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Submitted by: Brian Starks; Florida State University; [email protected] The Religious Divide and Identity Politics In 2001, Layman wrote, The Great Divide, in which he elaborated a theory of partisan change that highlighted the increasing importance of religion for American politics at the turn of the millennium. Building on sociological theories of cultural conflict (Hunter 1991, Wuthnow 1988) and over a decade of research by political scientists studying religion (e.g. Green and Guth 1991; Jelen 1991; Rothenberg and Newport 1984; Wilcox 1986, 1989; Wilcox, Jelen, and Leege 1993), Layman used NES data along with data on party elites to argue that the growing political impact of traditionalist–modernist religious divisions is largely a result of the increasing political salience of cultural and moral concerns. Put another way, the polarization of the parties with regard to cultural issues played a key role in creating the current religious divide in mass party politics. In his research monograph, Layman, while also considering religious tradition based on denominational typologies, largely focused his attention on measures of doctrinal orthodoxy (or religious traditionalism) and religious commitment. He found that these measures were becoming relatively more important for understanding the religious struggles determining political coalitions, as they more strongly affected the attitudes towards cultural and moral issues that were becoming central to both party elites and electoral choice. He argued that “the most visible components of this struggle are the divisive, highly emotional battles over cultural issues such as abortion, women’s rights, homosexual rights, and the role of religion in public education.” (2001, p. 3) A year later, Leege, Wald, Krueger, and Mueller (2002) wrote “The Politics of Cultural Differences.” They echoed Layman’s major points regarding the importance of cultural issues for the development of political coalitions and specifically the role of culture wars over “religious traditionalism” for shifts in political coalitions over the past decade, but whereas Layman tended to emphasize religious beliefs and behaviors as the basis for these wars, Leege and colleagues highlighted the importance of group identity, loyalty, and boundaries in the larger process of cultural politics. Their work suggests that cultural politics is not just about issues, but is ultimately about groups and identity. In their focus on groups as a source of competing moral visions and personal identities, Leege et al.’s discussion clearly resonates with earlier work by sociologists interested in the religious divide. If cultural campaigning is really about a conflict between “us” and “them,” then we need to examine not just issues and issue frames, but also perceptions of who is “us” and who is “them.” I fundamentally agree and use this insight to suggest that America’s “culture wars” are best understood as a form of “identity politics.” Thus, I suggest that religious self-identification be considered a key element in the development of partisan viewpoints and behaviors along religious lines. Furthermore, I believe the 2007-2009 panel study provides a perfect opportunity to assess this theory. In the past decade, research in sociology has continued to explore religious divisions, religious identity, and the cognitive maps of ordinary Americans. One important branch of such work built directly from Wuthnow’s studies of religious conservatives and liberals and Hunter’s discussion of religious progressives and the religiously orthodox and also indirectly on survey research by political scientists interested in self-identified Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. This research was conducted by Christian Smith (1998) and his colleagues. Their research detailed a variety of Protestant identities, their self-understandings, beliefs, and roots in particular religious sub-cultures. They argued that the roots of modern Evangelical identity were to be found in the neo-evangelical movement of the 1940s and 1950s, as opposed to the fundamentalist movement of the 1930s, and differences in these identities were important for understanding the religious vitality of these groups. Smith and his colleagues initially relied on in-depth interviews and survey questions from their 1996 Religious Identity and Influence Survey to study their claims, but more recently an item on Protestant religious self-identification has become a part of the semi-annual General Social Survey. In a similar vein, I am currently studying Catholic self-identification as a “traditional,” “moderate,” or “liberal” Catholic. In 2003-2004, I conducted in-depth interviews with Catholics in three different cities and explored their intra-group identifications as well as the way they depicted other Catholics of various cultural and political hues. In my own research, I found, as others have noted previously (Weaver and Appleby 1995), that Catholics do not like religious identifications such as fundamentalist or evangelical. Instead, I found the most likely self-designations in response to an openended question were traditional/old-fashioned, middle-of-the-road/moderate, and liberal/progressive (Starks 2005). As part of the same research project, I began exploring an item from the General Social Survey which asked Catholics nationwide: “When it comes to your religious identity, would you say you are a traditional, moderate, or liberal catholic or do none of these describe you?” This item paralleled the initial forced-choice survey question developed by Christian Smith to measure Protestant religious identity. Some previous NES surveys have included an item on religious identification somewhat similar in theoretical justification to the ones mentioned above. In particular, the following item, which was developed by the NES out of its 1989 pilot study, can be found in several NES studies in the 1990s: “Which one of these words best describes your kind of Christianity, fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic or pentecostal, moderate to liberal?” (V900544) I would like to point out two important shortcomings of this measure and then propose two items that I believe better measure religious selfidentification among Christians. First, I believe that the NES pilot study initially constructed separate questions for Catholics and Protestants, but these were reduced to a single question in later surveys. Unfortunately, my own in-depth interviews suggest that most Catholics are unlikely to subscribe to the conservative Protestant identifications of fundamentalist, pentecostal or evangelical (c.f. Weaver and Appleby 1995). This limits the usefulness of the measure for examining Catholics. Providing alternative identifications that better fit the linguistic repertoires of ordinary Catholics will better enable measurement of competing Catholic identities. Secondly, the NES measure above conflates moderate and liberal Protestant identity. I believe this conflation of moderate and liberal made the earlier NES item less useful for researchers who were more interested in the traditional/modernist divide rather than simply in differences within Conservative Protestantism. My two proposed items, below, solve these issues by asking separate religious identity questions of Catholics and Protestants and by measuring greater variation in Protestant identity across the traditionalist/modernist divide. Proposed items for the NES Panel Survey: Item 1: “When it comes to your religious identity, would you say you are a fundamentalist, evangelical, mainline, or liberal Protestant or do none of these describe you?” Item 2: “When it comes to your religious identity, would you say you are a traditional, moderate, or liberal catholic or do none of these describe you?” (see http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/; mnemonics: religid and cathid) Item 1 (or a variant, which allows for multiple identifications) has a substantial history and has been used to measure Protestant religious identity by Smith (1998) and others, and has been linked to a variety of outcomes, including politics (e.g., Regnerus, Sikkink and Smith 1999). Overcoming one of the deficiencies I noted in the earlier NES item, Smith’s item recognizes a distinction between mainline and liberal Protestant identity, and this allows for greater variation in identification along the traditionalist/modernist divide (which Layman and others have found to be so important). Of course, for those specifically interested in Conservative Protestants, the GSS measure described above does not allow for Pentecostal identification, whereas the previous NES measure did. The GSS has recently recognized this deficiency and added a pentecostal/charismatic category to its multiple-identification variant of the question above. Depending upon the desires of political scientists interested in religion, alternative wording for item 2 could be added which would allow for Pentecostal/Charismatic identification. Regarding Item 2, I have examined the correlates of Catholic self-identification in terms of socio-demographic indicators and social attitudes, as well as religious beliefs and behaviors in the GSS data. First of all, there are important group differences in religious beliefs and behaviors similar to the traditionalist/modernist divide discussed by Layman (2001) and others (e.g., Davis and Robinson 1996, 1997, 1999, 2006). Second, in examining the various Catholic identities’ and their links to economic and cultural attitudes, I found that differences were largest on cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality and largely non-existent with regards to economic and redistributive attitudes, again similar to Layman. More importantly, though, I found that the various religious self-identifications had significant independent effects even after controlling for a wide variety of religious beliefs. I also found significant main effects of religious selfidentification on political views (a conservative-liberal scale). Such results, while suggestive, provide only limited evidence for claims about identity’s causal impact on religious, cultural, and political beliefs and behaviors. Because the GSS has not asked these religious self-identification questions over a substantial period of time and especially since it does not contain panel data, it is hard to say whether these religious identities are causally-prior determinants of cultural attitudes and political identity or simply one-point-in-time self-assessments. As such, the panel study design of this survey would be ideal for studying the political consequences of religio-political identities. It would allow researchers to assess the stability of various religious self-identifications among individuals over time (and would allow comparisons to other non-religious identities, such as party identification). It would also allow exploration of whether religious identities are causally-prior determinants of cultural attitudes, political identity, and vote choice. Theorists (e.g., Tajfel and Turner 1977) suggest that because social identity monitors and construes social stimuli and provides a basis for regulating behavior, identity should be understood as a cognitive structure that organizes future activities, rather than as merely a “selfassessment” that follow shifts or changes in the underlying attitudes. Thus, identities are expected to be causal determinants of future behavior. However, it’s likely that not all identifications serve the purpose of structuring future action. Specifically, we need to study whether the religious self-identifications suggested here serve this purpose. A panel study would allow for a direct examination of the time sequencing of associations and therefore an assessment of whether these identifications are a basis for future actions. Other key items to which my proposed measures would be related: As I noted at the outset, research on the traditionalist/modernist divide has suggested that understanding religion and politics requires recognition of the importance of differing issue positions with regard to cultural/moral issues (abortion, homosexuality, gender roles, etc.) So, these measures should strongly relate to my proposed measures. Issue salience has also been recognized as important for religion’s connection to party identification and vote choice. Issue salience examines not one’s position on an issue, but the relative importance of that issue in a hierarchy of competing priorities. For instance, Brooks (2002) found that high-attending Evangelical Protestants were much more likely to be concerned with “family decline” than other religious groups. Similarly, Layman found that mentions of moral/cultural issues as important electoral concerns were important for determining Republican vote choice (among religious traditionalists). The proposed measures should correlate with issue salience. Open-ended responses would be best for examining arguments concerning the effectiveness of political or campaign appeals to various religio-political groups. Personally, I am especially interested in seeing how liberal and traditional Catholics prioritize not just cultural issues but also those related to the war and economic justice. If an open-ended question is not chosen (e.g., Repass’s current proposal in the online commons), then a closed-ended question which requires ranking the personal importance of some cultural/moral issues, economic/social welfare issues, and foreign policy/war issues would be essential. I would also hope that several measures of religious belief and behaviors could be a part of the final survey. This would allow for a comparison of the importance of religious self-identification vis-à-vis other approaches to the religious divide. If there is not room, however, I would seek at a minimum the inclusion of a religious attendance variable. Since identities are usually enacted in particular contexts, religious attendance as an indicator of religious involvement would be especially important to include. Finally, the politics measures in the GSS are much less comprehensive than the NES, especially with regard to political behaviors. I am very interested in seeing whether religious self-identification, after controlling for relevant political factors, still affects political behaviors directly through reactions to political appeals to identity, or only indirectly through issue positions, political views, etc. At the very least, I would expect significant relationships with measures of an individual’s political views (conservativeliberal), party identification (strong republican-strong democrat), and vote choice. Closing Rationale for adding to the NES Panel Survey: I believe that the two measures proposed would be a valuable addition to the NES panel study. The 2004 presidential election provided a vivid display of the way that political campaigns orient messages to attract different religio-political groups. Overt and covert appeals were consistently made to traditional Catholics and liberal Catholics by Bush and Kerry respectively—with Bush emphasizing his pro-life stance and speaking of a “culture of life” and Kerry emphasizing economic justice issues such as access to health insurance and the minimum wage. Without good measures of who identifies with these different groups, however, it is difficult to assess whether such appeals are successful or not in their targeting of particular groups. The NES does not currently have an item that successfully differentiates Catholics into self-distinguished groups based upon religious identification. In addition, while there was a previous item for differentiating conservative Protestants as evangelical, pentecostal, or fundamentalist identifiers, the fact that it conflated moderate and liberal Protestant identity was a deficiency. These critiques may help to explain why Layman and others have focused their research more on religious beliefs and behaviors, rather than groups and identities. Of course, political scientists do at times divide Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, and others into groups of “religious traditionalists” and “religious modernists.” However, these groups are constructed by researchers using multiple religion measures and based upon researcher decisions about who fits into a particular group or not. In comparison to this approach, I believe that the proposed measures are both more simple and straightforward and better measure the theoretically relevant distinctions involved in a personal delineation of “us” and “them.” Ideally, however, both these proposed measures and previous measures of religious beliefs and behaviors could be included in the panel study for comparison. References: Brooks, Clem. 2002. “Religious Influence and the Politics of Family Decline Concern: Trends, Sources, and U.S. Political Behavior.” American Sociological Review 67:191-211. Davis, Nancy J. and Robert V. Robinson. 1996. "Are the Rumors of War Exaggerated? Religious Orthodoxy and Moral Progressivism in America." American Journal of Sociology 102:756-87. ______. 1997. "A War for America's Soul? the American Religious Landscape." Pp. 3961 in Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth, edited by Rhys H. Williams. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. ______. 1999. "Their Brothers' Keepers? Orthodox Religionists, Modernists, and Economic Justice in Europe." American Journal of Sociology 104:1631-65. Green, John C. and James L. Guth. 1991. The Bible and the Ballot Box : Religion and Politics in the 1988 Election. Boulder: Westview Press. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Basic. Jelen, Ted G. (Ed) 1989. 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Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1986, 25, 3, Sept 25:355-63. Wilcox, Clyde. 1989. "The Fundamentalist Voter: Politicized Religious Identity and Political Attitudes and Behavior." Review of Religious Research, 1989, 31, 1, Sept 31:54-67. Wilcox, Clyde, Ted G. Jelen, and David C. Leege. 1993. Religious Group Identifications: Toward a Cognitive Theory of Religious Mobilization. In Leege, David C. and Kellstedt, Lyman A. 1993. Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II. Princeton University Press.