Religious Rhetoric and American Politics: The Endurance of Civil Religion in Electoral Campaigns

5. The Consequences of Religious Language on Presidential Candidate Evaluations

81 5 THE CONSEQUENCES OF RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE ON PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE EVALUATIONS This is the source of our confidence—the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed. —President Barack Obama, 2009 Inaugural Address In this passage, President Obama is invoking a by now familiar genre. Even in the midst of great uncertainty, America has a divinely inspired place in the world order. But when a president speaks, do Americans listen? Does invoking this creed have a special resonance with the American mass public—a strong enough pull to influence the manner in which Americans evaluate candidates and elected officials? Addressing this question not only helps us understand the place of religious rhetoric in American politics but also how campaigns influence political behavior more generally. Political scientists have debated the extent of the influence of rhetoric on the electoral process since the advent of the modern campaign. One of the more enduring points of contention has been whether stable predispositions govern political decision making from one election to the next or whether contextual factors such as campaign advertising and political debates exert a significant and varied influence. One scholarly tradition has long claimed that news media and advertising actually exert minimal effects on individuals’ attitudes (Klapper 1960). Moreover, evidence suggests that certain predispositions—partisan identification in particular— are unmoved movers that are incredibly important in determining electoral attitudes and that are resistant to persuasive forces (Campbell et al. 1960; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002). These predispositions preclude the possibility of substantial campaign effects (through advertising, media coverage, etc.) because the relationship between stable attitudes and vote choice is unwavering. 82 Chapter 5 On the other hand, recent research has produced, through both improved measurement (Bartels 1993) and nuanced theorization (Druckman 2005), substantial evidence that campaigns have measurable effects on citizen attitudes and electoral outcomes (Kinder 1998). In particular , evidence shows that contextual forces can prime the importance of numerous factors, including identity, on political evaluations (Transue 2007). Likewise, increased attention to the role of emotion in politics has shed light on the electoral decision calculus. For example, Brader (2006) has produced evidence that campaign advertising works by in- fluencing individuals’ affective states, which in turn has consequences on (among other things) the extent to which voters rely on existing predispositions in electoral decision making (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000). Religious rhetoric provides the penultimate test case study in the stability versus change debate. Religion is among individuals’ most stable predispositions (Sherkat 2001; Jennings and Stoker 2007).1 That an individual ’s religiosity is so stable suggests that the extent to which religion matters in a given campaign ought to remain relatively consistent between elections. But, at the same time, the relationship between religious and political attitudes in the electorate is changing (Kohut et al. 2000; Olson and Green 2006). Somewhat paradoxically, then, there are reasons both to view religion as an unmoved mover and as a force that can exert a variable impact from election to election. To understand the role of religiosity in electoral behavior, it is helpful to begin by making a distinction between affiliation with a particular denomination or tradition, beliefs about the divine, and level of religious commitment or involvement (Olson and Green 2006).2 Affiliation is perhaps the most intuitive way to think about religiously based electoral behavior (Herberg 1955). Religious communities have long coalesced around a particular party, due to a shared identity with candidates from that party, a platform consistent with the doctrine of that religious community , or policies that would otherwise benefit members of that religious group. For example, mid-twentieth-century Catholic support for the Democratic Party arose in part because of prominent Catholic party leaders such as Al Smith and John F. Kennedy. Moreover, the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered Catholics a vision of economic equality and an immigration policy more amenable to Catholic social mobility while at the same time opposing anti-Catholic bigotry (Wald and Calhoun-Brown 2006). Consequences of Religious Language 83 Although affiliation is still an important force in American politics, recent scholarship suggests that new belief-based fault lines may be reshaping traditionally affiliation-based divisions. Specifically, evidence suggests that an individual’s level of religious orthodoxy might now be a more important predictor of party...