abridged transcript · 2019. 3. 15. · abridged transcript “religious voters & the 2010...

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“Religious Voters & the 2010 Elections”

Dr. William A. Galston The Brookings Institution

E.J. Dionne

The Washington Post

Michael Barone The Washington Examiner

November 2010

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: E.J. and Bill Galston have just finished and produced some press data on religion and the election. We’re delighted that Bill can be here. He’s a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former professor of political philosophy at University of Maryland, University of Texas. He also was a Deputy Assistant for Public Policy in the Clinton administration for domestic policy. So what I like to say about Bill is he’s both a political philosopher and a practitioner, which is what we need more of in Washington. DR. WILLIAM A. GALSTON: You have at your seats two documents. One is the executive summary of something called “The Post Election American Values Survey,” and the other is a draft of a paper that E.J. and I have crafted largely off the data in this new survey, but with some additional material as well. I’d like to explain what this project is all about and how we’re related to it, lay some preliminary points on the table, and then turn it over to E.J., who is going to walk you through the document that we produced from beginning to end in far more detail. The heart of our collaboration to date has been the joint design of two major surveys this year probing the connection between contemporary religion, on the one hand, and recent developments in American politics, on the other.

The first of these surveys was a pre-election survey based on a random sample of a little bit more than 3,000 adults who were interviewed between September 1st and September

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Religious Voters & the 2010 Elections”

Dr. William A. Galston, E.J. Dionne and Michael Barone November 2010

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14th. Today’s presentation and documents are based on a post election survey. Its base is 1,494 call-back interviews, that is, re-interviews of people who were a part of the original tranche of 3,000. To give you some idea of how fresh these data are, these interviews were conducted between November 3rd and 7th.

First of all, here is what we are not saying. We are not challenging the conventional wisdom that the 2010 midterms were dominated by economic concerns. Number two, we are not arguing that faith or faith-inflicted or faith-based issues, such as abortion, same sex marriage, et cetera, et cetera, played either a larger or significantly different role than in recent elections. Third, we have found no evidence that the 2010 elections disrupted now familiar correlations between religious belief and observance, on the one hand, and political attitudes and preferences, on the other.

Our thesis can be stated then very simply, and that is that overlaying and interacting with these familiar patterns, which we call the old politics of faith, a new politics of faith is taking shape.

The principal components of the report that you’re about to hear are that number one, religiously based American exceptionalism is alive and well and amazingly pervasive in the American population. Almost six in ten Americans continue to believe that God has granted America a special role in human history, and the distribution of attitudes on this point correspond to some familiar cleavages between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, observant and less observant Americans, but not to ethnicity.

Indeed, African Americans are more likely to affirm American exceptionalism than several other groups in the population. And what this suggests to us is a very simple political point, namely, denying or appearing to deny or even muting America’s exceptionalist claims comes at some political risk to anybody who seeks to downplay that historic set of beliefs.

The second principal point: Americans are deeply and evenly divided over the relationship between Islamic values and American values. Indeed, 45 percent of the population completely or mostly agree that the two are at odds, while 49 percent disagree.



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Third, many Americans are experiencing a sense of religious distance from President Obama. We found that only 40 percent of Americans think that Obama’s religious beliefs are similar to their own, only 12 percent that those beliefs are very similar to their own. Fifty-one percent think that the President’s beliefs in religious matters are either somewhat or very different from their own, and the very different category is fully 35 percent of the population.

So if you look at the intensity, there are 12 percent who identify with the President quite closely in religious matters, and three times as many, 35 percent who feel quite strongly a sense of distance from the President, and there are, here again, some key lines of division: age, ethnicity, party ID, ideology, membership or non-membership in the Tea Party, religion, et cetera.

So that is the tee and the ball, and now for the long driver, my colleague.

MR. DIONNE: There was some talk that really this was a cultural election or somehow religious issues were dominant. Sometimes an election about economics really is an election about economics, and that is clearly the case in this election. What I would underscore here is that the Democrats lost ground across the board. They lost among the secular voters nearly as much as they lost among religious voters. That chart after page 8 is the basic data on shifting from both 2006 and 2008. The Democrats remained strong among secular voters. There was nothing in the structure of this election that overturned those. I would note that Republican gains were a little larger among Catholics than Protestants, which suggests what many surveys have suggested in the past, that Catholics are one of the premier swing groups in the American electorate. I once wrote that there is no Catholic vote and it’s important, by which I meant that Catholics are in a sense a 40-40-20 group, but 20 percent, it’s hard for Republicans to get less than 40 percent, hard for Democrats to get less than 40 percent, but 20 percent is a big swing, and you saw some of that swinging going on here.

I would underscore that when you look at any exit poll data this year, it’s very important to note the sharp decline in the participation of the young relative to the old in this election. There were the last I looked something like 45 million missing votes in the House race as compared to two years ago in the presidential election, and those missing votes



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were disproportionately young, to some degree disproportionately African American, and therefore, this electorate, the electorate on which the exit poll is based, is a different electorate than the electorate particularly of ’08, less so from ’06, although it’s a little older than that electorate.

These numbers aren’t in the paper, but one of my favorite findings in an illustrative sense is in 2008, 18 percent of the electorate was under 30; 16 percent was over 65. In this electorate, 12 percent was under 30; 21 percent was over 65. That’s a big shift, a big graying of the electorate. So all of these numbers are conditioned by that shift.

But however you cut it, this survey suggests that the Democratic losses were largely across the board, and that the categories that John Green wrote about, as I said, are largely undisturbed. The younger that evangelicals are, white evangelicals are, the more Republican; church attenders are more Republican and the like.

We also in our other survey said, all right, sometimes if you want to find out did an issue move voters, you just ask them, and so on page 11, I would note that in our PRRI survey only six percent of voters said religion played a larger role than usual in determining their vote. Eight percent said it played a smaller role, and the vast majority said it played the same role as it has in the past. Again, I think more evidence that it is a mistake to over-read this election, people who want to read it primarily in terms of culture.

There were some differences in the way in which voters classified issues. While economics mattered to everybody, economics mattered more to black Protestants than to white evangelicals, and we do some analysis you might want to look at about issue priorities there.

But if you look at the traditional hot button issues, they clearly played a very limited role. This is not an election about abortion or same sex marriage, even among voters you might expect to care more about those issues. The only small caveat I would add is that we knew going in that most people would say economics when we asked them, jobs or something related to economics.

So we asked people what their second most important issue was if they picked economics just to see, in a sense to give a fair chance for social issues or other issues to enter the



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mix. When you added one plus two together, you’ve got ten percent of white evangelicals listing abortion as a voting issue and ten percent of white Catholics. That’s a significant minority. That issue hasn’t gone away. But, again, nonetheless, this was not central.

A lot of people have talked about — particularly those involved in religious outreach for Democrats — how the party failed in this election because there was a decline in organized Democratic outreach to religious groups. Now, we agree that it’s obvious that such outreach efforts were more significant in 2008 than 2010, and in some sense, the fact that the core structure or the religious structure of the electorate hasn’t been shaken up suggests that Democrats— it’s in their interest to renew such religious mobilization programs.

But our sense is that the shift among religious voters was driven by other factors that were not directly related to the existence or nonexistence of outreach efforts.

There was one fascinating difference in terms of issue positions that came out of the PRRI survey, that white evangelicals were very distinctive in their views on foreign policy from the electorate as a whole. White evangelicals are significantly more hawkish. We asked a two-part forced choice question: in foreign policy, the best way to insure peace is through military strength or good diplomacy is the best way to insure peace. White evangelicals chose military strength over diplomacy, 53 to 44 percent, and 56 percent of Christian conservatives chose military strength. On the other hand, not only did white mainline Protestants prefer diplomacy, but 58 percent of white Catholics, and 73 percent of black Protestants.

American exceptionalism, you know, many of us were struck by Marco Rubio’s speech the night he won the election here in Florida. It was full of American exceptionalist language. I believe he believes that, but he would have said the same thing if he would have read our survey. I mean, we were very struck, especially by how the idea of American exceptionalism crosses racial lines in a country that at the moment on many issues is divided along racial lines. So the idea that God granted America a special role in human history, 64 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of African Americans, 56 percent of whites.

There is, however, an ideological difference: 75 percent of conservatives, 54 percent of moderates, but only 38 percent of liberals said this. Not surprisingly, American



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exceptionalism a view held by 86 percent of Christian conservatives, 83 percent of white evangelicals.

My very favorite, one of my favorite facts is this. Among the non-affiliated, even among them, 32 percent said that God ordained a special place for America, which led Bill and me to think when we were doing the survey I’m not sure if God exists, but if he did, he ordained a special place for America.

Just on another dimension, and again, these findings have some surprises. We asked if enough people had a personal relationship with God, social problems would take care of themselves. Again, African Americans, 72 percent agreed with this; 56 percent of whites; only 45 percent of Hispanics. Again, there is a moderate split along political and ideological lines. What’s fascinating is that African Americans take this view even though they have one of the strongest commitments among Americans to a strong role for government in solving social problems, and indeed, there is a correlation among just about everyone except African Americans between agreement on that statement and people’s views on another statement. We asked a question, government is providing too many social services that should be left to religious groups and private charities. People may think God solves social problems, but a narrow majority, 52 to 45 percent rejected that statement, and you have the data there.

What’s most revealing, and I’m going to get back to the Tea Party at the end, Tea Party supporters were significantly more likely than either white evangelicals or self-described Christians to see government as playing too large a role vis-à-vis private charities or religious charities.

I think it’s fair to say that this response was less a commentary about people’s views on private charity than it was a commentary about their views on government, and I think it’s fair to conclude that the ideas that fell under the heading “compassionate conservatism” may still have some resonance among white evangelicals and Christian conservatives, but that those ideas are largely rejected by the Tea Party movement.



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And here are, I think, three of the main findings about a new religious politics that I want to underscore. First, I think it’s very clear there is a substantial overlap between the Tea Party and religious conservatism or the religious right. There are a lot of teavangelicals. On the whole, Tea Party members are staunch conservatives who have much in common with the rest of the right.

On the question of the values of Islam are at odds with American values, 57 percent of white evangelicals say that, but 66 percent of Tea Party members say that. Obama has different religious beliefs from yours, 65 percent of white evangelicals, but 76 percent of Tea Party members. Now, again, all these numbers point in the same direction, and we don’t want to exaggerate this finding. There is a lot in common across the political right.

Nonetheless, something is going on here, and my notion of how we might sort that out was to look at the one election where one of the most assertive nationalists in American politics, Tom Tancredo ran for governor of Colorado as a third party candidate. There is no more outspoken opponent of immigration. There are very few politicians have been willing to use the kind of language Tancredo did. So we decided to look at the difference between Tea Party members and white evangelicals and their attitude toward Tancredo. Tancredo got 80 percent of support among those who describe themselves as strong Tea Party supporters, but only 66 percent from all conservatives and 54 percent among white evangelicals.

I think there is something significant here. We believe that what might be called the Tancredo difference has important implications for conservative and religious politics. While many accounts have emphasized the possibility of splits in the Republican Party between its establishment and the Tea Party, there was also the potential for other divisions between religious conservatives with more moderate views on immigration, more compassionate views on poverty, and members of a Tea Party movement still rebelling against certain distinctive aspects of the Bush presidency.

This question of differences between American values and Islamic values and where Americans came down on this, I do want to put in a word of caution that we put in the paper that there’s a big middle on this question. I think a lot of Americans don’t quite know what to make of this question because what we found is 20 percent of Americans completely agree that Islamic values and American values are at odds, while 22 percent



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completely disagree. This creates a big middle ground, the 25 percent who mostly agree, the 27 percent who mostly disagree. I think this suggests that opinion on this question could be subject to change, that many Americans hold nuanced views, and that a majority may not hold these views very strongly.

But when you look at who holds which views strongly, I think that there is a real danger that this issue could become politicized and very divisive. Thirty-three percent of Republicans say they completely agree that Muslim and American values are incompatible. Only 11 percent of Democrats said this. Thirty-one percent of conservatives, 43 percent of Tea Party members completely agree. Only eight percent of liberals and 16 percent of moderates said this.

So if you wonder why there was so much attention to the building of the Islamic center near the World Trade Center or the vote in Oklahoma on Sharia law, I think there is something going on beneath the surface, and I believe that the absence of President Bush may play a role in this.

Again, if you go back to the early part of the Bush presidency and pretty much throughout his presidency, President Bush said many of the things that President Obama is now being criticized for in saying Islam is a religion of peace and in trying to prevent the outbreak of anti-Islamic feeling in the country. President Bush said at the time of 9/11 that he didn’t want to have happen to Arabs and Muslims in America what had had happened to Germans and particularly the Japanese in World War II.

That force is now missing as a powerful force on the right, and we also have the fact that President Obama, the first President to have a Muslim parent, this issue is getting politicized in a way that I think should catch our attention, and I would argue we may want to worry about.

We close the paper with a couple of points. There is a lot of data here on what people see about Obama’s religious views, who sees his religious views as similar to theirs, who doesn’t. Our colleagues, Robby Jones and Dan Cox, made an interesting point that this question is especially important to the approval of Obama among those who attend religious services at least weekly. There’s a 74 point favorability gap between those who say he has similar religious beliefs and those who say he has different religious beliefs. A



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much smaller 35 point gap among those who are less religiously active. That’s partly because no matter what they think are his religious views, the less religiously active like Obama a lot better, and you can see that in the numbers.

We ask a question: “Government should do more to protect morality in society.” You would expect that’s a classic liberal-conservative split. Two years ago it was. In 2007, 50 percent of conservatives wanted government to do more to protect morality, but only 36 percent of moderates, 28 percent of liberals.

In the new survey, the proportion of conservatives who wanted government to protect morality dropped to 37 percent, and a lot of that was affected by views of President Obama.

The last two quick points. One, both parties have something to worry about on the religious front. Neither should be certain that they are on the right track.

On another question we asked Republican and Democratic. We asked respondents to characterize Republican and Democratic candidates. Again, it was a forced choice question. We asked either do they pay enough attention to religion or were they too close to religious leaders. By 47 percent to 28 percent respondents said Democrats didn’t pay enough attention to religion, and by 54 percent to 27 percent, they said Republican candidates were too close to religious leaders. Both parties have a lot of work to do.

We don’t pretend to offer a detailed solution to President Obama’s dilemma here. What we do know is that he has proven himself adept in the past at addressing religious issues and national divisions, and that he shied away from expressing himself on these matters as President. These findings suggest that it would be in his interest and the country’s for him to find his voice on issues that are of particular importance to the United States, which as you all know has been described for good reason as a nation with the soul of a church. Thank you.

MR. CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, I call your attention to Michael Barone’s bio. Among his many, many accomplishments, he has also traveled to all 50 states, to 435 congressional districts, and to 37 foreign countries. So he’s not only a prolific writer of



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books and articles, but he’s a world traveler, and he’s been to all the congressional districts in the country. MR. BARONE: This is an interesting work that E.J. and Bill put together, and I think it starts us off with an interesting paradox that religion, religious belief, degree of religiosity is still highly correlated with voting, though issues that seem to have religious content in which the views of many, if not all, voters are influenced by their religious beliefs were not at all prominent in this election. The philosopher Glenn Beck when asked to comment on same sex marriage and what was the problem there said, “I don’t really care about this. There are things that are more important right now,” an attitude which is shared by many voters on all sides of the issue. How to explain this paradox? It struck me as I was reading this paper and considering the fact that this conference is being held in Florida that there is something in the political attitudes of people that correlates with their sort of religious belief and their voting behavior, and it’s something I observed, I thought in the Florida controversy over the state’s electoral votes in the 2000 election because it seemed to me that the people on both sides were extremely energized and angry and motivated, and in part because, I thought, the arguments used by each side tended to be in line with their basic moral attitudes. The Republicans were basically making in their various legal forums arguments that said obey the rules. The rule says this. Don’t change the rule in the middle of the game. The Democrats were basically making a series of arguments that said the rules are unfair. We’ve got to change the rules, and so forth. I think that both sides might have made opposite arguments if it had been in their interest to do so.

It strikes me that the conservatives this year, what’s common is this sense of obey the rules, follow the rules as they are held.

But on February 19th, 2009, what Rick Santelli is arguing there about, it’s not so much government spending. He’s saying, I don’t want to have to pay off the mortgage of some guy that’s got an extra bathroom and took out too much of a loan, and so forth. It’s the idea of obeying the rules. He was arguing against these various policies that we’ve had or that have been proposed, you know, to modify people’s mortgages so that they won’t lose their house.



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And I see a similar thought, it seems to me, in this survey. We see white evangelicals showing up as particularly concerned about the size and role of government. They are extremely against financial bailouts of all kinds. They’re very much for balancing the budget. It seems to me in each case they’re saying obey the rules. Don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. Let’s obey the rules. If some people have to take a hit, that’s their problem, but we should obey the rules.

So that’s the sort of common thread that I see coming in there which helps to explain why we see a high correlation with religious belief and voting behavior even when the content of issues seems not to have much to do explicitly with religion.

Bill and E.J. pointed out some of the results where voters tend to see Obama as another, as different from them, and in particular, that his religious values are not similar to theirs. Other people have pointed that out. I’ve heard liberal commentators, in particular, say that, you know, Americans see Obama as “the other” because of his race, because of his unusual background having been raised in a foreign country with a foreigner, not an immigrant, but a visa holder.

It seems to me here that what we are seeing is a sort of reaction against him in the “gentry liberal” category. Gentry liberals are the high income people who are liberal on cultural issues, very often, but not always, secular, more so than the average public, and so forth.

What we see from the exit polls in this election or the election returns, who are the groups that are most faithful to the Democratic Party? Well, as this survey and the exit poll point out, black voters remain percentage-wise by far the most Democratic identifiable block and no significant difference in percentage from 2008, although it would appear a somewhat smaller turnout.

Why did the Democrats stay well ahead in the West Coast? Well, look around the San Francisco Bay area. Look at the west side of L.A. Gentry liberals stuck with the Democrats, and in some sense I think may be said to be the core of the Democratic party.

You know, people are always on the lookout for party splits. There is, you know, a potential split between these two core groups which we saw played out in the Washington, D.C., District of Columbia Democratic primary for mayor, where Adrian



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Fenty, the incumbent mayor was supported by gentry liberals, and the challenger, Vincent Gray, with a million bucks from the teachers union was supported by black voters over the issue of running the schools and school superintendent Michelle Rhee.

We may see other such splits in municipal, more likely municipal than national, politics, but it does seem to me that that’s an interesting development. Historically we’re not used to thinking of gentry liberals as a large or significant voting block because they weren’t historically. They are now.

Finally, why would Obama be seen as different, as not having similar religious views? I think part of the answer to that is something that’s not tested, I think, as far as I know, in this survey explicitly, and that is, is Barack Obama an American exceptionalist? The American exceptionalism is a problem for the Democratic Party because it basically unites the American people and splits the Democratic Party. About two-thirds of Americans tend to take American exceptionalist positions on this. The Republicans tend to be, you know, 90-10, 85-10, something like that. Democrats tend to be, you know, more on the order of 47-37.

It seems to me that the President is at least perceived as being on the wrong side of that basic attitude by many voters and that that is one of the reasons that people feel a certain distance from him. I don’t get the sense that substantial percentages of Americans have the kind of visceral hatred that many conservatives had for Bill Clinton and that many liberals had for George W. Bush. Each of those two Presidents it seemed to me to have personal qualities which people on the other side of the cultural divide just absolutely loathed.

I don’t think Barack Obama has personal qualities of that kind. I don’t think that he is loathed or hated in the way that Presidents Clinton and Bush were. But perhaps what we’re seeing here is evidence of some coolness, a distance that they measure in terms of his perceived religious attitudes, which continues to be of importance even though voters don’t consider, this year at least, issues with specific religious content to be particularly important.



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MR. DIONNE: I do want to point out that the gentry overall voted Republican this year. Americans earning more than $100,000 voted 58 to 40 percent for Republican House candidates. CATHY GROSSMAN,USA Today: I want to go back to the Obama shares my religious values question, and I wonder whether it’s a chicken or egg thing, which came first, the fact that they don’t like Obama and so they allow religious values to be the excuse that they’ve been offered the opportunity to give or vice versa because there’s such a tight correlation, but which is first here? And secondly, there are people who just don’t like him who are looking for you to give them language that they can sign up for, and how much of this is separate from race? DR. GALSTON: As is the case with all research of this sort correlations are one thing and causal attributions are quite a different thing, and we have some speculations in our report about what the political scientists with their typical barbarous language called “bi-directionality,” that is to say, it strikes us as very likely that you have movement of sentiment going in both directions, but that there is some effort to relieve cognitive dissonance by bringing these two sets of views into alignment. If you don’t like his politics, if that’s your prior, then you will be more likely than not to try to bring your view of his religious sentiments into some sort of cognitive harmony with that and vice versa. People just as a psychological matter are not comfortable with cognitive dissonance, and they tend to try to reduce it. We were careful in designing this survey and in writing up the results not to try to reduce a complex set of attitudes about President Obama simply to racial animus, and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, you know, from field work that’s been done suggesting that that kind of reduction is an analytical mistake.

If you’re asking do I think that there are some people in the population who even in this day and age are driven significantly by that, yeah, some, but we have no way of assessing the share of the population for which that is the principal driver, and we don’t want anyone to walk away from this meeting thinking that we think that it is the predominant phenomenon.



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It is clearly a very complex set of issues where religion, upbringing, the fact that the President so clearly represents the triumph of a new kind of meritocracy, you know, that has aroused a certain populous streak in Americans, which is part of our DNA and has been for a very long time.

MR. BARONE: Well, Barack Obama got 53 percent of the vote. That’s more than any other Democratic nominee in history except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It’s more than John Kennedy, more than Woodrow Wilson, more than Bill Clinton, more than Grover Cleveland. You know, America elected a black President with a record percentage of the vote. I think I react very strongly and with great hostility to arguments that people are only voting Republican because of race.

MR. DIONNE: I think there is a hard anti-Obama constituency out there of some size, maybe 30 percent, that there is no question that answers to the religious question are driven, in part, by racial attitudes. I think we would have to do, and we would love to do, more survey work to figure out what the interaction is between this and that. On race, I think there’s no question that there is racism there and that for some minority of Americans there is a racial factor. But I don’t think you can explain all of the reaction or most of the reaction to Obama from race. I think it has always been there as, you know, a minority of the electorate. They didn’t vote for him last time. They not going to vote for him again. So it’s there.

But one of the things Bill and I talked about in terms of the report was that this is both a neuralgic issue and it’s very easy to say it wrong because if you say it one way, it sounds like you’re saying all of Barack Obama’s opponents are motivated by racism. Well, of course that’s not true. If you say it another way, you’re saying there is no racism. This is all about politics. So that’s not true either. There is some element of race in there, but I don’t think it’s what flipped this election or flipped the numbers from what they were two years ago. I think there are a lot of other factors doing that.

MR. BARONE: Well, there’s an offsetting positive thing and we don’t know how big the offset is, which is, I think, most Americans feel as I do that it was a good thing for the country to elect a black President, and I think for 2012 many voters will feel a reluctance



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to seem to be rejecting the first black American President, and that’s a result of our history. KIRSTEN POWERS, The Daily Beast: I feel like if you ask a Catholic or a Jewish person, they’re going to say, “Well, yes, his religious beliefs are different than mine,” but what does that really tell you? Whereas I think we might be inclined to look at this and think, “Oh, his religious beliefs are different. They think he’s Muslim,” or they think something else. What can we really learn from these numbers?

DR. GALSTON: The breakdown is like this: among white evangelicals the very or somewhat similar total is only 27 percent, among white mainline Protestants it’s 40 percent, among white Catholics it’s 45 percent, and among black Protestants it’s 75 percent. So clearly the alignment or lack of alignment of white voters with President Obama’s religious sentiment is not in any direct way a reflection of their doctrinal beliefs. There’s something else going on. And if you ask us, well, do we know what that something else is, unfortunately, probably speculation will set in long before the analysis that you would want has been completed. MR. DIONNE: I felt that Obama had, during the period before he ran for President, from that Call to Renewal speech forward, talked more explicitly and in many ways more intelligently than most American politicians have about the relationship between religion and public life, and he made a very conscious effort to be, on the one hand, the liberal that he basically is on these matters but, on the other hand, speak with a lot of respect and understanding of more conservative religious people. I mean that Call to Renewal speech has language in it that’s quite critical of secular liberals. Since he’s become President, he has not engaged in much of that talk, and this would be an area where it would be useful for him to reengage. REIHAN SALAM, National Review: I wonder if it’s possible that a lot of the people who say that the 74 percent of African Americans, the 45 percent of Roman Catholics, et cetera, et cetera, who identify with the President as having religious views very similar to their own, they might be over-interpreting other kinds of sameness, that is, the fact that he identifies as an African American.



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Another thing I found interesting is that when you look at the numbers of Americans who believe that the President is a Muslim, I was struck by the large number who thought that was okay, and as a Muslim I think that that’s kind of an encouraging sign.

MR. DIONNE: You point to something else that’s interesting, which is you really do see a broad split between a more traditional kind of conservative Christianity and a social Gospel oriented Christianity, and my hunch is that among religious believers, a lot of those who say they identify with Obama’s religion are people who are broadly more a social justice and social gospel sort of Christians than they are traditionalist conservative Christians. I think it has a kind of rough and ready theological content that doesn’t have to do with denomination or a specific religious tradition. And certainly African American churches have a strong element of that prophetic tradition. BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: Maybe religious conservatives were disappointed with the Bush years, disappointed with McCain as a candidate, organizations were failing them and so the Tea Party stepped into where the Family Research Council or Christian Coalition used to be, and so they found a home. The conservative religious folks found a home with the Tea Party. And I guess what I’m wondering is if this is a temporary home or whether the social issues will so drive them that it will create a bit of a wedge with the true Tea Partiers who are motivated by economics.

DR. GALSTON: I think it’s fair to say that when you put the two American value surveys together, the one that was in the field in September, and this one, but especially the first, we did not find that the social attitudes of Tea Partiers are all that different substantively from the social attitudes of better known religious conservatives. What we did find was a difference in emphasis or priority, but the view that was current six months ago or a year ago that, you know, Tea Partiers represent some sort of a libertarian countercurrent within the Republican Party, that really for the most part is just not true. But the distinction between the members of the Tea Party movement and Christian conservatives who don’t see themselves as members of the Tea Party movement suggests that the finding a home explanation can’t be quite right either because if those were



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Christian conservatives who felt homeless as the result of developments during the Bush administration, you wouldn’t have expected to see them change their order of priority in these two issue baskets, social issues versus economic issues.

In other words, I think that what you have in the Tea Party movement is a bunch of people who got mobilized into politics principally by their sentiments about an alarm about changes in the size and role of government, the level of spending, the debt, that entire complex of familiar issues. They brought their socially conservative attitudes into the political mix with their economic alarm, but had it not been for the economic alarm, I’m reasonably sure that we would not have seen the kind of phenomenon that we’ve seen since very early in the Obama administration. Having said that, we’re certainly not denying that a lot of conservatives felt disaffected from standard Republican Party politics as a result of the eight Bush years because many economic conservatives were very, very critical of the Bush administration for Medicare D, for the rapid rise in discretionary spending, et cetera.

MR. DIONNE: I think one of the problems with discussions of the Tea Party is that you can measure its actual size in so many different ways because if you look at polls that asked “did you go to a rally,” or, in other words, somebody actually doing something, you’re down to numbers like three to six percent is the range I’ve seen. That’s still a lot of people, but it’s a relatively small number, and I think in some of its initial organizing, the organizing forces were probably more libertarian. We asked one question that requires more than just vague support. It sort of implies members. We get about 11 to 12 percent. In our 11 to 12 percent, this is a predominantly, not uniformly, but a predominantly socially conservative group. But then when you have favorability, you often get a lot more conservatives who are just happy these guys are out there on their broad side of politics, and it’s not clear what they mean by favorability other than, heck, I’m happy to have an ally out there.

I think there is something to your theory that there was sort of an organizational decline, and that there was a vacuum to be filled. You don’t get that from survey data, but I think there’s truth to that.



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MR. BARONE: I think we’ve had a sort of truce in the culture war. It’s a phrase that Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, was criticized by some Republicans for advocating such a thing, but I think that some of the culture war issues that, you know, have more or less been settled. Abortion is not going to be criminalized. It is going to be disfavored in different ways in our society. Same sex marriage is coming to large parts of the country. It’s an age break that suggests that it will be acceptable in the majority of the country some time in the next generation or so. Those attitudes have been changing sharply, and people seem to be going along with it.

We’ve seen an in-rush into political activity of hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people — I mean, six percent of Americans is 18 million people, or of adults it’s 13 million — over the last two years. I certainly did not predict this. I can’t think offhand of anybody who did. I liken it to the peace or anti-war movement of the late ’60s, early ’70s, which initially was directed not just at one political party. It was initially bipartisan but quickly became channeled largely within one of our two political parties; brought a lot of people into politics; was about a major issue. I mean, war and peace, size and scope of government are major, serious public policy issues. They cannot be dismissed as peripheral or, you know, weirdo preoccupations.

NINA EASTON, Fortune: I want to challenge E.J.’s sentiment that we need President Bush around to save conservatives from their racist, anti-Muslim sentiment. There was all that hand wringing a couple of months ago about, you know, Americans’ anti-Muslim sentiment going up in general. That we’re becoming more racist. Let me cite to you just three things: Fort Hood massacre, explosive Christmas Day underwear, and a fuming van in Times Square, all done in the name of Allah. Is it possible that rather than being racist people are reacting to threats they see out there, a reality? MR. DIONNE: Let me tell you why I believe Bush played a major role in holding down anti-Muslim sentiment in the country or putting a lid on it or containing it. And this was from work that I did with the Pew Forum back after 9/11. There was a favorability measure about Muslims in the country that we asked in the survey after 9/11, and what was really striking is the Muslims had an especially high favorability rating among conservatives after



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9/11, and we speculated but I think with reason at the time that President Bush’s many public statements, including going down to the Islamic Center right after 9/11, had a real impact on conservative views on this issue. But when President Bush didn’t talk about this nearly as much as time went on and over the years that the conservative negative feelings sort of ticked up, if you look at the trend line, and so I really do believe that Bush’s aggressive intervention particularly immediately after 9/11 had an impact on how conservatives see Muslims.

Now, on your other point, if you want to say that a lot of Americans look at these events and develop certain attitudes towards Muslims and they are not entirely surprising, that’s true, but this is, again, a fairly broad question we asked: are Islamic values at odds with American values? And only 20 percent completely agreed. So there is nuance within the level of agreement, and it’s a question of whether you make the distinction that Bush and Obama have both made between the terrorist as a radical and non-representative sect of Islam or whether you think this is Islam, period.

And I agree with Bush and Obama, and I think a lot of conservatives were more inclined to believe this when President Bush was saying it. I think there’s evidence for that.

MR. BARONE: I think Americans are capable of understanding that there are important threads in Islam that lead to this kind of violence. It doesn’t represent everybody; that you may be suspicious of somebody on the basis of their characteristics, but that that doesn’t necessarily indicate that they’re likely to go along with that. I think President Bush, Rudy Giuliani and others reminded us of that after 9/11, but that the level of violence by ordinary Americans against people that they identify as Muslims, to my knowledge, is very, very low. You know, there are certain parts of opinion that see the American people as a great beast who will go out and start shooting up everybody in sight if you tell them that this massacrer at Fort Hood said, “Allahu akbar,” and you’ve got to protect them from this knowledge because the great beast will go and, you know, all of these bigots will kill everybody.

And I just think that’s an underestimation of the American people, and I think the response to this survey that the completely agree was rather small, and that there was



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substantial numbers that partially agreed shows that people are aware that there is particular danger from people acting in the name of Islam on the basis of strains that do exist in that religious tradition, but that it’s not all Muslims by a long shot.

DR. GALSTON: The American people have not reacted to the events of the past decade in an undifferentiated way. On this question, there are strong party differences, ideological differences, and religious differences. Here are the percentages of different party groups who see Islamic values at odds with American values and way of life: 67 percent of Republicans, 30 percent of Democrats, 43 percent of independents. That’s what we found. Make of it what you will. MR. BARONE: How would you respond to the question? Completely agree, partly agree, partly disagree, completely disagree? DR. GALSTON: Well, if I may be autobiographical for just a minute, you know, I am married to someone who in her first career was a professor of Islamic political philosophy, and so, you know, she and I have had many discussions of this question, and the question is, which Islam are you talking about. If you’re asking me about the Sufis, you know, I’d say that they’re just as congenial to democracy as most of the people in this room. If you’re asking me about the Wahabis, I would say something completely different. And so one of the problems is that the category Islam, which covers a very appreciable portion of the human race, living scattered across the face of the globe in every continent, makes it very difficult for me to answer that question.

ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times: I think it’s worth distinguishing between racism and what you might call racial anxiety. I think to the extent that there has been a racial reaction to the Obama presidency among white people, I think what you see is much more of the, white people are becoming a minority in this country and we’re about to be discriminated against, which is a racial reaction, but it’s nothing like what we would characterize as racism in any kind of classical Barack Obama is inferior because he’s a black man sense of the word.



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You touched on this a bit talking about how successfully Barack Obama sort of played the religion card during his presidential campaign. And I wonder if you think there’s anything that Obama could have done differently since he became President to sort of sustain that kind of outreach. Barack Obama’s religious faith has seemed to diminish markedly as something that he expresses once he won the White House. I think there is an interpretation of Obama’s religious outreach given his governing style that suggests that maybe it was a little more calculated than sincere. I wonder what you think of that possibility. MR. DIONNE: I was talking to a politician who said, “he could go to church again.” Who am I to tell the President of the United States you should go to church more, but if you’re asking at the level of practice symbolism what a President might be expected to do, and you could argue back this is completely unfair. No one asked Ronald Reagan to go to church, and so it does show a kind of double standard against Barack Obama, which I believe exists on this question. Nonetheless, he’s a politician. He has to deal with double standards, too. You know, the question about the sincerity or insincerity, number one, I think for all of us it’s very hard ever to read what is in someone’s heart, but I’ve got to say when read the Call to Renewal speech, this struck me as a sincere speech, and it struck me as sincere partly because I particularly was taken by the section of it where he talked about doubt and— I had never heard a politician specifically talk about doubt. As far as I could tell, Barack Obama was the first person who said, “I’m a believer and I have had doubts,” and did it in that way.

There are a lot of problems that have been before the country that don’t relate directly to religion. So you could argue maybe there weren’t many opportunities, but I just think he had developed what at least I continue to think was a very sophisticated, unifying, largely unifying discourse on this subject, and I don’t think he should run away from it. I think he should have found ways periodically to reengage these questions.

DR. GALSTON: Let me just pick up on the other piece of your question, the distinction between racism and racial anxiety. I mean, I think you’re on to something there. We tried to probe that to some extent by including the following question in our survey, asking



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people for completely, mostly, agree or mostly or completely disagree. “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” And I could give you all sorts of breakdowns, but here’s just the racial and ethnic breakdown. You had 48 percent of whites agreeing completely or mostly with that sentiment and 50 percent rejecting, and I suspect strongly that if you do some cross-cuts with ideology, age, you know, and things of that sort you will find some fairly predictable patterns. LAUREN GREEN, Fox News: One of the things that most of us know is that race is a better indicator for how somebody is going to vote than their actual religious beliefs. I mean, race affiliation is the highest. So what I wanted to know is how much do our politics actually inform our religious beliefs as opposed to religious beliefs informing our politics. Because this is something that I don’t think any poll really gets at. MR. DIONNE: Race is a clearer indicator of party voting among African Americans and white Southerners than in the rest of the country. African Americans, in general, and Obama, of course, got 97 percent of the African American vote, but the typical vote has been around 88, 89, 90, 91. But among whites it’s not a good indicator outside the South. I mean, whites split. In the 2008 election, Northeastern whites voted slightly for Obama; I think Midwest slightly the other way, Westerners slightly the other way. Sixty-one percent of Obama’s votes came from white people. So, you know, I think it is partial, an important indicator, but not a total indicator, just to put that there. I think it’s a real question for people in all religious traditions to ask themselves, and all political views, by the way — this transcends ideology — the extent to which the political questions matter more even to religious people than their religious convictions. And I think there’s a lot of that going on, and I think all kinds of people of many faiths and views are, if it’s something to be guilty about, that is something they’re guilty of. DR. GALSTON: There’s also the question of political behavior, in particular, voting, and there we do have some evidence from our survey on what people say when they’re asked what really drove your decision when you got into the privacy of the polling booth. And in every single religious denomination or breakdown — and also for the unaffiliateds — the overwhelming response to that question when we gave people a choice was common



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sense and personal experience. The question we asked was, “which one of the following had the biggest influence on your vote?” Here are the choices they were given: common sense and personal experience, the views of friends and family, what you’ve seen or read in the media, your religious beliefs or something else. And here are the aggregate findings: common sense and personal experience, 73 percent; friends and family, four percent; the media, 12 percent; your religious beliefs, nine percent. Now, that doesn’t quite answer your question, but it is suggestive. But you’re right. There’s a black box there that we have to figure out a better way of getting into. JOHN L. ALLEN, JR., National Catholic Reporter: I’m interested in the compare and contrast with white evangelicals and white Catholics. Your data would seem to suggest that in a lot of matters they’re fairly similar. Where they’re different you can usually explain that by the fact that white Catholics tend to be a little bit more spread out ideologically than white evangelicals. But the one part of your data where there was a really dramatic contrast, and I’m interested if you have some way to explain this, is on this issue of American exceptionalism. What you find is that 83 percent of white evangelicals endorsed the notion of American exceptionalism, but only 49 percent of Catholics. I mean, that’s almost a factor of half, and in fact, Catholics have the lowest percentage of adherence to that statement of any religious subgroup that you identify, lower than mainline Protestants, lower than black Protestants, and so on. I can’t imagine that can be explained exclusively by political ideology. So what else do you think is in the mix there?

DR. GALSTON: Let’s go back all the way to the beginning of American history where a dominant trope among the dissenting Protestants who came to the new world was the idea of themselves as the new Israelites and America as the new Israel. I mean, if you look at the literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries that identification of America and Israel as a chosen people, a chosen nation was enormously powerful, and I think that’s a very important part of our cultural DNA as a Protestant origin country. This is a pure speculation. You know a Catholic asked a Catholic and a non-Catholic a question and the non-Catholic is answering the question, and I don’t have a lot of skin in



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this game, but I have to believe that the idea of Catholicism as the universal church tugs against the idea of the providential election of any single nation as well it might.

I mean, that strikes me as quite a logical connection for a universal church to make, particularly if you’re a universal church which is growing so much more vigorously outside the United States, outside the industrial West than it is, you know, than it is in Africa or even parts of Asia. I would certainly not be affirming American exceptionalism unless I had a very strong doctrinal or dogmatic reason to do so, but Catholics as far as I can see don’t, but you know, that’s just a view from outside.

MR. DIONNE: I think the universalism part is important. I also would note that Catholics and white mainline Protestants are actually quite close on this question, 49 percent Catholic, 53 percent white mainline, which suggests that the language in the question may be not only deeply Protestant, but almost inherently evangelical because black Protestants are higher than both Catholics and marginally white mainliners, and obviously white evangelicals are way up on that question. So I would be curious if there isn’t both a Protestant and an evangelical component to the language that is different from the language Catholics speak and to a significant degree different from the white mainliners because Catholics also were more pro diplomacy on that question than were white evangelicals.

MR. BARONE: The Census asked people to describe what groups they’re descended from, ancestry groups and so forth. If you take a look at the counties where the largest number of people say American, it’s the Scotch-Irish migration from southwest Pennsylvania going down the Appalachians into Texas. They don’t say they’re Scots or Irish. They say they’re Americans. A big overlap here with evangelical Protestants, I think, you know, or a high correlation, and they’ve just left — the old country is left behind. CARL CANNON, PoliticsDaily.com: Here’s the following groups of people who actually know that Obama’s religious views do not mirror their own, and I’m just going to tick off a few: Opus Dei Catholics, charismatics, Jews, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agists, Wiccans, Seventh Day Adventists, agnostics and atheists. And then when you take the rest of it, isn’t this a pretty high number actually who express solicitude for Obama?



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And then the second thing. Some of this is his fault, if yes is a positive answer. He doesn’t go to church. He answered that abortion question that we’ve talked about in this seminar many times. So evangelical Christians who paid attention to the answer said, “Well, okay. His views aren’t my views.”

So if Americans answer that question negatively, it seems to me that they’re being very literal and maybe telling the truth and maybe accurate, but that’s my question. What do you think?

DR. GALSTON: I stumbled across an interview that Obama had given to the New York Times a week after he clinched the presidential nomination in 2008, and he described himself as a Rorschach test. That was the phrase that he used, that whether by design or through inadvertence, you know, he had created a kind of a blank screen campaign onto which people could project different sorts of wishes, different forms of identification, different hopes. And so people who might have thought that he was a Muslim and that wasn’t such a bad thing, could imagine that about him; people who thought that he was a traditional Protestant could imagine that about him; people who thought with some justification that he was someone who had sucked at the Catholic social justice tradition could believe that; people who are very much inclined towards the Niebuhrian form of Protestantism had excellent reason to believe that he inclined in their direction. He was a man for all seasons.

And, you know, the problem with being a Rorschach test as a candidate is that it leaves a lot of things to fill in as President, and that is he has done very little as President to fill in the blanks, much less than I would have anticipated either behaviorally or rhetorically, and I think that that has created doubts and uncertainties such that people are more likely to say, “Well, gosh, you know, probably not like mine, because I have no reason to conceal or, you know, blur my religious identity, and so if he does, maybe they’re not like mine.” But that’s pure conjecture.

MR. DIONNE: It’s important not to misread the 51 percent who say his views aren’t theirs as automatically hostile to Obama. Some people are simply making the rational judgment you are, and that’s shown by the fact that especially among those who were not regular



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religious attenders, he still got 52 percent positive among those who said his religious views were different. So I think it’s worth underscoring that you can’t just read this purely as if you like him, you know, you say his religious views are like yours, and if you don’t like him you say the other thing.

The second thing is I don’t think it’s irrational or unfair if the Obama folks were trying to make a distinction between the fact that he did have a Muslim past could help us with the Muslim world and that some people who said Barack Hussein Obama were actually trying to curry prejudice or take advantage of prejudice.

But then the last point I’ve already said. I think it’s an area where he has fallen more silent than he has to, and it has hurt him.

DR. GALSTON: I would just add one last point, and that is that it may or may not be a coincidence that the people who are least likely to believe that his religious sentiments are like their own are the ones, the groups who are the most opposed to him in general. So the presumption is that it’s not a mark of favor, but it’s not a proof. ELIZABETH DIAS, Time: I’m curious about the last bullet point in the summary. “In the months leading up to the election, Americans who attended religious services were regularly more likely to hear about abortion from their clergy.” I’m not surprised that Catholics were hearing about abortion, but I am surprised that “only seven percent of white Catholics said their clergy spoke about the role and size of government and only 13 percent said they heard preaching about health care.” And I’m curious if you have more of a breakdown of that statistic and demographic for issues like employment, economy, immigration, and also for the other demographics. MR. DIONNE: Unfortunately, we couldn’t do a longer list on that question. I wish we could have. But I was actually blown away by how low the numbers were on everything but abortion. In one sense I wasn’t shocked because in my own experience, I heard on health care such preaching as I heard in Catholic Churches was almost all about abortion. And it really does show that the Catholic social justice tradition and the whole tradition of Catholic social thought seems to be talked about a whole lot less in churches than the life agenda, and I think that has important political effects.



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DAVID GIBSON, PoliticsDaily.com: I was struck by the national American exceptionalism percentages. Aren’t the Tea Partiers who embraced that American exceptionalism also less religiously devout than those of the religious right Christians? I think they got to church a little bit less than others. MR. DIONNE: It’s a great point, and I’m almost positive you’re right. We can look that up, but the Tea Partiers are much more assertive nationalists even more than they are religious conservatives. Assertive nationalist is an imperfect phrase, but for lack of a better phrase, that’s what I’ll call it, and you’re seeing that on attitudes toward immigration, on, you know, attitudes towards what it means to be an American, and it’s sort of an anti-government or sort of nationalism that seems to come together. And there are a lot of evangelicals who may have some sympathies in that direction, but it doesn’t come together quite as strongly or in the same way among evangelical conservatives, I think, than it does among Tea Partiers, and the church attendance takers are part of that picture.

MR. GIBSON: You know, I’ve always been taught that all politics is local, and it seems that all politics in this election was actually national and has been so at least for a couple of election rounds. Do you agree with that, and do you think that kind of religious rhetoric and the universalization of religious talk plays into that nationalizing of our campaign issues and our political life? MR. BARONE: When Tip O’Neill said all politics is local I think he was really talking about rounding up votes on Capitol Hill and what you needed to do to get to each one rather than talking about winning elections. I think elections in America very often have been national, and this certainly was one. I mean, it’s just totally undeniable, and it is this fascinating thing that we have—we had a period 1995 to 2005 with very stable and steady voting patterns. The 49 percent nation I called it, and voting behavior was very highly correlated with religion, and it was the demographic variable that was most highly correlated.



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We’ve been oscillating wildly in opposite directions now, and I think no one can be sure that the movement is all over and we’re all going to end up where we were in 2010, but it has been very national. And what I think is fascinating about this survey is that it shows that there remains a considerable correlation between religious belief and practice and political choices and political views. I tried to suggest some reasons why those lines of thought may tend to run parallel with many people, and I think E.J. and Bill have given us worthy studies for which we should be grateful.

MR. CROMARTIE: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

END

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org

or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]

abridged transcript · 2019. 3. 15. · abridged transcript “religious voters & the 2010...

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