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Don’t Tear Down This Wall

By Nick Sifuentes - Aug 22nd, 2008 at 11:19 am

The Pew Forum has a new poll out showing a significant shift in voter preference for religion’s role in politics. For the first time in the poll’s history (Pew began asking the question in 1996), a majority of the 2,905 adults surveyed–52 percent–said they felt religion and politics should not mix, while 45 percent felt that churches and other religious institutions should express their political views. This marks quite a reversal from the 1996 high of 54 percent in favor of mixing religion and politics.

My initial instinct was to attribute some of the decline to the tendency of the youngest cohort of voters to identify as less religious than their older counterparts. As segments of the voting populace age out of polling data and newer voters take their place, one would expect to see a more secular trend. However, that’s not as well-supported by the polling data as one would think.

The backbone of the religious movement remains in the 30-49-year-old bracket, and as the 65-plus age cohort ages out of the electorate, the number of religious adherents will not necessarily decline. The reemergence of a majority of voters who prefer the Jeffersonian wall of separation remain intact is more likely a sea change, a reevaluation of the role of religion by those who are most religious. The Pew data support this contention:

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center reveals that most of the reconsideration of the desirability of religious involvement in politics has occurred among conservatives. Four years ago, just 30% of conservatives believed that churches and other houses of worship should stay out of politics. Today, 50% of conservatives express this view.

The backlash against the overreach of the religious right, exemplified in issues like opposition to stem cell research, the Federal Marriage Amendment and the Terri Schiavo debacle, has fueled this change in attitude. The Schiavo case and stem cell opposition stand out as particular examples where the religious right stood athwart science and, perhaps more significantly, polling data. Many Americans, even religious ones, rightly saw the actions of Congress as a sweeping overreach of legislative authority (legislation, especially Congressional legislation, was never designed to apply only to one person), and as a result at least some Americans began to question the supremacy of an ideology shaped by a particular religious movement.

In another sense, what we are seeing is a fairly standard example of the cyclical nature of oppositional forces: while liberalism and secularism were ascendant in the 1960s and 1970s (as exemplified by the Great Society and the Warren Court, for instance), both were on the wane by time Reagan’s Morning in America arrived, and remained at a low ebb through the Gingrich Revolution and the 2000 elections. Now we are well past the apogee of the religious right’s ascendance, and it is this blogger’s belief, at least, that the natural cycle of power will continue to sweep the religious right from its former perch.

Why should not only progressives, but Americans in general be glad that the religious right’s influence on Capitol Hill is on the wane? The problem with decisions based in anything other than scientific fact is that they often necessitate either falsifying data or misleading the public. Either is deeply unethical and unjustifiable. When ideology trumps the truth, as has been the case with the current administration, countless such prevarications pile up, leading to legislation, executive orders, or policy shifts that can take a new administration years to unravel. Whether Barack Obama or John McCain ends up as president in 2009, if the trendlines set by the Pew data hold up, the influence of the rightmost elements of the Republican Party will no longer be as strong as they were during the Bush years. Only then can we begin to undo the damage wrought by eight years of policy shaped by ideology rather than fact.

Tags: Christianity, Pew, religion, religious right