[Update:] I may have misspoken when I declared the income gap was more important than the "God gap." The statistics aren't nearly solid enough to make such a claim. I've updated the title to reflect my new post-aircraft carrier approach.
Here's the deal: Michael Hout and Andrew Greely argue in the NYT (via the Christianity Today weblog) that income is a better indicator of voter preferences than religious affiliation. Meaning: poor evangelicals and Catholics vote for Democrats, same as everyone else.
Data and analysis below the fold.
CT provides a handy chart from a November 2003 Pew poll:
| 2000 VNS Exit Poll | | | Sept-Oct 2003 Reg. Voters | |
| Bush | Gore | Gap | | Bush | Dem | Gap |
Income | | | | | | | |
<$15K/<$20K | 39 | 61 | 22 | | 34 | 66 | 32 |
$15-30/$20-30K | 43 | 57 | 14 | | 38 | 62 | 24 |
$30-$50K | 49 | 51 | 2 | | 54 | 46 | 8 |
$50-$75K | 53 | 47 | 6 | | 59 | 41 | 18 |
$75-$100K | 54 | 46 | 8 | | 57 | 43 | 14 |
$100K+ | 56 | 44 | 12 | | 54 | 46 | 8 |
Church Attend | | | | | | | |
More than 1/wk | 64 | 36 | 28 | | 63 | 37 | 26 |
1/week | 59 | 41 | 18 | | 56 | 44 | 12 |
1-2/month | 47 | 53 | 6 | | 52 | 48 | 4 |
1-2/year | 44 | 56 | 12 | | 46 | 54 | 8 |
Seldom/Never | 34 | 66 | 32 | | 38 | 62 | 24 |
I wish they'd flipped the order of their second data series--it'd make it easier to see that the numbers run almost exactly parallel to the first.
In any case, there's a sociological dimension to this story and a dimension of practice, both Christian and Democratic.
Sociological first: it's long been known that growth in Christian denominations in the United States is linked to the economic development of their adherents. It isn't so true anymore, but it used to be that people would start out, say, Baptist or Methodist, and as their fortunes grew, become Presbyterian or Episcopalian. It's not so much that their beliefs changed, or that church was simply a place to network with the "right" people; more like as one's position changed, one would find more in common with a new group of friends, and drift toward their church.
At the same time, the story of American denominations has been one of continual expansion of the "mainline," or what most folks might call the religious mainstream. It began with the colonial established churches: Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Prebyterians. In the mid 1800's, the circle expanded to take in Methodists, Disciples, some Baptists, the Lutherans. It widened again in the 20's to include Catholics and Jews, whose numbers had spiked early in the century.
In the 50's, Pentecostal and Evangelical groups began a long march towards acceptance or even dominance of the American religious ecology. They were first able to flex their muscles in the 70's, and in the past ten or fifteen years, they have become more or less thoroughly ensconced in the religious mainstream. (Atheists/non-religious folks shouldn't sweat it; give the demographic growth in those two categories, these groups will be the next to move into the mainline.)
In any case, part of what drove the change was population shifting to the South, though evangelicalism and charismatic beliefs are by now thoroughly spread out across the country. And part of the shift was due to the rising income of folks in previously low-rent denominations. There are some Baptists and Assemblies of God folks who do pretty well, yo.
But not everybody in those churches has done so well, and the fault lines laid out in the table above demonstrate the results. Why don't conservative evangelicals vote their economic interests? Well, as it turns out, they do.
In fact, Hout and Greeley argue that income is a better predictor of party affiliation than membership in a "fundamentalist" denomination:
In the last two presidential elections, about 62 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican - or about 7.5 percent more than among other American Protestants. A majority, clearly, but nowhere near unanimity. And in terms of the electorate as a whole, it's hardly fair to say evangelicals are a dominant political force. If we measure their overall political influence as that 7.5 percent differential multiplied by their share of the electorate - they make up about 21 percent of voters- it comes to about 1.6 percentage points. Yes, as the 2000 election showed, even an edge that small can be decisive in a close race. But it hardly amounts to an overwhelming base. Moreover, those 1.6 percentage points are spread across all regions, not concentrated in the South, where the evangelicals supposedly contribute to the Republicans' red state advantage.
Clearly, claims that evangelicals have hijacked the nation's politics are greatly exaggerated. In fact, polling data show that President Bush's real base is not religious but economic, the group he jokingly referred to as "the haves and the have mores."
The General Social Survey found that 20 percent of American voters have family incomes of more than $75,000 a year, while twice that many earn $30,000 or less. The high-income group (about the same size as the evangelicals) votes Republican by an 18-point margin, while the low-income group favors Democrats by 24 percentage points. If the Republicans were to lose their 18-point advantage among the affluent, it would cost them about four percentage points nationwide in the election, more than twice the cost if they were to lose their edge among evangelicals.
And what they don't mention is that even evangelical denominations have a hard time growing these days. Growth in the Christian population has stalled, and in some areas, has even begun to shrink. Unless there's some kind of radical transformation in the religious landscape, the ability of conservative evangelicals to exert political influence through sheer numbers has topped out. As with the mainline denominations that have preceded them, they are probably going to start blending into the woodwork of society more and more, until their political views are not significantly different than any random person on the street.
If anyone will be able to exert increasing dominance in the coming years, it's the Catholic church, which grows almost exclusively by immigration in the US. That means a lot more nasty fights over abortion, but since immigrants tend to be low-income, probably a renewed focus on dinner-table economic issues, an area where the Dems have a built-in advantage.
So there's the sociology. What about the practice?
Two things jump out at me immediately. One is that churches have done a pretty lousy job at teaching their members about God's preference for the poor. When Bush can crack wise about the "haves and have-mores" being his base without having his head taken off by Christians across the board, then something's gone wrong.
To put it another way: if the churches were any good at teaching about economic justice, it's unlikely that we'd see such a sharp stratification in party affiliation along income levels. If we were teaching what we needed to teach, more people of all income levels would be connected to the party that I think has inarguably done more to protect low-income citizens. Certainly, those who attended church most regularly would give some thought to the social message of the gospel.
But let's not kid ourselves: neither Democrats nor Republicans have been exactly falling over themselves to attract the little guy in the past few years. Wasn't part of the shock of the Dean campaign that small contributors could show a lot of muscle when properly organized?
It's time for a back-to-basics movement, both for the church and for the Democrats. If there is any overlap in faith and progressive politics--and I believe there is considerable--it's that the wealth of society needs to be justly distributed. (Yes, yes, also peace. That's a rant for another day.) We need to tend to "the least of these" in our society. For Christians, it's a matter of fulfilling their mission in life. For Democrats, it's a way forward, a means to getting down to their core constituency, to see the party strengthen and even flourish at the start of the 21st century.