{"id":63,"date":"2010-09-02T09:37:04","date_gmt":"2010-09-02T09:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/conservative-republicans-religious-outliers.html"},"modified":"2010-09-02T09:37:04","modified_gmt":"2010-09-02T09:37:04","slug":"conservative-republicans-religious-outliers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/conservative-republicans-religious-outliers.html","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Republicans: Religious Outliers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The folks at Gallup headlined yesterday’s survey<\/a> on political preference by race\/ethnicity and religion, “Republicans Remain Disproportionately White and Religious.” They might have headlined it, “Democrats Remain Disproportionately Non-white and Not So Religious”–but that would have been wrong. Sixty-two percent of Democrats are non-Hispanic whites, which is very close to the 2009 Census Department estimate<\/a> of 65 percent. By contrast, the number for Republicans is 89 percent. As for religiosity, while it’s not clear to me what Gallup’s criteria are for distinguishing “highly religious” from “less religious,” I’m willing to bet a hefty sum that with 21 percent of their number African-American and 11 percent Hispanic, the Democrats as a whole are religiously about average for the population at large, whatever criteria are used.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s not exactly news that the GOP consists disproportionately of highly religious white people. What’s noteworthy is how much closer to the Democrats than Republicans the Independents are–ethno-racially and religiously. Seventy-one percent of Independents are non-Hispanic whites (twice as far from the GOP as from the Dems). And among non-Hispanic white Independents, the ratio of highly religious to less religious is just below the slightly-more-than 1:2 Democratic ratio and a far cry from the better than 1:1 GOP ratio. Indeed, white Independents are religiously virtually identical to Moderate Democrats, but significantly less religious than Moderate\/Liberal Republicans. <\/p>\n

Remember the “moral values” election of 2004? The political point here is that, to the extent that the old religious issues play a role in current electoral politics, the GOP has an uphill battle on its hands. Of all six Gallup partisan groupings, from Liberal Democrat through Conservative Republican, only the last counts more highly religious than less religious whites, and by the hefty 12-point margin (50-38). So if the Tea Party\/GOP, even in its latest Beckian incarnation, isn’t stressing same-sex marriage or abortion or any other specific faith-based issue, you can understand why.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The folks at Gallup headlined yesterday’s survey on political preference by race\/ethnicity and religion, “Republicans Remain Disproportionately White and Religious.” They might have headlined it, “Democrats Remain Disproportionately Non-white and Not So Religious”–but that would have been wrong. Sixty-two percent of Democrats are non-Hispanic whites, which is very close to the 2009 Census Department estimate…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nConservative Republicans: Religious Outliers - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/conservative-republicans-religious-outliers.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Conservative Republicans: Religious Outliers - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The folks at Gallup headlined yesterday’s survey on political preference by race\/ethnicity and religion, “Republicans Remain Disproportionately White and Religious.” They might have headlined it, “Democrats Remain Disproportionately Non-white and Not So Religious”–but that would have been wrong. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}