The Rise of Baptist Republicanism

4. Fundamental Differences: Baptist Republicanism’s Political Partners

The building blocks of any party system are issues and structures , or more formally, the platform of the political party and the people who organize around it under the party label. In some European countries, the meaning of party, as defined by the core agenda and voter groups associated with it, has changed little in the space of one hundred years. In Great Britain, laborers are Labour, and conservatives are Conservative , as it has always been. When I quizzed a mechanic from Warwickshire about his affiliation, he said, “I’m a working man, so I must be for Labour, you see.” Almost three out of four Britons strongly identify with a political party, compared to only one out of three Americans. In the United States, parties regularly shift back and forth across the ideological spectrum, and groups of voters change party affiliation at will. Blacks leave the party of Lincoln in droves and Teamsters become Reagan Democrats. At least a couple of factors are at work here. First, there is the concept of party realignment, also called “shift in party balance,” or a “redefinition of the basis of party cleavage.” The definition of realignment, depending on the approach, involves changing party composition as well as changing party strengths.1 Scholars point to numerous examples of realignments, each not a single election, but a series of partisan contests in which a watershed shift takes place. The disappearance of the Whigs, the rise of the Republicans, and the Depression–New Deal eras are good examples. A second concept is that of party porousness. Unlike British parties, for example, American parties are able to take in new groups of voters with their own unique agendas on a regular basis. Some would see this as a weakness. But others believe that by this porousness American parties have turned their openness into strength. Leon Epstein writes: Fundamental Differences Baptist Republicanism’s Political Partners 98 4 Party membership is loosely defined, often by state law that allows access without dues or organizational commitments. Parties so constructed are less meaningful than parties elsewhere . . . [but] . . . they provide labels that candidates seek and that officeholders use for certain collaborative purposes . . . . Such absorption, after all, is a kind of effectiveness.2 Though it is curious to the European advocates of strong, rigid parties , the weak party model of American politics has within it a curious strength based on its fluidity. There is no better illustration of realignment and the great porousness of American political parties than the rise of the fundamentalist right. Once afraid of partisan politics, self-identified born-again evangelicals now make up almost half of the Republican primary vote, and a quarter of those are members of the Christian Coalition. But the realignment of Christians to the Republican party is often oversimplified, and the degree of porousness needed has thereby been underestimated. The spectrum is narrow in a sense. The road from the SBC to Bob Jones to Pat Robertson to Jerry Falwell may be quite short in the grand scheme. But the value of this type of study is the discovery of nuances that define these important groups and their contrasting behaviors in Southern and American politics. Each comes to politics with unique motivations, each has a religious and political history of its own, and each fundamentalist group responds to different political stimuli. Diversity of the Conservative Bloc The very title of one of the early studies of voting behavior, Protestant, Catholic, Jew,3 is a powerful summary of the typical partitioning of the electorate by religion that is found in the classic works on voting behavior4 and in more recent works that follow in the classic tradition.5 The title shows how far we have come. Early works study religion and its impact on political behavior by including in their models tests designed to discover if identification as a Protestant, Catholic, or Jew has an impact on a voter’s decision. Divided into Protestant/Catholic/Jew, political and religious group identification and group cohesiveness are tested6 in this literature , as is religion and its relationship to the presidential vote.7 Other early studies examine religious and political opinions and their impact on issues,8 and even political differences within each of the three religious groups based on ethnicity (e.g., Polish Catholics versus Irish Catholics).9 Fundamental Differences | 99 But the simple Protestant/Catholic/Jew division proved much too broad. The term “Protestant...