How to turn white evangelicals into Democrats

After the 2006 election, many in the media declared that the age of the religious right was over. But evangelicals are showing up at the polls again this year, even when other Republicans aren't, as shown in the primaries and caucuses in Iowa, Kansas, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee. The winner of those contests, Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, outlasted every other major Republican contender except the likely nominee, John McCain. Do journalists and pundits actually have a good grasp on how evangelical voters think? It seems to me like they're engaging in projection and wishful thinking.

Certainly, there's a tendency to prematurely declare the death of the religious right. Pretty much every other year there are magazine headlines that either say the religious right is resurgent or that the religious right is over. That's a journalistic shortcoming. And you're right to say that much of that has to do with a lack of familiarity with the community, I think. But there's an important difference here between the leadership of the religious right (and you'll notice that [few] of them have come out for Mike Huckabee...) and the evangelicals in the pews, who may not, or most of them may not, think of themselves as part of the religious right. There are certainly those conservative voters who are frustrated with the Republican Party over the last few years but they're responding to Mike Huckabee because they see him as one of them, and importantly, not one of the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson crowd.

According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats soundly defeated Republicans among secular voters, winning the vote of those who seldom or never attend church by 2 to 1. And according to a study conducted by the Barna Group, since 1991, the number of adults who do not attend church has nearly doubled, rising from 39 million to 75 million in 2004, while the entire adult population has only increased by 15 percent. Why is so much attention paid to the Democrats' so-called God gap when so little is paid to the Republicans' inability to appeal to secular voters? Can't the Democrats win now and in the future by appealing to secular voters?

There was a study done in the fall of 2006 down at Baylor University that was very useful because it actually probed this question. We have seen a rise in the number of people who state they have no religious affiliation. That's not the same as people who identify as atheists or secular. It's just people who don't name a religious affiliation when asked in a poll. And what the people at Baylor did is probe that and try to find out how many of those people really should be accurately categorized as having no religious traditions. And what they found was that a significant percentage of people who said they had no religious tradition still engaged in what we would define as religious practices. They pray every day; many of them say they believe in God; a good number of them, when asked, could identify a house of worship. So I think what it's telling us is that religion is getting a bad rap. And it's getting such a bad rap that it's becoming something people don't want to affiliate themselves with.

But there's no question that the percentage of Americans who are more secular has grown in the last two decades. There are two important sociological reasons for this, and I'll bore you with this because I'm a reformed sociologist. First, you're starting to see the first cohort of kids who are secular and who were raised by secular parents. So it's not as if they were raised in a religious tradition and rebelled against it. They're second generation. And we've never really seen that before.

The second thing is just simply that the cohort of people who are not yet married or not yet with kids continues to grow, and there's a life cycle effect. We know that people stop going to religious services when they start going to college and when they're young adults. But they almost always go back once they get married and have kids. People seem to still think it's important to raise their kids in a religious tradition. But whereas, a generation or so ago, people would start having kids in their late 20s, now they're not having kids until their 30s. So it's just a simple matter of that cohort of childless Americans [being] much larger. But from everything we've seen, they continue to go back to church.

So just to bring it back to your question, I think it's inaccurate to look at the numbers and conclude that a growing number of Americans view religion as irrelevant to their lives. We know that's not true. There's a very consistent number, around 85 to 87 percent of Americans, who say that religion is an important part of their lives. And the demographic trends are actually moving in that direction because immigrants tend to be the most religious of those people in America. So for all those secularists who may be moving up into the ranks of the electorates, they're being outweighed by immigrants, particularly first-generation Asians and Hispanics, who tend to be much more religious than your average white voter.

Throughout the book you mention how deeply religious many Democrats are. You write that two-thirds of Democrats attend worship services regularly. And you show all these Democrats such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and John Kerry who are very committed to their religious beliefs. Do you think that many Democrats underestimate just how religious many of the members of their party are?

Absolutely. It continues to shock people when I talk to Democratic audiences and I remind them that 87 percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their lives. And that includes a heck of a lot of Democrats. Republicans are not getting 87 percent of the vote. I continue to meet people who insist, and these are hardcore Democrats, who insist to me that Bill Clinton is not religious, that it's just an act, that he had to go to church to put off his Republican critics and that he's really not a religious guy. Who find it inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi is a committed Catholic, [or think] that whenever she talks about faith now it's just the result of advisors and consultants telling her it's smart, when in fact this is a woman who's been quoting the Bible in closed-door meetings for decades. So I do think Democrats are kind of surprised to learn who the religious are in their midst and I think those are mostly the secular Democrats. The religious Democrats who I talk to are somewhat relieved because they had all been thinking that they were all by themselves.

How do you see evangelicals voting in this fall's presidential election?

I see evangelical voters voting the same way that everyone else does. They have serious concerns. They are concerned about the economy. They are concerned about not being able to provide healthcare for their families. They are concerned about the war in large part. And increasingly they're concerned about our place in the world. Like what we're doing to combat third-world poverty, what we're doing to protect the environment. The reason that I was writing about whether Democrats can become more savvy or aware of religious voters, is not to put religious issues on the agenda. It's to take them off ... and in so doing, focus on the issues that all voters really care about.

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