Religious Interests in Community Conflict: Beyond the Culture Wars

Chapter 1:Toward a Fuller Understanding of Religion and Politics

h 3 Chapter 1 Toward a Fuller Understanding of Religion and Politics Paul A. Djupe & Laura R. Olson Religion and politics have been profoundly intertwined in the United States since before the founding of the republic, despite constituw w tional prohibitions against state intervention in religious matters. Religious interest groups lobby government alongside secular interw w est groups. Political candidates target specific religious constituenw w cies for their votes. Clergy speak out on key issues of the day. The heavy religious overtones of the 2004 presidential campaigns again highlighted the important role of religion in the practice of Ameriw w canpolitics(Green,Smidt,Guth,andKellstedt2004;PewForum2004). Much scholarly and popular attention has been rightfully paid to the macrowlevel relationship between religion and politics. Religion and politics, however, intersect just as profoundly at the local level as they do on the national stage—and over similar issues. The groww w ing religion and politics literature has barely explored the specific nature of these localwlevel interactions, even though a local milieu would allow researchers greater perspective and validity in making causal claims. This is the approach we utilize in this volume. Our project represents a systematic attempt to explore the politiw w cal motivations, effectiveness, and interplay of organized religious interests as they confront public policy problems in their local comw w munities. In other words, we are concerned with the degree of repres s sentationofreligiousinterestsinpoliticalconflicts.Accordingly,three guiding questions unite the volume’s chapters. First, what motivates organized religious interests to confront public problems? Second, 4 Toward a Fuller Understanding of Religion and Politics do religious interests cooperate with one another to confront public problems, and what barriers exist that might hinder them from doing so? Third, how effective are religious interests when they choose to confront public problems? Motivatedbybothsubstantiveandtheoretical concerns, we have assembled an expert team of authors to explore the extent to which religious groups involve themselves in different types of community political debates. Each chapter offers an illustrative case study of a different policy problem in a different community. Significantly, each chapter is organized tightly around a common outline and we urged contributors to be as inclusive of religious interests as posw w sible. With this common design, we are able to maximize the cumuw w lative impact of our case studies and enhance our understanding of religion and politics in the United States. Thus, in the concluding chapter, we integrate the insights offered by the substantive chapw w ters to comment on the extant theories of religion’s effect on politiw w cal behavior. We also offer a general theoretical interpretation of how religion and politics intersect at the community level. Toward the goal of creating a metawanalysis in the concluding chapter, the case studies presented in the volume are designed to constitute a de facto sample including communities with diversity on several variables of interest. We include investigations of some of the most visible hotwbutton issues in American politics today, includw w ing gay marriage and race relations, along with ongoing concerns that sometimes fly below the mass media’s radar, such as health care and homelessness. The chapters investigate a diverse range of communities, including those in which one faith dominates (such as Salt Lake City) and those which have considerable religious diversity (such as Cincinnati). The communities studied also span the gamut from rural to urban and are located in all major regions of the conw w tinental United States. We are especially interested in the extent to which the full range of religious interests either comes together to address the issue of concern, or fails to do so. We are, therefore, interested in the concept of ecumenism—or the formal practice of working together across ecclesiastical dividing lines. This volume is not, however, merely a study of ecumenical cooperation. We are just as interested in circumstances characterized by a lack of cooperation among reliw w gious actors, and the cases presented in these chapters reflect both ecumenism and a lack thereof. Paul A. Djupe & Laura R. Olson 5 The volume itself is organized around four substantive themes: religion in the public square, social justice, race relations, and moral concerns. These substantive themes capture the diversity of issues about which organized religious interests have tended to express greatest concern in the past several decades. Each chapter is an investigation of an individual issue that falls under one of these broad rubrics of public discourse...