The ‘God gap’: Dan Gilgoff on how Barack Obama has narrowed it
By Dan Gilgoff
Virtually no political experts saw it coming, but religion was one of the biggest factors in George W. Bush’s 2004 election victory. Bush, who had used evangelical Christian language and championed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage — a cause pushed by the Christian Right — won 78 per cent of the evangelical vote, a group comprising almost a quarter of the American electorate. Republican presidential candidates had won the evangelical vote ever since Jerry Falwell launched his Moral Majority in the late 1970s, but no presidential candidate on record had ever achieved this level of support.
John Kerry, the first Catholic nominee for president since John F. Kennedy — who won upwards of three quarters of Catholic voters in 1960 — managed to lose the traditionally Democratic Catholic vote to Bush after a handful of American bishops attacked Kerry’s pro-abortion rights stance.
And in Ohio, the state whose 20 electoral votes decided the race, an evangelical-led ballot initiative to ban gay marriage helped give Bush the two per cent margin of victory that sent him back to the White House for four more years.
The so-called God gap of 2004 revealed more than the resurgent political power of old-school evangelicals and Catholics: it testified to the political might of American religion in general. The best indication of whether a voter supported Bush or Kerry wasn’t gender, income level, or union membership — it was frequency of church attendance.
Four years later, it has at times seemed that the Democrats might be the beneficiaries of politicised religion this time around. John McCain has long had an uneasy relationship with the Christian Right. He opposes a constitutional ban on gay marriage, favours federal funding for expanded embryonic stem cell research — a practice many conservative evangelicals and Catholics liken to abortion — and branded Christian Right bosses like Falwell and Pat Robertson ‘agents of intolerance’ during his 2000 run for the White House. Bush wound up beating McCain in that year’s Republican primaries largely by marshalling the Christian Right against him.
This year, McCain won the Republican primaries by relying on moderate Republican voters, leaving Christian Right darlings like Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney to split the GOP’s evangelical and pro-life base in key primary states like
Obama, by contrast, embraces religion as doggedly as John Kerry avoided it. Recalling his days as a church-based community organizer during a visit to a
Yet McCain’s fortunes among the faithful have improved in the last couple of months. The biggest turning-point was his surprise selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. A former Pentecostal Christian and fierce opponent of abortion and embryonic stem cell research, Palin electrified Christian Right activists with her story of foregoing abortion to give birth to a son with Down’s syndrome. ‘You know how politics works — you don’t usually get it all,’ crowed Family Research Council Action political chief Connie Mackey on the day McCain announced the Palin pick.
McCain had already won plaudits from evangelicals for his nationally televised performance at Rick Warren’s
“I don’t know” on the most divisive issue in
In fact, despite McCain’s earlier stumbles on faith-based matters — and Obama’s historic outreach to evangelicals — most polls give McCain an overwhelming advantage among those voters. A late September survey by the
So why are there still plenty of reasons to doubt religion will be the boon to Republicans this November that it was four years ago?
First, hot-button issues like gay marriage have been eclipsed by economic concerns, even among ardent religious conservatives. In 2004, a quarter of all voters cited social issues like gay marriage and abortion as their top concern. This year, according to a new polling analysis by the religion website Belief.net, only one in eight voters says those issues matter most.
This analysis found that among Christian Right voters, half of whom said social issues were their top priority in 2004, economic issues are now pre-eminent. Among Latino Christians, a fast-growing and traditionally Democratic voting bloc that was nonetheless integral to Bush’s 2004 re-election, just 12 per cent say social issues are their foremost concern, down from nearly 30 per cent in 2004. More than 60 per cent of those voters cite the economy as their main concern.
Second, younger evangelicals are less wedded to the Republican Party than their parents. Some younger evangelicals feel the GOP has used their movement, making campaign promises on issues like abortion but not delivering on actual legislation. Others believe that the Christian Right’s narrow agenda, sledgehammer tactics and allegiance to the GOP have tarnished Christianity’s image. ‘There’s an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the way the older generation has engaged politically and connected their faith with it,’ says David Kinnaman, who leads the Barna Group,
That helps explain why an analysis last autumn by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that the share of white evangelicals under 30 identifying as Republicans has fallen 15 percentage points since 2005, to 40 per cent. Most of those voters are migrating to the Independent column, not the Democratic one. But they make it much less likely that McCain will match Bush’s stratospheric evangelical support. One September poll found that while most white evangelicals under 30 back McCain, they are 10 percentage points less supportive than older evangelicals.
Third, although plenty of Christian Right activists are officially supporting McCain, many of their hearts aren’t in it. They’re less likely to knock on doors or pick up the phone to promote him than they were for Bush. At a Colorado meeting this summer where dozens of Christian Right heavies decided to coalesce around McCain, they also strategised on how to avoid another McCain-like nominee in future elections. ‘This election is not about McCain,’ says Mat Staver, the evangelical legal advocate who organized the meeting. ‘This is about how we best pursue our core values and advance Christian principles... [McCain] might not represent everything you want in a candidate, but Obama would decimate our values.’
Even after choosing Palin, the McCain campaign has made little contact with religious communities to ratchet up tepid support. McCain’s website includes special pages for ‘Arab Americans for McCain’ and ‘Racing Fans for McCain’, but lacks a page for evangelicals. ‘We put in a request with the McCain campaign and it was never responded to,’ says Richard Cizik, the government affairs chief for the National Association of Evangelicals, the country’s biggest evangelical umbrella group. ‘Many figures in the Republican party have reached out to the campaign stating their concern that the candidate has not reached out to evangelical leaders, but it went nowhere.’
Obama, meanwhile, invited Cizik and two dozen other conservative religious leaders to
Will most of 2004’s values voters be so enthusiastic? No way. But Obama has made himself acceptable enough to religious voters to have put culturally conservative states like
Dan Gilgoff is politics editor at Beliefnet.com and author of The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War.
Source: http://www.spectator.co.