Holding on to the Right

The Religious Right may become an inappropriate name for evangelical Christians, particularly a younger generation of religious voters who may identify more with the Democratic left. In her article entitled “Praying Politics,” Loredana Vuoto shows that more evangelicals voted for President Barack Obama than any other Democratic candidate did since Jimmy Carter in 1976. According to Vuoto, this shows how Obama was able to tailor the democratic platform to religious voter without losing the party’s secular voters, which he earned 72 percent of the non-religious votes. According to Vuoto, that large amount of support in the evangelical community, however, many be turned away by President Obama’s overturning of the “Mexico City” regulations, which prohibited giving funding to foreign social-service organizations who provide abortions or information on abortions.

This logic used by Vuoto runs counter to the logic laid out by William Martin is his book, With God on Our Side: The History of the Religious Right in America, about what issues actually sway religious voters to switch political affiliation. Martin asserts that it was not the so-called “moral issues,” such as abortion or gay marriage that first caught the ire of the evangelical community, but rather the threat of the Internal Revenue Service to strip Christian schools of their tax-exempt status because if what the bureau believed was “de facto segregation.” Using the logic that Martin laid out, it is very unlikely that religious voters would supported President Obama would be turned-off by this move, understanding that this issue is more about foreign policy than religious convictions. The types of political decisions that have the power to shift religious voters’ loyalties have more to do with the government interference in the private lives of Christians. As long as President Obama is willing to respect the rights of religious voters to live as they want, than he has little to worry about losing the evangelical votes he received.