Rhetoric Race and Religion
Last week, Alex Knapp and I got into a friendly debate on Twitter about whether it’s fair to stereotype conservative and fundamentalist religion as representative of religion generally. I wanted to flesh out some of my arguments there with additional data.
I wish it were true that the religious left and the religious right were equally influential. If they were, they’d usually balance each other out, and there would be little reason for atheists to worry about undue religious influence in politics.
But that isn’t the case. Poll after poll has shown that, in America at least, religious affiliation predicts voting patterns. The more committed a believer is, the more frequently they attend church, the more likely they are to be conservative and to vote Republican. The states where the highest percentage of people describe religion as “very important” to their daily lives are all solid red states. The 2012 election bore this out, with Protestants continuing to support Republicans by lopsided margins. If religious fundamentalism wasn’t politically dominant over religious liberalism, none of this would be the case, and knowing a person’s depth of devotion or level of church attendance wouldn’t tell you anything about which candidates they were likely to support. But it does.
Further reinforcing this picture, the “mainstream” Protestant churches, which are the most theologically liberal Christian denominations, are suffering from severe demographic decline, plummeting from over 50% of the population to a mere 8% in just a few decades. (Note this isn’t solely affecting liberal churches – America is becoming more secular in general, which is affecting all denominations. Conservative churches are shrinking and consolidating as well, although not quite so dramatically.)
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