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Read the full R & E interview with Allen Hertzke, professor of political science and director of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma:
A true religious divide has emerged in the American electorate. We've always had divisions between different religious groups, Catholics versus Protestants. Catholics always tended to vote more Democratic, Protestants tended to vote more Republican in the past. What has happened now is that among whites the amount of devotion people have to their faith is a determinative factor between the parties. Democrats are now a more secular party; Republicans are now a more religiously observant party, at least in terms of things like church attendance. The exit polls in 2000 show that church attendance was a major factor in determining the outcome of the vote. It was a more powerful predictor than a number of other things that we normally look at. Sixty percent of all people who attend church more than once a week voted for Bush, and 60 percent of the people who do not attend church at all voted for Gore. This is really an unprecedented development and does pose challenges for both parties.
What it says is that we have a new religious divide in our party politics, and it has a big impact on how both political parties have to position themselves. At the Democratic convention there was a lot of talk about faith, because the Democrats are trying to address the problem of their image among churchgoing whites, especially. Republicans, on the other hand, need to reach out to those voters who might be uneasy about their pietistic affiliation with the Christian Right, and so they're going to feature speakers who are more identified with other issues, like Rudolph Giuliani, for example.
About one fourth of the total electorate is made up of white evangelicals. Of that, at least two thirds to 70 percent vote Republican. This is a crucial voting constituency for George Bush. White evangelicals or Christian evangelicals are, in fact, crucial to Bush's reelection. And a big problem, according to Karl Rove, was they didn't turn out in the kind of numbers they wanted. So not only do evangelicals tend to vote Republican, but a greater turnout of evangelicals could be decisive to Bush's fortunes. One other way to look at this is that 40 percent of Bush's total electoral votes come from white evangelicals, so it's a crucial constituency.
We know that people are motivated to vote on the basis of events and issues and how the issues are framed. If, for example, hot-button cultural issues become a major factor in the election -- for example, gay marriage -- and if it becomes clear to evangelical voters and conservative Catholics that Bush is on one side and Kerry is on the other side, then what we're going to see, I think, is a galvanized evangelical electorate. On the other hand, if the war goes worse, and if people -- including moderate evangelicals -- begin to have serious concerns about Bush's leadership, then Bush could lose some of the more moderate and Democratic evangelicals that he relies on. And if the economy, or vulnerability, or concern about loss of jobs and health care, if those issues become more salient, then some evangelicals will vote for the Democrats. It really depends upon how the issue cuts whether, in fact, Bush or Kerry gets elected.
Catholics are the quintessential swing voters in American politics. If you want to know how the median voter voted, or where the middle of the electorate is, white Catholics are it. They are crucial constituents for both parties, and they tend to swing back and forth depending upon the personality and the issue. Bush is pressing very hard on school choice, on abortion, on gay marriage. We know that among white Catholics the more they attend church, the more they tend to be culturally traditional, and the more they tend to vote Republican. So Bush is going to go after not the lapsed Catholics but the more faithful attenders who may be progressive on economics and more dove-ish on foreign policy, but who in fact are very conservative on some of these cultural issues. He and the Republicans are going to seriously go after that electorate.
In 1960, John Kennedy got 80 percent of the Catholic vote. There was still a deep divide between Catholics and Protestants, and many Protestants feared Catholics, Catholicism, and a Catholic president. That's gone. In fact, evangelicals often align with conservative Catholics and seek some Catholic leaders as their leaders. The fact that the Catholic vote is up for grabs is a relatively new phenomenon and a very important one.
The faith-based initiative may be effective in terms of public policy at some point, but I don't think it's going to be very effective in getting many black voters to vote for Bush. There's too much antipathy toward the way the 2000 election went. There's a difference on issues; Bush has a real credibility problem with black voters. Hispanics may be a different story. Bush got a decent Hispanic vote; many Hispanic Catholics and especially Hispanic evangelicals and Pentecostals are quite conservative, so it's possible that Bush's faith-based initiatives, his outreach to churches, may work there.
How does the Republican Party galvanize its evangelical base without offending the more moderate voters and conservative Democrats they rely on to get elected? If, for example, Bush is identified too closely with strident rhetoric about the culture wars, about the war over the family, about a struggle for the soul of America, the kind of rhetoric you hear in some conservative Christian or Christian Right preachers, then that may turn off other voters who are really skittish about pietistic politics or the mixing of church and state too much. On the other hand, Bush can't completely ignore that constituency. There has been some real grumbling about how some evangelical leaders have been slighted at the Republican convention in terms of prominent positions as speakers. Prominent pro-choice politicians such as Rudolph Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and others are going to be featured at the Republican convention, and there have been some real upset feelings among evangelicals that they don't see some of their major leaders. I think the Republicans may have to address that as well.
One way they may do this is to have someone like Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) speak, who is strongly associated with opposition to gay marriage, opposition to abortion, and support for school choice, but who is also strongly associated with human rights initiatives around the world, humanitarian concerns, and so forth. It's not that you have to in some ways only talk about gay marriage and abortion to appeal to evangelicals. Evangelicals are also very concerned about human rights around the world; because of their concern about the persecution of fellow believers, they've been very involved in issues -- on sex trafficking -- that have drawn some alliances with some liberal groups, and they're concerned about the environment and health care and the war. It would be patronizing to assume that all you have to do is talk about gay marriage and abortion and you appeal to the evangelical voters. On the other hand, you can't ignore those issues, especially, I think, gay marriage. The fear that an activist judiciary is going to redefine marriage, that unelected judges are going to usher in this vast social revolution is absolutely horrifying to evangelical leaders right now. You hear it across the board, from the more moderate ones to the more strident ones. That's an issue that Bush is going to have to address, but he doesn't want to come across as being mean-spirited to gays.
We should not assume that the evangelical world is a monolith. In fact, it thrives with entrepreneurial activity by diverse and often competing local congregations with dynamic local leaders. It's the quintessential entrepreneurial religion. What that means is that there will be competing voices this fall. Sometimes you will hear militant rhetoric from a particular religious leader. It might be James Dobson about the war on the family. It might be incendiary rhetoric about Islam. And then other evangelical leaders will want to basically calm that down and appear and be more moderate and reasonable. This always poses a potential challenge for Republicans, because they don't want to be associated with anti-Islamic rhetoric, with culture war rhetoric, and so forth.
The average person doesn't pay attention to the presidential election until after the conventions, and they don't really pay attention until the debates. That's why we can't say what will galvanize voters. If there's a sharp debate over gay marriage, and if Bush is able to frame Kerry as someone who actually would not protect the integrity of marriage as conservative evangelicals would see it, then it's quite possible that the average person in the pew would go, "Oh, my God, I didn't know this was going on." I mean, the average person is dealing with their kids, their school, their jobs, going to church, organizing their churches. They're not paying attention to politics.
[In 2000,] the leaders of the Islamic community in America made a strategic decision to endorse George Bush. They did so on two grounds: they felt snubbed by Gore, and they're morally very conservative on issues the Republicans take strong stands on. But that's not going to happen this time. Muslim leaders, by and large, are very upset with the Bush administration; they're upset with the Patriot Act; they're upset with profiling; they're upset with the war in Iraq. And so the majority of the Muslim vote will go to Kerry this year instead of Bush, and that's something we don't generally see. We don't see that dramatic a turnaround from one presidential election to another. But we do know that the majority of Muslim voters in 2000 voted for Bush, and I would predict that the majority of Muslim voters will vote for Kerry in 2004. They're a small part of the electorate, maybe one percent, but, frankly, if this is as close as it was last time, anything can be decisive.
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The Hispanic population is dramatically growing, as we know. It has surpassed the African-American population in terms of its percentage in the United States. Its electorate is still smaller because many of these people either are not yet citizens or have not registered to vote. But the Hispanic electorate, the portion that votes, is going to grow. It's going to be bigger in 2004 than it was in 2000. And it's extremely important, especially in some decisive states. Here's what we know: about two thirds of the Hispanic vote generally goes to Democrats at the presidential level. But that means there's a significant third out there that the Republicans can go after, and the Republicans might be able to cut into that two thirds, or the Democrats might be able to cut into the one third. We also know that there's an interesting division within the Hispanic community. Hispanic Protestants who tend to be evangelicals [and] Pentecostals tend to vote more Republican than Hispanic Catholics. The Hispanic Protestant population is growing, and so that could have an influence as well over time.
In the 1950s, the mainline Protestant churches were the heart of the Republican Party. The Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, mainline Protestants were Republicans and were the base of the Republican Party. That population has declined. The mainline churches have had a precipitous decline in membership, while the evangelical churches have grown [and] the Catholic population has grown. The mainline churches are at best a fifth of the population, and probably less than that. They're less important than they once were. They also are less Republican than they used to be. Now mainline Protestants still generally are more Republican than Democrat, but the number of mainline Protestants have become disenchanted with the Republican Party as the Republican Party has become more associated with the evangelical or what they would see as the Christian Right influence, and so socially liberal mainline Protestants often vote Democrat if those issues become salient. That can create an interesting situation, where some mainline Protestants might vote Democrat if the Republican Party seems too identified with the Christian Right, for example. But we shouldn't exaggerate that because there's a big gap between the mainline leaders, who are liberal, and average mainline parishioners, who tend to be moderate to conservative.
The Republicans have an actual outreach to evangelical churches. They have made contacts, mailings, phone calls to prominent evangelical ministers; they've asked for lists of parishioners; they've asked for lists of denominational members, and so forth. This is very controversial, and it might draw some of these churches into a violation of their tax-exempt status, although it's doubtful the IRS will really pursue these because if they did, they would have to pursue some of the violations in the black churches. The point is that there is an aggressive effort on the part of the Bush campaign to reach out and mobilize evangelical voters and highlight the differences between Bush and Kerry on issues that will be salient to those people. Even though local church leaders cannot endorse a candidate from the pulpit, there are all kinds of ways that cues can be provided within churches that will convey who the right candidate is to vote for. Why this strategy might be effective is that many of these evangelical and charismatic churches are so huge; these are churches with thousands of members. If the environment is thoroughly conservative in its messages, and if there are things on the bulletin boards and workshops and announcements about pro-life efforts and about gay marriage, and then if there's a voter guide distributed that shows the voting positions of the two candidates on the issues, it becomes obvious whom they should vote for. There's nothing wrong with churches organizing voter registration drives, driving people to the polls. This effort may actually address one of the crucial concerns that Karl Rove has, which is turnout. In other words, if the Republicans are successful at mobilizing the evangelical electorate through churches, then they can increase turnout. That's one of the crucial ways that they are approaching this election. The other, I suspect, will be by how they frame issues, the kinds of ads they run, what Bush says in the debates, what kinds of speeches are given at the convention, and so forth.
The Republicans see a real strategic opportunity this year to cut into the traditional Democratic Catholic vote. Catholics tend to be cross-pressured voters. They can be quite progressive on economic matters, health care, the environment, war and peace, but quite traditional on abortion, school choice, marriage, family issues, and so forth. Because of the gay marriage issue and because Catholic bishops have been speaking out on that, and because of the abortion issue, and because most specifically Kerry is himself a Catholic who has taken a strong pro-choice position, Bush and his aides see a real strategic opportunity. Kerry is the first Catholic candidate for president since John Kennedy. The abortion issue was not a matter of concern; it was not on the agenda in 1960. Now it is. There have been Catholic bishops who have actually said that if Kerry came to their diocese or to their church, they would deny Communion to him, and there's been talk in conservative Catholic circles that that ought to be done. I think there will be more publicity about this, about how Kerry as a senator has had one of the most liberal voting records on abortion; he not only supports abortion rights generally but he's opposed the bill banning late-term abortion, providing parental consent, funding for abortions abroad, and so forth. Kerry has a record that is in some ways ideally suited for Republicans to attack with conservative Catholics, and there has been a lot of outreach to bishops by the Bush campaign, but the Catholic bishops are going to have to be careful. They have some credibility issues of their own. They can't be perceived as being too political. I think ultimately they're going to back off on threats of denying Communion.
This could be the most important election in terms of its religious impact since 1960. As we know, religion was a powerful factor because John Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president; that was a very important factor for many Protestants, and it almost lost him the election. This year I think religion may be as important as in 1960. It will be because the parties are so divided on some of the issues that really galvanize the religious community, like the status of marriage, like abortion, like the future of our public schools, the nature of education, and even the war against terrorism. Issues that are powerfully important to the religious community, especially to the evangelical and conservative Catholic communities, are really dividing the two parties. In addition, the candidates probably lend themselves to accentuating that religious influence. The fact that Kerry's a Catholic and the fact that he takes a position that's opposed officially by Catholic hierarchy or Catholic Church teaching is going to be a factor in the election as well.
Religious issues are central to the Republican Party. The religious constituency is central to the Republican Party. When you add the evangelical Protestants who vote for Republicans, plus the conservative Catholics, you have a majority of the Republican vote. And then when you add more conservative mainline Protestant voters, it's the churchgoing white population that forms the basis of the Republican electorate. But they still have an exquisite challenge, because even most evangelicals are not militant. They themselves often don't like strident rhetoric in the public square. Especially many Catholics and mainline Protestants don't like to hear that. The Republican leaders and Bush himself have to appeal to the base, and especially appeal to the leaders who sometimes speak with strident culture war rhetoric at the same time that they don't offend more moderate voters. In a similar way, Democrats have to draw religious voters to them without offending their more secular supporters.
What I'm going to be watching for at the Republican convention are a couple of things. I want to see how prominently featured the gay marriage issue is. It could be the Republicans decide to downplay the issue, assuming that it's going to be raised by the media, by events, by independent groups, by church leaders themselves, so that the Republican official campaign establishment doesn't have to deal with it, and Bush can be above it all, can talk about the sanctity of marriage and so forth. That's something to watch for. It will be interesting to see how Bush weaves together religious themes in his acceptance speech -- to what extent he will attempt to articulate Catholic social teaching, the extent to which he'll speak to diversity (I suspect he will), and he will want to come across as ecumenical, he will want to reassure people. There are people who are very much afraid that he believes he has been anointed by God to carry [out] this war on terrorism, and that scares the daylights out of many secular voters and also many Europeans. That's something else I want to see, if Bush tries to allay the fears of those who think his religion is actually dangerous. Those are two things I would look for in the Republican convention.
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