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Religious Right, Religious Left, Both, Or Neither? Understanding Religio-Political Identification

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Religious Right, Religious Left, Both, Or Neither? Understanding Religio-Political Identification JOURNAL for the SCIENTIFIC STUDY of RELIGION Religious Right, Religious Left, Both, or Neither? Understanding Religio-Political Identification ANGELA F. MCCARTHY LAURA R. OLSON Department of Political Science Department of Political Science University of Florida Clemson University JAMES C. GARAND Department of Political Science Louisiana State University In this article we analyze the effects of religious, political, socioeconomic, and demographic variables on religious Americans’ propensity to identify with religio-political movements. Using data from the 2013 Economic Values Survey collected by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we sort nonsecular Americans into four categories: religious right, religious left, both religious right and religious left, or neither religious right nor the religious left. We estimate a multinomial logit model in which we depict religio-political identification as a function of religious affiliation, worship attendance, religious embeddedness, religious convictions, political attitudes, and socioeconomic and demographic controls. We find that a wide range of religious, political, and socioeconomic/demographic variables affect individuals’ identification with the religious right and/or religious left. Our empirical results also permit us to analyze the seeming paradox of identifying with both the religious right and the religious left. We find that individuals who identify with both movements come from the ranks of the highly religious, those who believe that being moral requires one to believe in God, Tea Party supporters, strong partisans, those with lower education and income, older individuals, and blacks and Hispanics. Keywords: religious right, religious left, religio-political identification. INTRODUCTION Mountains of evidence continue to pile up documenting elite- and mass-level political po- larization in the United States. The American people are said to be divided into two seemingly irreconcilable silos that scarcely interact with each another (Pew Research Center 2014) and do not care to do so (Pew Research Center 2017). It has become a trope that progressives in cities, the coasts, and university towns—overwhelmingly supporters of former President Barack Obama—embrace diversity and look askance at conservatives in Middle America. Meanwhile, these very conservatives, who tend to live in rural areas or suburbs (Pew Research Center 2014), decry social change and profoundly distrust cosmopolitan elites (e.g., Bishop 2009; Wuthnow 2018). The causes and effects of this polarization appear not just in public opinion (e.g., Green, Palmqust, and Schickler 2002; but see Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2010) and the voting booth (e.g., Abramowitz 2010) but also in media consumption (Baum and Groeling 2008; Nie et al. 2010), on social media (Conover et al. 2011), and in Congress (McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 15–17, 2015. We are indebted to Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute for sharing the survey data used in this article, as well as to Quin Monson and anonymous reviewers for useful feedback. We are grateful to the editor of this journal for assistance in guiding the article through the editorial process. We remain responsible for any interpretations or errors. Correspondence should be addressed to James C. Garand, Emogene Pliner Distinguished Professor, Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803–5433. Email: [email protected] Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2019) 58(3):547–569 C 2019 The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion 548 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION 2016; Poole and Rosenthal 1984, 2007; Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz 2006). The two-silo dichotomy may not be so straightforward, however (Baldassarri and Bearman 2007; Baldassarri and Gelman 2008); not everyone opts in to one silo or the other. What distinguishes people who take clear sides in the polarized American political arena from those who do not? Might there be individuals who identify with both or neither silos? Religion ranks among the more powerful forces driving American political polarization, sitting alongside social media, class distinctions, racial tensions, and other factors (Abramowitz and Saunders 2008; Haidt 2012; Layman 2001). As Wuthnow observes about religion’s deep cultural significance in conservative rural communities: “Religion is part of the moral warp and woof of where they live . [It] plays an important role in holding the community together, whether in preaching and potlucks or conducting weddings and funerals. It supports the family values that people hold dear and tells them that they should care for their neighbors” (2018:139). And cultural significance usually evolves into political significance. Indeed, evidence shows that over several decades, the most religious Americans in the aggregate have come to view themselves as politically conservative; the Republican Party has been able to count on the votes of evangelical Protestants (especially) and of the most pious Christians in other traditions (Green 2007; Smidt et al. 2010). Meanwhile, the growing number of secular people in the United States—now roughly a quarter of the population, according to Pew Research Center (2015)—are much more liberal than the median American voter (Jones 2016). Survey data also show that the American public views the Republican Party as substantially “friendlier to religion” than the Democratic Party (Pew Research Center 2016). In this context, religion reveals its ability to play a “tribal” role in helping people determine which social groups are friends and which are foes (see Haidt 2012). Politically speaking, there are indeed two identifiable religio-political tribes in the United States today: the religious right and the (much smaller and less well organized) religious left. The religious right champions the preservation of traditional moral values and has focused primarily on social issues, including abortion and sexuality. The religious left arguably has deeper roots in American history even though it is much less powerful than the religious right is today. The religious right has been a significant presence in American politics since the late 1970s (Wilcox 1992; Wilcox and Robinson 2010), whereas the religious left can trace its (albeit punctuated) history back for at least a century. Religious advocacy for justice and economic assistance for the poor and disadvantaged emerged within mainline Protestantism during the early 20th century under the auspices of the social gospel movement (Evans 2004). The Catholic worker movement’s justice-oriented priorities (Zwick and Zwick 2005), rooted in Catholic social teaching (Massaro 2016), dovetailed with those of the social gospel movement even though Protestant-Catholic tensions prevented much cooperation between these two progressive impulses. Later, progressive black clergy joined with white advocates from across the religious spectrum in the civil rights movement (Findlay 1993; Morris 1984). Even though the religious left today is a shadow of its former self, it still wields some measure of political clout under certain circumstances (Olson 2011). The religious right, however, has the capacity to shape electoral outcomes from local school boards to the presidency (Deckman 2004; Putnam and Campbell 2010; Smidt et al. 2010). Aptly, scholars have paid a great deal of attention to many aspects of religion’s influence in American politics (e.g., Djupe and Gilbert 2003, 2008; Green 2007; Guth 2009; Jelen 2009; Pearson-Merkowitz and Gimpel 2009; Putnam and Campbell 2010; Smidt et al. 2008, 2010; Smith 2013; Wilcox and Forelny 2009; Wilcox and Robinson 2010; Wilson 2009). However, one matter that has drawn somewhat less attention in the literature on religion and politics is the question of how political and religious beliefs integrate themselves (but see, e.g., Jelen 1991; Layman 2001; Wilcox 1990), especially regarding when and why people on the ground decide to align themselves with broad-based movements like the religious right or religious left. The standard assumption continues to derive from Hunter’s (1991) “culture wars” formulation, which matches the conventional wisdom about religion and political polarization: devoutly Christian Americans are conservative, while more nominal Christians, adherents of minority religious traditions, and UNDERSTANDING RELIGIO-POLITICAL IDENTIFICATION 549 the religiously unaffiliated are progressive. For decades now, political observers and scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the religious right, reaffirming the connection between doctrinal orthodoxy and political conservatism (Layman 1997; Wilcox 1992). Less scholarly attention has been paid to the religious left, although religion-and-politics scholars do recognize that some Americans connect political liberalism with progressive religious convictions (Olson 2007, 2011). Regardless of whether this religious right/religious left dichotomy is accurate, an unchallenged assumption underlying the distinction between the religious right and religious left is that many Americans do in fact systematically connect their political attitudes with their religious convictions. People who say they identify with the religious right or the religious left typically are expected to exhibit distinct—and polarized—patterns of voting behavior and political
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