Guest Blogger

R Gustav Niebuhr

Associate Professor in Religion & the Media at Syracuse University

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R Gustav Niebuhr is Associate Professor in Religion & the Media at Syracuse University in New York. With over a 20-year career in journalism, most recently at the New York Times and, prior to that, at the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Niebuhr has established a reputation as a leading writer about American religion.

As I noted in a previous posting, the religious/political landscape can be highly dynamic in the United States when it comes to how broad religious groups seem to side with political parties. Yes, as I said earlier, the Mormons tend to vote Republican, as African-American Protestants tend to be reliable Democrats.

But that evidence of stability should not obscure larger changes in the political affiliation of religious groups. The biggest of these shifts has occurred over the last three decades and can be described in three parts. First and foremost, white, evangelical Protestants–a group that comprises more than 20 percent of the population–steadily moved from mainly supporting Democrats for president in the 1970s to going overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidates in the last two elections, an obvious benefit to the current incumbent President George W. Bush. Evangelicals are generally defined by their regard for the Bible as their highest authority and their experience of being “born-again”–that is, making a conscious decision to accept Jesus as their savior.

Secondly, non-Latino Roman Catholics, another once-reliable Democratic constitutency, moved toward the center, to the point that those Catholics–another fifth or more of the electorate–now reflect American voters in general. That is, if a Republican wins the election, analysis of the results finds that a majority of non-Latino Catholics supported him; if it is a Democrat who wins, it is with the same Catholic majority. That pattern has held true since the early 1970s.

Finally, in the third trend, mainline Protestants–Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians–have become slightly less Republican in their voting preferences than they were three decades ago.

Where are these groups now, with the 2008 presidential election only a week away? Well, an answer may come from a survey released a week ago by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The center reported that according to its polling between October 16 through 19, evangelicals favored Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, by 67 percent to 24 percent for the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama. (Notably, this is a smaller percentage than the proportion of evangelicals who supported Bush in 2004.) Non-Latino white Catholics were supporting Obama 49 percent to 41 percent for McCain. And mainline Protestants were backing Obama, too, albeit by a slightly smaller percentage, 48 to 43.

Will those numbers hold? We’ll know soon enough.