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Religion and Polarization James Q. Wilson Today America is divided over religion to a degree we have not seen since the anti-Catholic efforts of the Know-Nothing Party in the nineteenth century and the Ku Klux Klan in the twentieth.And in those earlier con›icts,the struggle was at least between two religious traditions, Protestantism and Catholicism . Now the struggle is between people of any faith (Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish) and secularists who worry that political leaders who express a religious commitment, such as President Bush, are the enemies of freedom. The split between the religious and the secular is large and has grown. In 2004, white voters who attended religious services at least weekly were three times as likely as those who seldom or never went to church to oppose abortion and twice as likely to object to gay marriage and to describe themselves as conservative. When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that income chie›y explained the difference between Democratic and Republican voters. When I was a graduate student, I was told that education now explained more of these differences than did wealth. Today, religious identi‹cation is more closely associated with the presidential vote of white voters than is age, sex, income, or education.1 The importance of religion was emphasized by editorial comment after the 2004 election. A series of angry statements accused President Bush of having led a “jihad” against the American people by attempting to found a “theocratic” state in which “Christian fundamentalists” will use their “religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad.”2 Pundits eagerly looked for evidence that the election was settled by voters who had embraced “moral values,” presumably the wrong ones. My argument is that America is a religious nation, but not one in which religion threatens politics, restricts human freedom, or seeks theocratic rule. The critics of religious leaders, especially those in the liberal media, have misjudged the relations between religion and American democracy. / 193 The Historical Legacy of Religion One does not have to be a close student of American history to recall that religion has animated both worrisome and desirable causes. Religious differences animated the objections of the Know-Nothing Party to the presence of American Catholics, but it also supplied the moral outrage against the ownership of human beings. The civil rights movement was led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his appeal was essentially religious in nature . Southern white Protestant churches, though they had long been a part of a segregated society, did not resist King’s claims. Though many churches were passive or silent, some, such as the Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians, publicly supported desegregation.3 And those who opposed the war in Vietnam rarely, if ever, complained that the Rev. William Sloane Cof‹n appealed to God to argue against American involvement there.4 When Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency in 1976 he brought to his candidacy the support of many evangelicals. But at the time only about one-third of them described themselves as Republicans. Carter, and then Clinton after him, carried several southern states with some evangelical help. By 1996, however, matters had changed. White Protestant evangelicals had become much more conservative, more Republican in party identi‹cation, and more likely to vote for the Republican presidential candidate . In 1976 these voters made up only one-sixth of all Republican supporters ; by 1996, they made up one-third of that support.5 In 2006, bornagain or evangelical Christians gave 58 percent of their votes to Republican House candidates; among white voters with these attitudes, 70 percent of their votes went to Republicans. The conversion of evangelicals from being Democrats to becoming Republicans may be the result of their view that liberals had become zealous secularists who defended a court-ordered right to abortion and denounced school prayer. (A clue to this was the name of an early evangelical group: the Moral Majority.) But we have no direct evidence on this matter. Though the great majority of Americans believe in God and life after death, secularists (by which I mean people for whom religion plays no role in their lives whether or not they believe in God or an afterlife) are rising in number. They tend to live in big cities on the Paci‹c Coast or in the Northeast and to have been much more likely to vote for Al Gore in 2000 and for John F. Kerry in...

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