There have been a number of articles over the past week detailing Barack Obama’s success with winning votes from a variety of religious people. In her article from Newsweek, A Post Evangelical America, Lisa Miller describes Obama supporters as “a wild diversity of the American religious experience, including mainline protestants, church-shoppers, the curious, the spiritual but not religious, the heterodox, the intermarried, the community minded.” Obama also did well with Jewish people, Catholics and religious African Americans.
Another article, which is from the LA Times, looks at the differences in demographics between the people who voted for John Kerry in 2004 and the people who voted for Barack Obama. Cathleen Decker highlights the fact that “Obama did better than Kerry among pretty much every religious group.” Obama did surprisingly well with Catholics even made a little bit of progress with white evangelicals.
Miller asserts, “For at least four decades, white evangelicals have been the religion-and-politics story in this country.” Ever since Billy Graham became a national figure, decrying communism and spreading the gospel, the evangelical right has been one of the essential voting blocs needed to win an election. This idea was solidified with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and his efforts to get Ronald Reagan elected. However, this election demonstrated that simply winning the white evangelical vote is not enough. Candidates must appeal to a variety of religious voters.
This shift in the voting patterns of religious voters can be explained in two connected ways. Miller argues, “The religious vote for Obama did not reflect a massive shift in ideology and priorities among Evangelicals but rather muscle-flexing by a coalition of others of faith.” With higher voter turn out among Latinos and African Americans, who mostly supported Obama, voter demographics were quite different. Furthermore, social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, where not the most important issues for a number of voters. More pressing problems, especially the economy, influenced many voters to chose one candidate or the other.
The question that I am left is will these shifts be permanent? Are religious voters becoming more liberal, or at least more willing to support more liberal candidates? Or were certain issues simply prioritized during this election? I think that the current state of our nation definitely influenced voters’ decisions, but I also do not think that the “religious” vote is guaranteed to the republicans. Candidates need to learn to not take any votes for granted.
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I would surmise that religious voters are not necessarily "becoming more liberal" as much as they are returning to their pre-Reagan moderate position.
I really never understood how religion and conservatism became so closely related. As you explained, though, this goes back the relatively recent Jerry Falwell Moral Majority and the Reagan administration.
I know that JFK conjured support from the religious sphere, and I am sure he isn't the only president labeled 'liberal' that received support from religion.
It seems to me that a person's religion is incredibly personal, and therefore I reason that their 'politico-religious entanglement' would equally be intimate and personal. I don't understand how then religious voters can be lumped together under one bloc. Moreover, how can any one religious leader, i.e. Jerry Falwell, usurp such authority over an imagined homogeneous religious voter bloc, and organize them under any issue moral or otherwise.
Maybe the pious have reverted to self-determination rather than Falwell/Limbaugh/Ayatollah/papal determination.
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