiety in prompting individuals to reevaluate their prior beliefs (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000).
Fortunately, since 1980 the ANES has asked individuals whether the presidential candidates have Ridenour | 76
made them feel angry, afraid, proud, and hopeful. Due to the primacy of anger and anxiety in
explaining individuals’ political behaviors—with anger reinforcing prior attitudes and anxiety
weakening them—Figures 5.2 and 5.3 represent the probability that Evangelicals mention that the
Republican presidential candidate made them feel angry and afraid, respectively (Tables B.5.2 and
B.5.3). The outcomes in these cases are dichotomous—the respondent either felt angry or did not, or afraid or did not—so I use a logistic regression model to recover the predicted probability of reporting having felt that emotion.
Immediately, we notice strong main effects of partisanship. Democrats are more afraid of and angry toward Republican candidates, and Republicans are less so. Since the 1990s, however,
Evangelicals have become angrier and more afraid with regard to the Republican candidates regardless of their own party affiliation. The probability that a Republican Evangelical, whom most would expect to be loyal to the Republican Party, has felt afraid of their own party’s candidate has more than doubled since 1996. The change was even more dramatic for reports of feeling angry at the Republican candidate, from approximately .15 to above .4. Evangelical Republicans have grown angrier toward and more afraid of Republican presidential candidates, reaching their highest levels in 2016 with candidate Trump. Ridenour | 77
Has this increase in negative emotion corresponded with a tendency for Evangelicals to
defect from the Republican Party when it comes to presidential voting? Apparently, no, it has not
(Table B.5.4). In 2016, the probability that an Evangelical voted for Donald Trump was .8, the
highest probability since 1968 (Figure 5.4).
Moreover, these negative emotions have grown decreasingly important when Evangelicals
make their voting decisions. Figure 5.5 and 5.6 indicate that the effect of feeling angry at and afraid
of the Republican presidential candidate has a lower and lower effect on the probability that a
Republican Evangelical voted for the Republican candidate. These negative emotional reactions
to their party’s candidate have become less and less relevant for their decision-making (Tables
B.5.5 and B.5.6.). I interpret this as the countervailing influence of dissonance resolution, that
Evangelicals seek out and utilize alternative justifications for their political loyalties. Ridenour | 78
As evaluations of Republican candidates have become more negative, Evangelicals’
evaluations of political issues have also shifted. Since 1972, the ANES has asked respondents what
things they like and dislike about both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.
These are open-ended responses, and I went through each year and coded whether an individual
mentioned a culture issue—abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, and other related topics—when
they were describing what they liked and disliked about these candidates. I then created a simple
category for whether the mention was Pro-Republican (a reason for liking the Republican, or disliking the Democrat) or whether it was Pro-Democrat (a reason for liking the Democrat, or disliking the Republican). Then, I calculated the proportion of Evangelicals that expressed one of Ridenour | 79
these mentions from 1972 to 2016. These proportions are represented in Figure 5.7. We see
immediately that the highwater mark for cultural mentions among Evangelical voters was in the
1990s. In 2016, the proportion of Evangelicals mentioning a cultural issue when evaluating the
candidates was its lowest since 1980. I created a similar coding scheme for the open-ended
question of “what do you personally feel are the most important problems the government in
Washington should try to take care of?” Figure 5.8 represents the proportion of Evangelicals listing a cultural issue as this “most important problem.” There is a marked decline in the proportion of
Evangelicals mentioning cultural issues as most important following the 2000 election of George
W. Bush. Although many in the media portrayed the 2004 election as a “moral election,” it appears that Evangelicals were not as concerned with policy issues relating to those moral issues as in previous elections (Hillygus and Shields 2005; Langer and Cohen 2005).
These trends suggest to me that Evangelicals are experiencing and resolving some amount of cognitive dissonance. Negative emotional reactions and less favorable feelings by Evangelicals do not appear to be undercutting their support for Republican candidates. Perhaps instead,
Evangelicals are simply reprioritizing their motivating issues by deemphasizing the cultural victories they have been unable to secure. These data, however, are not conclusive evidence of the existence of dissonance and its resolution. In order to demonstrate the role of dissonance, then, I utilize an experimental design that induces dissonance in some Evangelicals, then compares their political evaluations to individuals not experiencing dissonance.
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Pilot Study
Experimental Design
I relied on an online sample of 416 U.S. adults that were recruited through Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk (mTurk) platform and paid $0.67 for their time. mTurk listed my survey as a Ridenour | 81
“human intelligence task” (HIT), but only individuals that identified as U.S. political conservatives
were eligible to see the HIT in their available tasks. I narrowed my sample for the pilot test to conservatives because Evangelicals are overwhelmingly conservative in the United States, and mTurk did not have the option to restrict to Evangelicals only. Due to an error in Qualtrics text
piping, 50 individuals were not exposed to the treatment. Their data were excluded. Furthermore,
I restricted the sample used in my analyses to the 183 individuals that indicated they were “born
again” or had experienced a personal conversion experience with Jesus Christ, or identified as
“Evangelical.” Sample statistics are presented in Table B.5.1 in the appendix. Participants were
majority female, and overwhelmingly white and Republican. Sixty-three percent of the useable
sample identified as both Evangelical and born-again. Aside from gender and race, I did not solicit
any additional demographic information.
Manipulation
In order to induce dissonance, I relied on the counter-attitudinal essay task commonly
employed in studies of cognitive dissonance (Festinger and Carlsmith 1959; Linder, Cooper, and
Jones 1967). However, I opted to use an especially affronting writing task. Prior to the
manipulations, individuals were asked about their voting behavior in 2016 as well as their preferred
political party. Individuals that did not choose either the Democratic or Republican parties were
asked if they leaned one way or the other. Only six Evangelicals indicated that they did not lean
one way or the other. These individuals did not view the treatments (for reasons to be explained
shortly) and are excluded. After reporting their political affiliations, I asked respondents to rank
order 7 political issues. They were: abortion, immigration, religious freedom, healthcare, LGBT
issues, national security, and taxes. The order in which these were presented to individuals was Ridenour | 82
randomized, and individuals had to physically click and drag responses with the most important
issue at the top and the least important issue at the bottom.
Following this task, respondents were placed into one of three conditions. In the control
condition, participants read about the Senate passing a bill intended to revitalize American
infrastructure. Because infrastructure was not one of the issues in the order-of-importance task, I expect this article to have no effect on individuals’ political opinions. In the remaining two conditions, I informed individuals that I was interested in a public opinion task where I needed them to write a particular argument for me. Based on their party affiliation and their rank-ordering of issues, I asked them to write a 1-2 sentence argument that their preferred political party does not represent voters on the issue that they rated as personally most important. This setup necessarily excluded the six pure independents from viewing treatment. I disguised the counter- attitudinal prompt as being the result of my having too many pro-attitudinal essays already written by participants, and thus needing counter-attitudinal essays. The difference between the two essay conditions was that in one—the “high choice” condition—I introduced the task by emphasizing in bold letters that this portion of the survey was voluntary. Moreover, I reminded people after explaining the task that this portion was (again) voluntary. Individuals in the “low choice” condition were not reminded of the voluntary nature of this survey task. This design follows in the steps of other induced-compliance studies of dissonance.
Surprisingly, compliance was quite low in both conditions, though lower in the high choice condition. Thirty-one of sixty Evangelicals in the high choice condition actually complied. Forty- two of sixty in the low choice condition complied. The Non-compliers did not follow the directions and either wrote a pro-attitudinal essay or simply left the essay portion blank. Six individuals in the high choice essay condition stated that they could not complete the task because they disagreed Ridenour | 83
with it, while two individuals in the low choice condition said the same. To account for this non- compliance, I created a categorical variable for five types of individuals: those in the control, compliers in the high choice condition, compliers in the low choice condition, and non-compliers in each of the high and low choice conditions.
Measures
After completing the writing task, I asked individuals how “uncomfortable,” “proud,” and
“frustrated” individuals felt when either reading the article (control) or when writing their
argument. I also asked the extent to which individuals felt both positive and negative feelings
toward the article of their argument. Each of these items were standardized to range from 0 to 1,
and I took the mean of individuals’ responses to form a measure of their discomfort with the writing task (α = 0.78). This discomfort indicator is the operationalization of dissonance for my experiment.
Results Ridenour | 84
To determine whether there existed important group mean differences, I conducted a one- way ANOVA, where the grouping variable was the indicator for condition and compliance with
the instructions. There was a significant effect of condition on discomfort [F (4, 178) = 7.477, p <
.001]. To determine where these group mean differences lie, I used Tukey’s Honest Significant
Difference test. Individuals in both the high- and low-choice conditions complied that with my
request to write a counter-attitudinal essay expressed significantly more discomfort (p < .01 high
choice; p <.001 low choice). In contrast to most studies of induced compliance, it did not appear
to matter whether participants were reminded that the essay-writing task was voluntary (see Table
5.1). Essay ownership, then, appears to be unrelated to the experience of psychological discomfort.
Individuals that refused to participate did not react any more negatively to the task than individuals
reading a news story about an unrelated political topic. Figure 5.9 represents the distribution of
respondents’ discomfort in each of the 5 groups, as well as the corresponding group means and
standard errors. Ridenour | 85
An alternative approach to dealing with non-compliance is to estimate Compliance
Average Treatment Effects (CATE; or Local Average Treatment Effects [LATE]) using participants’ random treatment assignment as an instrument for actual treatment (Imbens and
Angrist 1994). Because compliance in this case is one-sided (i.e., those assigned to treatment may not be treated, but individuals assigned to control will not be treated), the local average treatment effect correctly estimates the effect of treatment on the treated (Frölich and Melly 2013). This requires a slightly different specification from the one-way ANOVA. First, participants in the control and individuals who did not comply with the experimental instructions were coded 0 with respect to the variable treatment. Compliers were coded as 1. A separate indicator for assignment, assign, was coded 0 for individuals assigned to the control, and 1 for all participants assigned to either of the two treatment conditions. Assign is an instrumental variable for treatment. Table 5.2 presents the results from this instrumental variable regression, which identified a significant effect Ridenour | 86
of treatment on compliers’ discomfort after completing the writing task.1 On average, treatment
resulted in feeling 28 per cent more uncomfortable than not completing the task or viewing an
unrelated political article.
Estimating these effects separately for individuals in the high- and low-choice conditions reveals similar patterns. Whether participants were reminded of the voluntary nature of the task or not did not substantively affect the treatment’s ability to induce dissonance among those who complied with the experimental task. Those in the high- and low-choice conditions were equally uncomfortable with treatment (28 per cent more uncomfortable than the untreated, in both cases).
1 Note that the scale of the dependent variable ranges from high discomfort at the bottom end, to low discomfort at the top end. Thus, the negative coefficient indicates more discomfort relative to those not treated in the sample. Ridenour | 87
One potential concern is whether compliance is non-random. Specifically, some political
issues may be more closely held and thus individuals would be less willing to write a counter-
attitudinal essay when it concerns that topic. Issue importance, of course, is not randomly
assigned. Thus, I estimated a simple logistic regression that predicts individuals’ likelihood to
comply using their most important issue ranking. I found no significant effect of issue—that is,
rates of compliance do not appear to differ between individuals who choose different issues as
being most personally important. Figure 5.10 presents the average rank-ordering of each political
issue among those who comply and those who do not, side-by-side.
Because respondents were asked to rank the issues from 1-7, the most important issue for each respondent had the lowest ordered value (it was ranked a 1). Thus, lower bars indicate that, on average, the participants rated that issue as more important than other issues. What this figure demonstrates is that the issue priorities of those who complied with the experimental task is largely similar to the issue priorities of those who did not comply. That is, non-compliance does not appear to be the result of Evangelicals issue priorities as much as it does with their general unwillingness to make a counter-attitudinal argument. Thus, experimental compliance does not
seem to be influenced by the particular issue Evangelicals care most about.
Discussion
The results indicate that the experimental writing task is an effective method of inducing
dissonance in participants. Not only were essay-writers more uncomfortable after completing the task, but the effect of this task was limited to only those individuals who actually complied with the written instructions, on average. Simply viewing the task did not appear to create a lasting treatment effect. Indeed, the decision to disobey the instructions may have been a dissonance- reduction strategy. Were dissonance to be effectively eliminated by writing a pro-attitudinal essay, Ridenour | 88 we would expect precisely the same results here. The current design, however, did not have the capability of assessing dissonance prior to the decision to comply.
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Interestingly, there did not appear to be differences in the effect of treatment on individuals assigned to the high- versus low-choice conditions. Traditional dissonance theory would argue that because individuals in the high-choice condition were acutely aware of their own choice in the matter, they should experience higher levels of dissonance. That did not occur in these data, with treatment leading to similarly strong effects for both groups. This may be due to the particularly on-the-nose nature of the writing task.
Local Churches Experiment
Although the pre-test was encouraging with regard to the effect of the dissonance task, the real interest is whether individuals engage in several dissonance-reduction strategies. Specifically, when Evangelicals are faced with needing to resolve the inconsistency between supporting
Republican candidates and those candidates failing to achieve culturally-important policy goals, they should engage in one or more of three strategies. First, Evangelicals may report less strongly identifying with the Republican Party as a way of expelling the dissonance between behavior and attitude (Hypothesis 1: Disengagement). Second, Evangelicals may instead double-down on their commitment to the Republican Party and justify their political behavior by contrasting a non-ideal choice with an even worse one: the Democratic Party. As a result, their evaluations of the two parties should grow relatively more polarized (Hypothesis 2: Evaluation Polarization). Third,
Evangelicals may reduce the relevance of the dissonance-inducing culture opinions by changing their political priorities and emphasizing alternative policy areas where they have greater alignment with the Republicans they support (Hypothesis 3: Issue Reprioritization). To test these expectations, I opted to restrict my data collection to exclusively local, adult Evangelicals. In the next section, I describe my process of recruiting local churchgoers. Ridenour | 90
Data Collection
In Chapter 3, I described the process by which I collected the data used in this experiment.
In brief, these data were collected in an online format from attenders of Evangelical churches in a
mid-sized Southwestern city, or from individuals affiliated with Evangelical service networks.
Sample Characteristics
A total of 201 individuals agreed to participate in the survey experiment. Of these, 50
identified as pure independents (and thus did not view the treatment) or failed to complete the
survey. Thus, this analysis is limited to the 151 individuals that completed the survey. Table B.5.6
in Appendix B presents the sample statistics. The sample was majority female and white. Only 3
per cent of the sample did not identify as either Evangelical or born again, while 68 per cent
labelled themselves as both. The sample was also overwhelmingly Republican (73 per cent).
Finally, the sample was quite highly educated, with 54 per cent of the sample reporting having a
4-year college degree or a graduate degree.
Procedure
Much of the substantive procedure was identical to the pre-test, especially the nature and
language of the manipulations. Prior to viewing the experimental task, individuals were asked for
their interest in politics, their partisan and ideological affiliations, and their evaluations of the
major differences between the political parties. I also asked whether there were political candidates
or positions that they were aware their pastor or church congregation tended to support or oppose.
Finally, I asked all participants to rank order the seven political issues from most to least important:
Abortion, Religious freedom, LGBT civil rights, National security, Taxes, Healthcare, and
Immigration. The appearance of these items in the click-and-drag exercise was randomly varied for each participant. Ridenour | 91
Upon completing the ranking, individuals were then assigned to one of three conditions,
similar to the pre-test. A control group read an article about the Senate passing an infrastructure
bill. The remaining two writing conditions were asked to craft a 1-2 sentence argument for why the party they indicated supporting previously in the survey does not represent Evangelicals on the issue they had personally rated as most important to them. Thus, the manipulation was slightly personalized to each individual (based on their partisanship and their issue evaluation). The only difference between the two writing conditions was that in one condition, I reminded individuals with bold letters that the task was voluntary, but I would appreciate their help. All individuals in the treatment were told their essays would be used in future research and evaluated on their strength, persuasiveness, and accuracy. Participants were encouraged to make their argument as convincing and honest as possible.
After the manipulation, all participants were asked for their strength of partisan identification using the 4-item scale developed by Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe (2015; adapted from
Theiss-Morse 2009). Partisan evaluations were assessed by asking respondents how angry, afraid, proud, and hopeful each political party made them feel, as well as a feeling thermometer for each party. The order of parties was randomized for each participant. Finally, to assess issue importance respondents were given a matrix table containing the same seven political issues they had rank- ordered prior to treatment. Again, the presentation of these items was randomized for each individual. Instead of rank-ordering this time, however, each policy item had a 7-point Likert scale.
This allowed individuals to change the relative priority of specific items, without relying on an identical style as prior to treatment.
Analysis and Results Ridenour | 92
Prior to conducting the analysis, individuals were coded for whether or not they complied
with the experimental instructions. Noncompliance continued to be widespread, though especially
in the high choice conditions. Only fifteen of fifty-eight individuals in the high choice condition
followed the instructions and wrote a counter-attitudinal essay; twenty of the forty-seven in the low choice condition complied. Given that the voluntariness of the task did not appear to matter in the pilot study and the low numbers of complying participants I collapsed respondents across the manipulation of voluntariness and created three groups: the control (n = 53), compliers (n = 35), and non-compliers (n = 63). I then compared Non-compliers and Compliers to the control group across three dimensions: the strength of partisan identification (H1), evaluations of the two parties
(H2), and issue importance ratings (H3).
Partisan Identification To assess changes in partisan identification, I calculate individuals’
partisan identification scores by rescaling the four partisan identity items to range from 0 to 1. I
then take the mean of individuals’ responses to the items. The reliability of this scale was higher
for partisans than for leaners, as might be expected (αpartisans = 0.83; αindependents = 0.65). A one-way
ANOVA did not reveal any significant differences between the conditions on the dimension of
partisan identity strength (F [2, 126] = 1.054, p = .352). Individuals that wrote a counter-attitudinal
essay did not appear to be significantly more likely to report a higher identification with their party,
which is inconsistent with my first hypothesis. Re-running the analysis excluding leaners did not
change the outcome (F [2, 98] = 2.131, p = .124). Experiencing dissonance did not appear to influence the degree to which individuals feel attached to their partisan identification. Hypothesis
1: Disengagement is not supported.
Party Evaluations I estimated treatment effects on two aspects of party evaluations. First,
I conducted separate ANOVA tests for each emotion item, for each party. On only one item did I Ridenour | 93
find a significant effect of the dissonance task, though two other items were marginally significant.
Specifically, individuals that complied with the dissonance task reported feeling angry with
Democrats more often than individuals in the control or who did not comply (Fangry [2, 144] =
4.767, p < .01). There was a similar, but statistically marginal effect on feelings of hope and feeling
afraid of Democrats (Fhope [2, 144] = 2.472, p = .088; Fafraid [2, 144] = 2.536, p = .083). In each of
these cases, individuals that complied with the task reported more negative (or less positive)
feelings toward Democrats as a result of treatment. Figure 5.11 demonstrates that individuals who
experienced dissonance reported feeling about 13% angrier toward the Democratic Party than
those that did not. Those in the control and those who did not comply with the task were
statistically indistinguishable (see Tables B.5.7—B.5.9).
This pattern of emotional reactions is similar to the pattern observed in the previous
chapter. When Evangelicals mention cultural reasons when asked what they like and dislike about
candidates, it tends to negatively impact Democratic candidates while having a smaller positive
effect for Republicans. Thus, the effects of both threat and, it seems, disappointment appear
particularly disproportionate for Evangelical voters. Hypothesis 2: Evaluation Polarization is
modestly supported.
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Issue Importance The final strategy that individuals may use to alleviate dissonance is to deprioritize the relevance of a dissonance-inducing cognition. In this case, after arguing that a party they support does not represent them on a particular issue, Evangelicals may rate other issues as relatively more important. To capture this alteration, I used respondents’ ratings of how important their most important issue was to them. I then evaluated importance change as manifesting in two possible ways. First, individuals may downplay the importance of their previously “most important” issue. This would be represented by a lower average importance score among compliers. A one-way ANOVA failed to find such an effect (F [2,140] = 0.354, p = .703). Ridenour | 95
Thus, it does not seem that Evangelicals respond to dissonance by de-prioritizing the item they
previously said was most important. However, it is possible that rather than subtracting dissonant
cognitions, individuals simply overwhelm it by adding more consonant cognitions—in this case,
by adding other policy areas where they agree with their party. This would be represented by a
higher relative importance on the non-“most important” issues. A one-way ANOVA found a marginally significant difference in group means (F [2, 140] = 2.397, p = .095). Tukey’s test revealed that individuals who complied with the writing task had a higher average rating of other political issues’ importance after treatment, though again, the effect was marginal (see Figure
5.12). The control group and individuals who did not comply were not statistically different (p >
.24, see Table 8). Hypothesis 3: Issue Re-prioritization receives mixed support, and requires further
exploration.
Compliance Average Treatment Effects Unlike the pilot study above, the local church
sample suffers particularly from the rates of non-compliance when it comes to estimating treatment
effects on the treated. Across all three hypotheses and the respective tests within each hypothesis,
an instrumental variables regression that accounts for non-compliance fails to find any significant
effect of treatment on compliers. However, this is likely due to serious issues of statistical power
and the low number of those treated in the sample. To find a small effect size in a three-group
balanced sample, I would need approximately 52 participants in each condition. However, my
design has two additional complications. First, the groups are unbalanced—there are not equal
numbers of participants in each condition. Using a power analysis simulation, I find that even in
the case where the ANOVA identifies a significant group mean difference—anger towards
Democrats—the model is slightly underpowered when accounting for the unbalanced nature of the
design (0.77, relative to the generally-accepted power level of 0.80). Ridenour | 96
Second, these typical power analyses do not account for the non-compliance that exists in my data. While a new general framework for estimating the power of LATE estimation has been proposed, to my knowledge there is no relevant software implementation (Bansak 2019). Future data collection should account for the need for not only more participating subjects, but also the unusually high rates of non-compliance I observe here. With appropriate statistical power, I suspect that—similar to the pilot test—the results of the instrumental variable regression will resemble those from the one-way ANOVA if sufficiently powered. Ridenour | 97
General Discussion
Not every dissonance-reducing strategy was employed by local church respondents.
Contrary to the expectations of the Disengagement Hypothesis, individuals subjected to a
dissonance-task did not appear to become less strongly identified with their political party. This
was true regardless of whether individuals actually completed the task or not. Thus, perceived inconsistencies between a party and one’s issue preferences do not appear to explain one’s level of partisan identification. This could result from two possibilities. First, partisan identity may be so central that it is not easily moved by short experimental tasks (Huddy 2013; Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015). Alternatively, because strong and weak identifiers exhibit different responses to threats to group identity, it is possible that the treatment had different effects conditional on the
individual’s level of partisan identification (Huddy 2013; Mackie, Devos, and Smith 2000).
Because partisan identity was measured after treatment, however, I cannot conclusively test this
possibility.
Evaluations of the parties, on the other hand, appear to be somewhat shaped by the
experience of cognitive dissonance. Individuals that completed a dissonance-inducing task
reported feeling angry with Democrats more often than individuals in a control and those who did
not comply with the dissonance-task. I found less certain results that individuals viewed the
Democrats more negatively in terms of hope and fear as a result of treatment. Interestingly, these
affective responses appear to be directed primarily at one political party. This is likely due to the
overwhelming Republican presence in my sample (68% Republican, 13% Democratic). It is
possible that Democrats would report more negative feelings toward Republicans, were they better
represented in my sample. Nonetheless, this pattern would be consistent with both social
comparison theories and balance theory. To restore group self-esteem, individuals often engage in Ridenour | 98 downward social comparisons by denigrating another, rather than becoming more affectively positive towards the threatened group (Tajfel and Turner 1979). Alternatively, when negative considerations of one’s own party are made salient, individuals may seek to restore cognitive consistency by portraying support for a non-ideal party as a necessity given the even worse attributes of the opposing political party (Heider 1958).
Finally, I find inconclusive but suggestive evidence in favor of the Policy Reprioritization
Hypothesis. Individuals that complied with my dissonance task rated other policy issues as more important when asked to rank them individually on 7-point scales. Although the effect here is small and does not reach conventional levels of significance, that there is any noticeable movement between conditions is encouraging given the small sample sizes. It is additionally intriguing that we observe movement on the same issues that individuals had ranked approximately 5-7 minutes before.
The results seem to suggest that dissonance between voting behavior and political disappointment encouraged individuals to dig in, rather than weaken their loyalties to a party.
While this result would be consistent with previous work exploring the effect of dissonance on attitudinal change, it is at the same time troubling when applied to the realm of policy and representation. A standard expectation of voter behavior is that individuals choose candidates based upon how well those candidates represent their interests on particular issues (Erikson and
Tedin 2015). When candidates do not live up to their campaign promises, it is assumed they will be punished at the polls come election season. The results from this experiment finds that may not always be the case. Instead, individuals may pursue two strategies designed to justify their prior commitments. First, they may justify their support by denigrating the out-party or alternative choice. Thus, the decision can become “choosing between the lesser of two evils,” rather than Ridenour | 99
throwing whole-hearted support behind a disappointing candidate. Second, voters may fall back
upon other political issues as additional reasons for their support. In essence, single-issue voters may adopt consistent views on other areas, or re-prioritize other issues as reasons for voting the way they have previously.
The influence of dissonance, as described here, helps relieve some of the contradiction between Evangelicals’ contemporary political behavior and the Culture Wars and
Sociodemographic approaches described earlier. The steady liberalization of American voters, including Evangelicals, does not necessarily lead to a weakening of Evangelical support for the
Republican party under this perspective. The macro trends expected by the Sociodemographic explanation may be the result of these micro-level psychological motivations for Evangelical behaviors.
There are limitations to these broad claims. One limiting factor is whether voters are aware of inconsistencies between their voting behavior and their chosen candidate’s actions once in office. Elected officials are motivated to emphasize what they have done for constituents rather than what they have not, and to frame failures in self-serving ways. Given that voters are also motivated to seek out attitude-confirming information (Kunda 1990), and to evaluate information from political opponents more critically (Taber and Lodge 2006), one could argue that dissonance is simply not experienced widely in the American public. Two observational trends, documented earlier, argue against this proposition, however. First, in the context of Evangelical support for the
Republican Party, at the times that politicians failed on their goals, Evangelicals were acutely aware of the betrayal. The historical record I reviewed at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates that Evangelicals have repeatedly complained in popular media about the lack of success on cultural issues. Second, this disappointment appears to be reflected in their evaluation of the Ridenour | 100 political candidates. Evangelicals have grown increasingly negative toward the candidates they vote for. That they are engaging in dissonance-reduction is, I argue, evident in their accelerated negativity toward the opposing candidates and the shifting salience of cultural issues. Thus, the specific patterns I identify with the writing manipulation are consistent with broader observational trends among American Evangelicals. In the next and final empirical chapter, I take my theoretical argument on the role of dissonance and party loyalty to the context of the 2016 election.
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Chapter 6. Evangelicals in 2016.
The previous chapters have developed a theory to explain Evangelicals’ motivating and sustaining reasons for political behavior that at times has faced severe backlash. A perceived threat to one’s identity group is a strong motivating factor for becoming involved politically, and once mobilized, it is often difficult to retract from the circles of influence to which a sizable voting bloc becomes accustomed to. As Charles Colson, a disgraced Special Counsel to President Nixon who
later became a televangelist, put it,
“It is easy to become enthralled with access to power. In time, however, without even knowing it, well-intentioned attempts to influence public policy can be so entangled with the politics of power that the pastor’s primary goal becomes maintaining political access. When that happens, the gospel of Jesus Christ is held hostage to a political agenda—and religious leaders are little able to speak out and criticize it” (Colson 1987).
The confluence of a perceived threat and a process of cognitive dissonance, I argue, is the
theoretical perspective that best unites seemingly contradictory Evangelical behavior. Specifically,
the decision to focus political battles on matters of religious freedom of practice and freedom from
government intrusion, rather than efforts to support federal and state anti-poverty and welfare
policies. Moreover, it explains Evangelicals’ overwhelming support for highly charismatic leaders
that tend to sidestep the foundational moral concerns of Evangelicals, particularly in matters of family and sex. While the previous chapters have focused on finding evidence of these dynamics over the past 50 years, in this chapter I focus on a diagnostic assessment of where Evangelicals have resided politically in the most recent elections. In addition to voting behavior, I will also
examine relative evaluations of the political issues they believe are most important, as well as
leverage panel data to observe exogenous shocks to Evangelical public opinion in the form of
campaign scandals, and whether these shocks altered Evangelicals’ evaluations of and
commitment to particular candidates. To be specific, I will answer three questions. First, to what Ridenour | 102
extent are Evangelicals committed to one political party? Second, does that commitment vary as a
function of their religiosity or concern with cultural issues? Third, in what ways do Evangelicals’
political concerns resemble or diverge from non-Evangelicals’ political concerns? After exploring these trends, I will then carry out a very specific test of Evangelicals’ commitment to the
Republican Party. Namely, I will test whether Evangelicals’ evaluations of the Republican and
Democratic Presidential candidates changed in response to the sexually graphic Access Hollywood tape that was released late in the campaign season.
Evangelical Political Commitment in 2016
Few disagree that the 2016 presidential campaign was an unusual one, although explanations for the degree of oddity are not scarce (see, for example, the exchanges between Mutz
[2018] and Morgan [2018] and their derivatives). For Evangelicals, one notable characteristic was the public distancing of some Evangelical leaders from the Republican candidate, leaders such as
Al Mohler and Russell Moore. Of course, other Evangelicals were outspoken supporters, such as
Jerry Falwell, Jr. (Heim 2018), but there was a greater difference of opinion than in previous elections. These divergences from typicality led many to wonder if Evangelicals would “defect” or simply not turn out to vote.
Ultimately, Evangelicals appeared to neither defect nor simply stay home. More than 4 out of 5 Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016 in what would become the highest level of
Evangelical support of any candidate since the 1980s (Smith and Martínez 2016). Yet, their decision to stand behind the Republican is not so surprising. What is more intriguing is that
Evangelicals were early supporters of Trump even when there were strong, Evangelical alternatives like Ted Cruz (Djupe and Calfano 2018). One can understand choosing party loyalty Ridenour | 103
even when the nominee is not your first choice in the primary. Remarkably, Evangelicals wanted
Trump almost from the beginning.
Each year, Harvard University fields the Cooperative Congressional Election Study
(CCES) which surveys more than 50,000 adults in the United States. What makes these data
particularly helpful here, is that it asks respondents who they voted for not just in the general, but
also in the primary election. Matching respondents between their primary and general election choices, we can identify four different types of voters: 1) Trump Loyalists, who voted for him in both elections; 2) Trump Converts, who supported another candidate in the primary but voted for him in the general; 3) Defectors, who voted for Trump in the primary but did not in the general; and 4) Never Trumpers, who did not vote Trump in either election. Having these categories in hand, we can then estimate the probability that an Evangelical was a campaign-long supporter of
Trump2. Full regression tables can be found in Appendix B, under Chapter 6. While the probability
that an Evangelical supported Trump in the general election was 0.81 (Smith and Martínez 2016),
the probability that an Evangelical supported Trump in the primary and the general election was
0.66. However, this loyalty appears to be more influenced by the partisan rather than religious
identity of the voter. The probability that a Democratic Evangelical never supported Trump (i.e.,
a Never Trumper) was more than 0.8, while the probability that a Republican Evangelical always
supported Trump (i.e., a Loyalist) was above 0.9 (Table B.6.1). Figure 6.1 makes clear that this
pattern was largely the result of the partisanship of the voter than their status as an Evangelical.
Evangelicals who had the opportunity to support other more traditionally Evangelical candidates
overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump during the course of his campaign.
2 I utilize a multinomial logistic regression with controls for partisanship and standard demographic information. Ridenour | 104
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A similar pattern can be observed when looking at how respondents answered a feeling thermometer question. The feeling thermometer asks people to indicate on a 0-100 thermometer how warm or cold they feel toward a specific candidate. Such a question was asked in the American
National Election Studies (ANES) survey in 2016. Accounting for potential demographic differences and the overwhelming effects of partisanship, Evangelicals were still solidly more favorable towards Donald Trump than non-Evangelicals (Table B.6.2). Even compared to members of their own party, Evangelicals stand out as especially supportive of the Republican nominee. By all measurable indicators, Evangelicals were staunch occupiers of the Republican corner in 2016.
Evangelicals’ Issue Priorities in 2016
Most calls for Republican support by Evangelicals center upon the motivating factor of abortion policy. “I disagree with Donald Trump on a wide range of issues, but he has kept his promises on the pro-life issues. I am not a thoroughbred single-issue voter, but I am pretty close to that” (Wilson 2020). Al Mohler, who wrote a 2016 op-ed wherein he said he would not be supporting Trump, has come around and will be supporting him in 2020 due to his record on abortion (Chotiner 2020). For decades, the conventional wisdom has held that morality-based legislation and policy was responsible for Evangelicals’ support of Republican candidates, and their “reluctant” acceptance of Donald Trump in 2016. More recent analyses have questioned whether race might be a more motivating factor (Balmer 2010; Claassen 2018). The measurement of racially-conservative attitudes, however, has generated considerable controversy (Huddy and
Feldman 2009). Moreover, although Evangelicals tend to hold more racially-conservative social attitudes (Claasen, Lewis, Djupe, and Neiheisel 2019), it must be remembered that early
Evangelicals were not mobilized against racially egalitarian policies in the 1960s and 1970s Ridenour | 106
(FitzGerald 2017; Harding 2000). Instead, they responded by retreating further into their enclaves.
Thus, the racial views of Evangelicals fail to explain their initial foray into the political realm.
Assessing abortion attitudes, however, is not as fraught with analytical and social landmines. Since the 1980s, pollsters have asked about voters’ opinions on abortion in largely the same manner, focusing on which types of exceptions they believe are legitimate to allow for abortion. Moreover, examining the importance of abortion allows us to take Evangelicals at their word, examining the extent to which their attitudes toward abortion matter to them personally. To assess this degree of importance, I emphasize the degree of relative importance to Evangelicals.
Views on abortion are highly partisan, and members of the two major parties in the U.S. have only grown further apart on the issue (Ridenour, Schmitt, and Norrander 2019). But though the two parties might be further apart on the issue, it does not necessarily mean that the issue is responsible for the divergence, or that the issue factors heavily in their voting behavior. Fortunately, the CCES in 2016 provides us the opportunity to assess how relatively important Evangelicals believe this issue to be.
To begin, it should be noted that most religious defenses of Trump specifically, and
Republicans more generally, have centered on Republicans’ record on pro-life issues. Many
Evangelicals “held their noses” and voted for Trump because they believed he would reshape the federal courts by appointing pro-life judges. If this is true, we should expect that Evangelicals, and especially Evangelicals who voted for Trump, have abortion at the forefront of their minds when considering the political issues of the day. In the 2016 CCES survey, respondents were asked how important 15 different political issues were to them personally. In addition to relatively vague categories like national security, healthcare, and the environment, respondents were also asked about abortion and marriage equality, and also about race relations. Ridenour | 107
To analyze relative importance, I created a single value for each respondent that represents
the average of how important they rated all 15 issues. Importantly, this average is unique to each
individual. I then converted respondents’ scores on each of the individual 15 issues to a standardized score, a z-score, that represents how far from this global average their response on any individual issue lies. A score of zero on the issue of abortion would mean that the individual has an average level of importance assigned to abortion. Scores less than zero mean they care less than average about that issue, while scores above zero indicate they care more than average. Again, this average is unique to that individual, so this creates an individual relative importance indicator.
Using this individual relative importance indicator, we can then determine the degree to which
Evangelicals as a group appear to care about each of the 15 issues they were asked about in the
CCES survey. Figure 6.2 presents the big picture of this distribution of relative importance for
Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals.
This figure is a histogram, so the higher the bar, the greater the number of individuals that lie at that point on the x-axis. The solid black bar represents the zero-point, where each individuals’ average issue importance is located. So again, these represent relative importance unique to an individual. Their absolute value, or true score on the survey, may be different, but their own average on this standardized scale is not. The dotted black line indicates the average relative score of all individuals in the sample for that specific issue. Blue bars correspond to Non-Evangelicals, while red bars correspond to Evangelical respondents. The two solid colored lines, red for
Evangelicals and blue for Non-Evangelicals, indicates the position of the average for Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals, respectively, for that specific issue.
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There are two important relationships to consider in this figure. The first relationship concerns the full sample’s relative importance of each item. Where the black dotted line is to the right of the solid black line, we can say that survey respondents on average care relatively more about that issue. Where individual bars lie to the right of the solid black line, we can say that those individuals care relatively more about that issue. I’ve arranged the figure so that the issue considered to be most important, on average, is located in the upper left (National Security), while declining importance moves to the right and down. Thus, across all adults in the sample, Gay
Marriage was on average rated as the least relatively important, with Abortion just slightly more important. Healthcare, Social Security, National Security, Corruption, and the Economy appear to have dominated issue attention in 2016.
The second relationship to consider is the comparison of Evangelicals and Non-
Evangelicals. Where the solid red line is to the right of the blue solid line, we can say that on average, Evangelicals cared relatively more about that issue. However, although Evangelicals may care more than Non-Evangelicals on some issues—for example, Abortion—it still does not mean that the issue is relatively important for Evangelicals themselves. Only in cases where the solid red line lies to the right of the solid black line (the zero point) can we say that Evangelicals on average cared relatively more about this issue. Given this information, we can see that Evangelicals as a group cared relatively less about Abortion and Gay Marriage than they did most issues. In fact, Evangelicals lie squarely at the zero point (average relative importance) on the issue of
Defense Spending3. Abortion and Gay Marriage join the issues of Gun Control, Race Relations,
3 On the issue of defense spending, the solid red line, in fact, perfectly overlaps with the solid black line that indicates the full sample mean. This means that Defense Spending represents the issue that Evangelicals as a group care about to an average degree. Ridenour | 110
and the Environment as the issues about which they care less than an average amount. Abortion
and Gay Marriage, two pillars of the cultural wars agenda, were two of the five least important issues for Evangelicals in 2016.
Now, some may question whether all Evangelicals should be grouped together. After all, there were a number of Evangelicals who voted Democratic, or did not support Trump in the primary. Perhaps these groups have different issue priorities. To account for that potential distortion, I analyzed two additional cross-tabulations. The first evaluates Evangelicals and Non-
Evangelicals, accounting for their partisanship. As we see in Figure 6.3, this didn’t seem to matter all that much. Whether Democrat or Republican, or Evangelical or not, respondents in 2016 appeared to believe that Abortion was relatively less important than their average issue (again, remember that zero is the individual’s average).
The consideration of whether the Evangelical was a campaign-long supporter of Trump or not also does not appear to change the interpretation. One might think that those who voted against
Trump in the primary might have been more concerned with cultural issues than those that supported Trump earlier than November. This does not appear to be the case. Neither Trump
Loyalists nor Trump Converts appear to care relatively all that much about the issue of Abortion
(Figure 6.4). Accounting for voting loyalty, partisanship, and Evangelical status does not change the picture that voters, on average, simply did not find Abortion to be an important issue for them in 2016. In sum, abortion does not appear to have been all that important a consideration for the
Evangelical voter. National security, healthcare, corruption, and crime all top Evangelicals’ issue priorities. To the extent that Evangelical loyalty to the Republican Party is considered a defense of pro-life values, it appears that such defenses are rooted in an idealized sense of their commitment, rather than rooted in a realistic picture of how Evangelicals prioritize their political issues. Ridenour | 111
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In addition to comparing the histograms visually, we can also statistically measure the
degree to which these distributions are dissimilar or not. I estimated four separate test statistics across two dimensions: across Evangelical status, and across issue type. First, do Evangelical
Republicans and Non-Evangelical Republicans ascribe different levels of relative importance to these political issues? I estimate differences in three ways: (1) a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test that determines whether two sample distributions are drawn from the same underlying cumulative density function; (2) a Welch’s t-test of two sample means with unequal variances; and (3) an
estimate of the effect size difference between the two samples (Cohen’s d). I include the fourth
statistic because with a sample size larger than 12,000 even trivial differences between samples
can be identified. That appears to be the case here. The results of the K-S and Welch’s tests in
Table 6.1 indicate that except in the case of Healthcare, the distribution of responses and their
means are significantly different for Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals. However, scanning
across to the effect size column we learn that in only one case do we observe a medium effect size.
All others would be classified as small or very small. This medium effect size we observe for the
issue of Abortion, where we find that Evangelicals care relatively more about this issue.
But whether Evangelicals care more about the issue is somewhat less relevant than how
much they care about that issue, as we learned from Figure 6.2. Applying the same analyses to
compare how Evangelicals care about Abortion relative to all other issues, we observe that
Evangelicals cared differently about Abortion. But the sign of the effect sizes indicates that they
cared substantially less than almost every other political issue. Evangelicals cared about Abortion
more than Marriage Equality, Race Relations, the Environment, and Gun Control. This places it at
11th out of 15 political issues. Marriage Equality occupied the solidly last spot on Evangelicals’
issue priorities in 2016. Culture issues, it seems, were relatively unimportant to Evangelicals. Ridenour | 114
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Not only do Evangelicals seemingly care relatively little about the issue of abortion, but
the issue itself also does not appear to factor heavily in their voting behavior. Evangelicals that
rated abortion most highly on the relative issue importance scale were no less likely to have
supported Trump in both the primary and general elections than those who rated it as least
relatively important. Holding all else constant, the average marginal effect of rating abortion as
one’s least important to one’s most important reduced the probability of being a Trump Loyalist by a mere 0.014, and increased the probability of being a Never Trumper by 0.016 (Figure 6.5).
Neither of these differences are statistically distinguishable from zero (Table B.6.3). Of course, from a statistical perspective this makes sense. A relatively unimportant issue is unlikely to have much effect on voters’ behaviors. In this case, the Evangelicals that cared the most about abortion are seemingly no less likely to have supported Trump than Evangelicals that cared the least about the issue. Abortion, as an issue, appears to have little impact on the voting behaviors of
Evangelicals.
The preceding two sections have demonstrated that although Evangelicals were highly supportive of Donald Trump in 2016, this support does not appear to be the result of their opinions on the issue of abortion. Instead, Evangelicals appear to demonstrate a high degree of loyalty to their partisan identity rather than a religious one. At the very least, other notably secular issues dominated their priorities, while abortion itself had no tangible effect on their voting decisions. In this final empirical section, we look more at the decision to remain loyal especially in the face of a mid-campaign scandal.
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Evangelical Support and the Access Hollywood Tape
On October 7th, 2016, an 11-year old interview between Donald Trump and Billy Bush was
released by the The Washington Post. On the tape, listeners can hear Trump say a series of lewd
comments that, upon release, were widely repudiated by members of both parties, and by several
religious leaders as well—although others attempted to separate the contents of the tape from the
context of the election (Bailey 2016). Although the “October surprise” may have been over- shadowed by FBI Director James Comey’s letter concerning Hillary Clinton’s emails, still it is worth assessing the degree to which Evangelicals’ faith in their candidate may have been shaken. Ridenour | 117
Fortunately, at least one survey was already in the field at the time of the story breaking.
As part of the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, YouGov fielded a rolling cross-sectional survey of 1,000 American adults each week from August 10 to November 4, 2016. Although they also included a baseline survey in July, and a post-election survey for approximately a month after the election, my primary analysis centers on the surveys from September 2nd to November 8th
(weeks 3 – 11). This allows for a comparison between several groups of interest, mainly in an
effort to distinguish between those who were aware of the Access Hollywood tape, and those that
were not.
My primary independent variable of interest is the indicator for whether the tape had been
reported by The Washington Post or not. Fortunately, there is a clean cutoff between the survey
weeks. The sixth survey battery ran from September 29th to October 3rd, while the seventh battery
ran from October 13th to October 18th. The story was published by The Washington Post on
October 10th, between these two survey weeks.
I focus on three dependent variables that I expect to be most affected by whether an individual had heard the Access Hollywood Tape or not. These are: 1) whether the respondent is likely to vote for Donald Trump, or not; 2) whether the respondent believes that the term
“religious” describes candidate Trump or not; and 3) whether the respondent indicates that they
“Like somewhat” and “Like a lot,” or whether they “Dislike” candidate Trump. Each of these three dependent variables are dichotomous, so I employ a logistic regression model to determine whether the existence of the Access Hollywood Tape significantly alters the probability that the respondent indicates the affirmative answer to each question. In addition to controlling for demographic indicators like age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status, I also control for the respondent’s partisan identification (using the traditional 7-point scale) and their ideological Ridenour | 118
orientation (using the survey’s 5-point scale). I estimate average marginal effects, which indicate
the average change in the probability of the outcome when shifting from a 0 to a 1 on the
independent variable of interest. In this case, that change represents the shift from the period before the tape’s release, to the period after the tape’s release.
For each of the analyses I present, I an include an interaction between the Tape indicator, and the respondent’s answer to the question of whether they considered themselves to be “Born
Again” or not. This is a standard measure used by Pew to assess whether a religious individual is considered an Evangelical. Unfortunately, the religious tradition typology is not available for this survey battery. Nonetheless, this personal conversion experience is an important indicator for whether one is an Evangelical (Smith, Sciupac, Gecewicz, and Hackett 2018). For the entirety of the survey period (September to November 2016), the percentage of people that responded “Yes” to this question averaged 28.7%, a figure quite close to most estimates of the Evangelical population.
Again, I focus on three primary dependent variables: 1) vote for Trump, 2) whether they would describe Trump as “religious,” and 3) Trump’s likability. For each dependent variable, I estimate these effects in five contexts. First, I estimate a simple model comparing respondents before the tape’s being published to those surveyed after the tape’s release (Weeks 3—6 versus
Weeks 7—11). This covers survey respondents from September to November and allows us to see a general trend. Second, I compare respondents the week before and the week after the tape was published (Week 6 versus Week 7). This focuses specifically on the group of respondents that are temporally closest to one another, no more than three weeks apart from one another, and less than two weeks from the tape’s release. Third, I compare respondents the week after the tape to all respondents prior to the tape (Weeks 3—6 versus Week 7). This serves as a first robustness check, Ridenour | 119
to attempt to isolate any potentially unique factors from the week before the tape and simply
average across sentiments toward Trump in the month leading up to the tape and immediately
after. Fourth, I compare respondents the week before the tape’s release to all other respondents
after the tape’s release (Week 6 versus Weeks 7—11). Finally, I undertake a second robustness
check, comparing respondents the week after the tape’s release to all other respondents after the
tape’s release (Weeks 7 versus Weeks 8—11). Importantly, I expect to find no difference between
these two groups, as the effect of the tape is most likely to be observed immediately after the tape’s
release. A significant effect of time in this context would indicate that people’s attitudes towards
Trump either remained static after the tape’s release and changed more gradually over time, or that
the change in attitudes after the tape returned to their pre-release state. While a non-significant
finding is not evidence for a particular phenomenon, a statistically significant effect would rule out that any attitudinal changes as a result of the tape remained stable from October to the election.
I call this indicator decay.
These five contexts allow for a fairly simple presentation of the results of these models. In
Figure 6.6, each panel reflects one of these contexts. The y-axis in each panel represents the
average marginal effect of moving from the first set of Weeks to the second set of Weeks in the
panel (or the indicator for decay, in panel E), with the x-axis delineating the specific dependent
variable of interest. The average marginal effect for non-Evangelicals is colored blue, while the
average marginal effect for Evangelicals is red. Where the confidence intervals cross the horizontal
zero line, we can say that there was no effect of the tape on the dependent variable.
The figure reveals a consistent pattern of little change in Evangelicals’ attitudes toward
Trump as a result of the Access Hollywood tape. In only one case do we observe Evangelical’s
attitudes changing as a result of the tape, and it—surprisingly—indicates that Evangelicals the Ridenour | 120
week after the tape was released were more likely to describe Trump as religious. In two cases we
observe that moving from Week 6 to Week 7 or Weeks 7—11 leads to an increase in the probability that Evangelicals described candidate Trump as religious. Although some Evangelicals and Republicans were concerned with Trump’s flippancy in talking about sexual assault, many others appeared to have internalized the idea that the recorded conversation was just “locker room talk” and had no discernible impact on their attitudes and intended behaviors in the upcoming election. The regression tables for these models can be found in Appendix B, tables 6.4—6.6.
General Discussion
Long considered a bastion of Republican support, Evangelicals in 2016 showed no apparent departure from their historical loyalty toward the conservative party in American politics.
Candidate Trump won the highest percentage of Evangelical voters since the Reagan era, and in doing so appears to have demonstrated the strength of this commitment. Evangelicals voted for
Trump overwhelmingly in spite of the cultural agenda that the Religious Right has championed for the past four decades. In contrast to the theory of Culture War that attributes Evangelical Ridenour | 121
conservatism to their attitudes on abortion and gay marriage, these data revealed that these two
issues consistently ranked as the least important issues for Evangelical voters in 2016. Moreover, even serious questions concerning the candidate’s lack of personal morals appears to have failed to deter Evangelicals from supporting him. To the extent that Evangelical loyalty to a Republican candidate derives from their need to remain cognitively consistent, it appears that the process of justification and reprioritization are ingrained and unlikely to be interrupted in the near future. In that sense, the question of whether Trump is symptom or disease may be misleading. Instead,
Trump may merely be an indicator for how far Evangelical loyalty can go.
This raises the question of whether Evangelicals truly are a unique subset of Republican voters, or are merely highly committed partisans. Although partisanship appears to be an important identity, as demonstrated in Figure 6.1, there are yet still observable effects of Evangelical identity on loyalty to a candidate and party. Since 1980, Evangelicals have been slightly—but significantly—more likely to identify as Republican and conservative. The results from Chapter
5’s analysis of the effects of dissonance suggest this small bump may be more the effect of a need for cognitive consistency than a uniquely-Evangelical commitment to cultural conservatism.
Social pressure, too, may be responsible for these smaller effects. Others have documented an important role of perceived political identities on one’s religious identification (Campbell,
Layman, Green, and Sumaktoyo 2018; Margolis 2018; Patrikios 2008). In these cases, it is predominantly a backlash effect; religious members of the political left appear more willing to suppress their religious expression in response to explicitly religious appeals on the political right.
This may be responsible for the perceived blurring of the lines between Evangelical and
Republican identity (e.g., Patrikios 2013). But this likely works in the opposite direction as well, leading Evangelicals to more greatly internalize a Republican identity. In such a scenario, Ridenour | 122
Evangelicals should demonstrate increasing loyalty to the Republican Party as social pressure intensifies (e.g., White 2007; White, Laird, and Allen 2014). In fact, this may explain why
Evangelicals were largely unresponsive in both experiments in terms of their attachment to their religious and political identities. While perceived identity threats and cognitive dissonance may shape evaluations of the other party and one’s emotional reactions to them, social pressure may instead be the force that intensifies Evangelicals’ sense of Republican identity ownership.
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Chapter 7. Conclusion
In November 2020, Evangelicals again demonstrated their commitment to a Republican presidential nominee. Early projections from Edison Research and the Associated Press indicate that between 76 per cent and 81 per cent of Evangelicals voted to re-elect President Trump
(National Public Radio 2020; Newport 2020). Indeed, a number of previous Never Trumpers like
Al Mohler and Russell Moore wrote editorials outlining their decision to return to the fold and vote for President Trump, citing his pro-life record in terms of judicial appointments during the last four years. As we discovered in the last chapter, however, it is unclear whether this issue actually explains the levels of partisan loyalty we observe among Evangelicals.
I began this dissertation by describing the two major explanations for Evangelicals’ political behavior during the last 50 years. The Culture Wars hypothesis argues that Evangelicals were motivated to participate in politics in response to the emergence of new culture-rooted political issues—specifically abortion and, later, marriage equality. Although these issues have become highly salient symbolic issues, it is not simply enough to say that growing liberalization on culture issues constituted a sustained political attack on Evangelical communities. For decades prior to Evangelicals’ rally behind Reagan, Evangelicals had been living within an increasingly secular society. Indeed, their response to the first culture war in the early 20th century was social retreat, not political mobilization. As we discovered in chapter 4, the mere presence of these cultural issues was not enough to trigger emotional responses consistent with perceived identity threat. Instead, it is when political actors endorse punitive actions against Evangelical institutions that Evangelicals appear to be threatened. Issues of so-perceived private religious expression are especially capable of triggering emotional responses consistent with a threat to social identity.
Could the political issues of the 1970s and 1980s be considered social identity threats to Ridenour | 124
Evangelicals? The historical record reviewed by Balmer (2008, 2010) and Cromartie (1993)
answer this question in the affirmative. Moreover, the effort to politicize these issues was
remarkably effective beginning with Reagan’s decision to champion the Evangelical universities
that stood as symbols of state-sponsored religious persecution (Domke and Coe 2008; FitzGerald
2017; Williams 2010). The combination of a directed identity threat and elite-driven partisan framing was responsible for ushering Evangelicals into the political arena as cultural warriors.
How, then, does this picture of a cultural warrior square with the political priorities of
Evangelicals today? Here the social context of partisan mobilization interacts with the dynamics of psychological needs for cognitive consistency. In the face of recurring disappointment over the failure to adopt a sweepingly conservative cultural agenda, Evangelicals were forced to reconcile with the possibility that politicians, despite their promises and effective use of religious symbolism, were not perfect representatives of politico-religious revival. One avenue of reconciling this disappointment, as I argue in chapter 5, is to denigrate the opposition, leading to increasingly negative views of the opposing political party to overwhelm the negative feelings towards one’s own party. Another is to seek political alignment with your chosen candidate or party on other issues in order to restore balance. Although not every strategy of dissonance reduction is observed in the experiment in chapter 5, the Evangelicals in my sample demonstrated a pattern of opponent denigration and, to a less certain extent, issue re-prioritization. Future studies of this process of issue re-prioritization may test this argument further by evaluating changes in issue-ideological congruity among Evangelicals, either leveraging cross-sectional data over a long period of time, or through the use of panels conducted during a presidential campaign season.
These data may offer an answer to the question as to whether Evangelicals have become less likely to be single-issue voters since the 1980s. Ridenour | 125
These are two important take-aways. Cultural issues alone may no longer constitute threats to Evangelical identity as argued under the Culture Wars perspective. Indeed, on a number of issues, Republicans generally and Evangelicals specifically seem to be adopting more mainstream views on these issues (Ridenour, Schmitt, and Norrander 2019). But issues of religious freedom, as exemplified by Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd., are clearly threatening. Similar to televangelists’ and administrators’ concerns over the purview of federal taxation (FitzGerald
2017), local churchgoers who view governments as agents of persecution—as they are in popularly portrayed in pre-millennialist fiction—may be voted to support candidates that seek to curtail federal power in a variety of domains not strictly religious (Crouse 2013).
Furthermore, if Evangelicals’ issue priorities are primarily secular in nature, and if they so closely resemble the priorities of non-Evangelical conservatives, efforts to decentralize cultural policy or highlight the religious proclivities of Democratic candidates may be futile strategies
(Burge 2020). To the extent that Evangelicals are no different than other Republicans, attempting to uniquely wrestle them from the Republican Party is unlikely to succeed. Indeed, here the
Sociodemographic perspective seems more capable of explaining Evangelicals’ contemporary political attitudes. However, if cognitive dissonance is the driving force that pushes Evangelicals further toward a conservative political ideology—a premise inconclusively tested in chapter 5— attempts to alleviate this dissonance may weaken the psychological need to reprioritize issues.
Moreover, without an understanding of the psychological process of dissonance resolution, the contradiction between Evangelicals’ decision to enter politics and the decision to remain in politics is left unexplained by the Sociodemographic hypothesis. Indeed, if secular political issues continue to dominate the political agenda, it is possible that future Evangelicals may no longer defend many of their political decisions as votes for the elimination of abortion. Whether individuals who de- Ridenour | 126
prioritize culture issues (or even outright ignore them) will continue to describe themselves as
Evangelical, however, is another question (e.g., Markham 2010). A growing avenue of research is
exploring the degree to which political affinities may in fact affect religious identifications, rather
than the other way around (Campbell, Layman, Green, and Sumaktoyo 2018; Margolis 2018). If
being an “Evangelical” constitutes a social identity label that incorporates both religious and
political meaning (Patrikios 2013), the label may become an obsolete signal to those who do not
share those political preferences.
Both the Culture Wars hypothesis and the Sociodemographic perspective offer their own
unique advantages for understanding Evangelical political behavior, but as macro-level theories
they are incomplete explanations for the whole of Evangelicals’ political affinities. Rather than an
issues-based threat as expected by the Culture Wars hypothesis, Evangelicals’ mobilization seems more due to an effort to protect their identity from perceived encroachments on their private space.
In the wake of a 2016 election where cultural issues appeared on the backburner, and a growing emphasis on the sanctity of free speech in social media and corporate regulation, an identity-based approach offers a clearer picture of Evangelicals’ motivations. Moreover, viewing ongoing
Evangelical commitment to a party label with markedly different issue priorities is better explained by the need for cognitive consistency than simple economics (e.g., Johnston, Lavine, and Federico
2017).
This appears on its face to paint a rather dismal picture of electoral behavior. Identity groups, when threatened, may gravitate toward certain political parties and candidates, only to become captured by the dissonance of political disappointment. This dissertation focused its analysis on the attitudes and behaviors of Evangelicals in the United States. Future research should explore whether these dynamics are unique to the religious, or whether we may observe these Ridenour | 127
effects in other groups. Moreover, it should be determined whether dissonance is more pronounced
and effectual in periods of high affective polarization—as we observe currently (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012; Mason 2015)—and thus less capable of generating immoveable partisans in politically “boring” eras. Yet the converse should also be explored, that affective polarization might be an outgrowth of individuals’ feelings of dissonance, and thus their attempts to regain cognitive consistency in their political choices.
Ridenour | 128
At the very least, the defining characteristic of Evangelicals’ political behavior appeared
in 2016 to have become nearly completely folded into their partisan identity. A simple display of
the correlation between Evangelical identity and partisanship shows an ever-increasing relationship (Figure 7.1). As we observed in Chapter 6, the primary determinant of one’s level of commitment during the entirety of a campaign was partisanship, not religious identity. The overlap between Evangelical and Republican identity hypothesized earlier seems likely. At the same time, both the parties and its adherents have grown better aligned in terms of their partisan and ideological attachment. That is, individuals are more often identifying with party labels that match Ridenour | 129
their ideological orientations (Levendusky 2009). Although there is a discussion of whether this is
driven first by ideology or by partisanship, nonetheless the terms “conservative” and “Republican”
are quickly becoming synonymous, as are “liberal” and “Democratic.” Has the process of partisan- ideological sorting been different for Evangelicals and Non-Evangelicals? The answer, as displayed in Figure 7.2, is largely no. Not only are Evangelicals equivalently able to align their partisan and ideological identities, but the correlation between the two has risen dramatically along with the rest of the electorate. Instead of a unique subset of Republicans, Evangelicals might be the party’s most avid supporters for purely identity-based, rather than issues-based, reasons.
Some questions remain, so I recommend three specific future studies to address them. First, if Evangelicals’ mobilized over issues of religious freedom and not necessarily other secular issues, it should be determined whether Evangelicals’ ideological congruity—perceived or
actual—has changed to reflect this pattern of issue reprioritization. This should include trends
concerning which issues Evangelicals tend to prioritize when forced to compromise between the
whole of their political agenda. Have the distributions of relative issue importance in chapter 6,
for example, changed over time as Evangelicals have adopted conservative attitudes on non-
cultural issues to justify their staunch Republican support? Second, the perceptions of identity
overlap between Evangelical and Republican (Patrikios 2013) and their effects on both political
participation and religious identity should be further explored. To what extent does this lead to a
partisan backlash (Campbell, Layman, Green, and Sumaktoyo 2018; Patrikios 2008), and to what
extent are these matching identities not only positively framed by its members, but effective at
uniting these two groups into a single identity group? Studies that have explored the degree to
which shared identity explains Black loyalty to the Democratic Party offer a compelling theoretical
foundation (Lynd 2019; White 2007). Is it the case that Evangelicals are merely strong partisans, Ridenour | 130
and if so, is this level of partisan loyalty the result of secular identity-based motivations, or are
cultural issues the reason for an unusually high level of partisan solidarity? Could other
psychological characteristics—in contrast to demographic ones—better explain Evangelicals’
commitment? Finally, as I stated in the paragraph above, the degree to which the broader social
environment shapes or is shaped by the process of dissonance should be studied. Political behavior
does not occur in a vacuum and is shaped not only by our personal social networks (Festinger,
Schachter, and Beck 1963; Marsden and Friedkin 1993) but also by the social climate in which we
find ourselves (Erikson and Stoker 2011; Hersh 2013). Exploring antecedents or consequences of partisan polarization may offer better insights concerning how we might reduce social
exclusionism and ideological animosity.
Ridenour | 131
APPENDIX A: EXPERIMENTAL MANIPULATIONS
Control Condition
Ridenour | 132
Gay Condition – No Threat
Ridenour | 133
Gay Condition – Threat
Ridenour | 134
Race Condition – No Threat
Ridenour | 135
Race Condition - Threat
Ridenour | 136
APPENDIX B: TABLES OF STATISTICAL MODELS
Chapter 4.
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Chapter 5.
Ridenour | 142
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Chapter 6.
Ridenour | 150
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