The Politics-Religion Vortex Spins

On August 24, 2018, President Trump warned 100 evangelical leaders who had been summoned to the White House that the fall’s midterm elections are “very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion.” White evangelical Protestants had overwhelmingly–77% of them– voted for candidate Trump in 2016 (versus 57% of white mainline Protestants), while the religiously unaffiliated had voted overwhelmingly against him–only 24% for Trump. A year and a half later, white evangelicals and the unaffiliated were virtually unchanged in their rates of heavily supporting versus heavily opposing the president.

Attack on Presidential Candidate Wm. J. Bryan for dragging Christian symbols into politics, 1896

Religion and politics have been intertwined through much of American history, especially since Catholics starting moving here in large numbers. Americans’ party allegiances tended to follow their religious allegiances. Seemingly new to this century is the extent to which the reverse is true, that politics is driving religious identity.

Since this possibility was first discussed by some of us about 15 years ago (1, 2, 3), this reversal of mover and moved has become increasingly apparent. A few weeks after Trump’s declaration to the assembled evangelicals, the election-predicting website 538 posted a story titled “Americans are Shifting the Rest of their Identity [sic] to Match their Politics,”drawing on an as-yet unpublished study I discuss below.

Two recent developments in this story lead me to update earlier posts (4, 5, 6): In the academic world, research on how politics shapes religious expression has boomed. And in the real world, the mutual influence between Caesar’s realm and God’s realm has tightened.

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Loneliness Epidemic: An End to the Story?

I hate to beat a dead horse. Well, maybe this horse I do want to beat, because it never actually gives up the ghost.

Flu Epidemic, 1918

Over the last few years, I have complained about a meme propagated in the popular media, abetted by a few academics, that Americans are suffering an “epidemic” of loneliness. Repeatedly since at least 2011, if not earlier, I have argued that there is no reliable evidence for any real trend in loneliness–nor in social isolation (which is not the same thing)–over the last 40-plus years. But what can this little blog do when The New York Times and The Atlantic keep flogging the loneliness horse for all the clicks it can deliver?

Two comprehensive reports on the “loneliness epidemic” have just come out. Perhaps they will finally put down that nag. Probably not.

Get by with a Little Help from…

Behind the front-stage soap opera–or is it the Shakespearean tragedy? The Moliere farce? The Marx Brothers stateroom buffoonery?–that is Washington today, much of import is going on backstage.

Legions of conservative activists, former corporate executives, and former lobbyists are working to dismantle the modern American state. Most of this would be happening if we had a President Cruz or Walker, too. (Some of us are old enough to recall an earlier such period, when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, only then the deconstruction was done with some finesse and principle.) In such an era, it is worth taking a brief historical glance at how the federal government, stepping in for an ineffective market, has sustained average Americans–even if many of these instances of help are now largely forgotten.

Boy Scout Making Deposit, 1913

Indeed, forgetting such help from the past–and even overlooking it in the present– seems to be a general American trait.

Feel-Good or Do-Good Politics

A few recent developments have again highlighted a tension in left politics. One is the public shaming of Trump administration officials, calling them out in venues like restaurants, a tactic encouraged by at least one Democratic congresswoman. Another is a never-say-die mobilization against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, a campaign that is supremely unlikely to succeed and would, if it did, simply lead to someone else at least as conservative being appointed. A third are calls to abolish ICE, the agency that has been deporting the undocumented, an event about as likely to happen in the near future as the Congress abolishing Trump golf courses.

So, what is the point of calling for such bootless initiatives? Mainly, it appears, it is to energize people, to join them together in righteous and exciting solidarity, to declare their indignation and moral purity. And what about actually getting something done? Not so much.

Left activists have done this before, declaiming outrage, while right activists have more quietly but effectively advanced by focusing on what matters: votes. Some on the left have learned this lesson, as new grass-root groups have flipped Republican-held districts, but others are still stuck in the “Occupy” mind set.

Do Americans Tolerate Zero Tolerance?

Controversies over “zero tolerance” have exploded recently in two very distinct contexts: the Trump administration’s policy for undocumented border-crossers, dramatized most starkly in its separation of migrant children from their parents, and the #MeToo debate over how firm policies should be toward men who press themselves on women, highlighted by liberals’ torment over the resignation of Senator Al Franken.

Zero tolerance controversies pop up in other places as well, such as over strict drug and alcohol policy (should one lapse lose a worker his or her job?), enforcement of discipline in schools (is it creating a school-to-jail pipeline?), and the “broken windows” policing strategy (is alienating a community a long-term losing strategy for law enforcement?).

Across a wide range of public policies, however, Americans do not support zero tolerance–even when American lives are stake. Indeed, it is not clear that societies could function well with zero tolerance.

How Can Size of Community Still Matter?

Once upon a time (actually about 50 years ago) when I started doing research on social psychological differences between urban and rural people, many authorities dismissed the whole question as out of date. Sure, city-country cultural differences were once vast and important, but in the modern era of interstate highways, telephones, television, nationwide markets, and the like, such differences were gone or pretty soon would be. 

Now, after a half-century more of those distance-shrinking changes plus the internet, cheap air travel, and so on, a Pew Research Center report has gotten media attention by highlighting notable differences in the cultural views of Americans according to whether they lived–or whether they said that they lived–in a city, a suburb, or a rural place. Add this report to the political polarization between city and country highlighted in the Trump victory–he won rural and small towns by about 25 points and lost cities over 50,000 by about the same–and it looks as if city-country differences are alive and well in the 21st century.

There is, however, a technical issue–an interesting technical issue–in the Pew analysis. Whether people say they live in city, suburb, or country partly reflects obvious demographic facts. (Few residents of New York City would tell a pollster that they live in the country–although a vice-presidential candidate did once claim that her Queens neighborhood was just like a small town.) But where survey respondents say they live is also shaped by their stereotypes of city, suburb, and country.[1] So, for example, a socially conservative person who feels that her neighbors share those views might, in an ambiguous setting like a low-density suburb, say she lives in a rural place, because it feels culturally rural. Such subjective answers to “Where do you live?” would make city-suburb-rural differences look greater than they really are.

So, let’s take another look. I’ll ask whether there really are place-based differences in cultural views today, whether they are diminishing as notions about modern technology suggest, and whether those differences really are about the places.

Sending a Message by Pollster

Here are a few facts about what surveyed Americans claim to be facts: In a late 2017 poll, one in five survey respondents claimed that Donald Trump received more popular votes than did Hillary Clinton; about two in five said that the unemployment rate had risen during the Obama years; and about one in three told another poll that Obama was born in Kenya. All wrong. Of course, there is a huge political split on such topics. For example, about one-half of Republicans versus one-seventh of Democrats said that we’ve had a Kenyan president.

There are partisan splits on a range of facts. In 2016, 79 percent of liberal democrats versus 15 percent of conservative Republicans said that they agreed that “Earth is warming mostly due to human activities.” Not all the misperceptions are on the Republican side. It is well known that many Americans sharply flip their reports about how the economy is doing or even about how their own finances are doing when the White House changes party control (e.g., here and here). Both political sides have tended to report crime as rising when it was actually falling.

How should we understand the detachment from reality that so many Americans seem to display when asked questions about facts? What does it say about polls and their value? One thing it says is that many people use polls to send a message.