There is an argument to be made that all political realignment in America starts with desegregation. Even the rise of abortion as a political wedge seems tied to it, linking conservative Catholic and conservative Protestant interests in a way they had not been before. Talk radio, Heritage schools, states rights vs. greater federalism--desegregation was the reformulation of the Civil War. Identity is slow to follow practice, but it happens eventually.
The relative amity between conservative Catholicism and conservative Protestantism probably has a lot to do with the expanding divide between liberal and conservative Protestants. It also has to do with the effectively complete assimilation of Ellis Island Catholics.
The conservative-liberal divide was well-documented in the seminary by Gresham Machen 100 years ago, in which he describes liberal Christianity (unlike Catholicism) as a distinct Abrahamic religion from traditional Christianity, but it took longer to be fully realized on the ground and in the pews.
Unlike in the mid-20th century, there is very little common ground any longer between conservative and liberal Protestants in terms of religious ideas, values, or politics, which makes Catholics on one's side of the culture war rather less alien by comparison.
Your final paragraph asserts that white evangelicals voted republican in the past because they were motivated by racism. The inference seems to be that white evangelical vote today are motivated by that same racism. Is that what you intended to say?
I do not believe that, nor do I believe I inferred that in the post. I think that issues regarding race did shift a significant numbers of white evangelicals from Democrats to Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s.
But, I specifically mention generational replacement in the paragraph. Younger white evangelicals were politically socialized in homes that were right leaning and they continued to vote for the Republican, with little knowledge of anything related to the racial discussion of the prior era.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate greatly the articles you post. Yes, one data point does not make a trend, I overstated my point. My main point though is that the trends in voting and party identification you identified which developed over 60 years have multiple factor causation, not just racism. Anit Catholicism was a factor in 1960 as you point out. The Republican fight against “atheistic” communism beginning in the late 40’s through the 80’s was another factor. By the Reagan election of 1980, “traditional family values” represented a host of non-racial issues, including opposition to abortion, which were/are important to evangelicals. So, while racist views within evangelicalism in the Bible Belt certainly persisted far too long, there also are other “legitimate” reasons why white evangelicals shifted in the Republican direction. This single factor analysis also unfairly brands the Republican party with the sins of Attwater for 60 years, 10 maybe but not 60, and even during those 10 years appeals like “law and order”, were not overtly racist and were taken by many at face value, not as dog whistles for racist motives. Thanks again for responding and for your ongoing research.
Also, we need to compare/contrast what is going on here in the US (both politically and religiously) with what's going on in the rest of the (not just Western) world. My gut tells me that A LOT of what fuels what's going on here and everywhere else in the world has more to do with economics that rel/pol. (PS. AND the rise of extremism(s), autocratic govts and all kinds of fill-in-the blank ____________ nationalism.)
Fascinating data! And it leads to another question for me - what is the impact of the Pro Life conservative movement following Roe v Wade in 1973, on the White Evangelicals that voted Republican yet claimed to be Democrats - to shift their stated party affiliation to Republican?
In other words, as White Evangelicals shifted their actual votes to Republican due to the Southern Strategy, they were still claiming to be Democrats. But as the Pro Life movement took hold of the Republican party, now these White Evangelicals no longer felt the need to claim to be Democrat, because they could now own being a Republican because they are Pro Life?
This made me wonder how much difference there is between the Democrat/Republican party system and those who identify as liberal/conservative. And now liberal/conservative/populist AKA angry. I would suspect there are differences. It would also be interesting and probably difficult to impossible what each party and ideology meant/self-defined when asked what does being a Democrat/Republican/Liberal/Conservative mean to you. And the context, since states and regions may favor identifying in a political party more so as access than belief.
Very interesting findings here. Thank you for taking the time to pull together these two sources and map them against each other. An angle on partisanship that I hadn’t seen but that makes intuitive sense. It would be interesting to look at the timing of Southern politicians’ who swapped parties while in office and map that against the narrowing gap between voting patterns and self-identified party among voters (perhaps looking at state governors and U.S. Senators). Great work here!
It is a shame that Ryan attributes this voting and partisan shift to a single variable, racism. That conclusion is contradicted by his own data. His graph shows evangelical votes for Republicans in 1960 at 63%, years before the civil rights legislation signed by LBJ. Evangelicals including Billy Graham were attracted to Republican anticommunist sentiments beginning in the late 40’s and extending through the Regan era. Nixon’s appeal in 1968 was both law and order and anticommunist, win in Vietnam through Vietnamization of the war. His appeal to law and order was a response to antiwar protests as well as race riots. One could certainly oppose riots without having racist motives, as was true for Dr. King. The same was true for affirmative action quotas, opposition did not require one to have a racist motive. Atwater’s description of his Southern Strategy reveals his racism, but his strategy used non-race terminology which certainly had support from many for nonracist motives as has already stated relative to “forced bussing” and “law and order” terminology. Attributing the white evangelical voting shift to one variable, and that one itself suspect, is the type of mistake Ryan does not often make.
I think it's pretty fair to say that the election of 1960 does not provide strong empirical support for the claim that white evangelicals had already shifted to the Republicans prior to LBJ.
JFK's Catholicism had to have played a role in the minds of white evangelical voters. There's just too much historical evidence of anti-Catholic sentiment to argue otherwise. I don't have any data prior to this, though. So I can't look at the election of 1956, for instance.
Thanks for this very interesting post. Do the more recent numbers take into account than many non-evangelicals (theologically) have adopted the term evangelical as a political term? I suppose in some ways it doesn’t matter since non-evangelicals began using the term because so many actual evangelicals created this political connotation through their political alignment. On another note, is it possible to go back further in history? When did evangelicals become predominantly Republican or have they always been? And why is that the case, esp. pre abortion debates? Thoughts?
Also, I suppose the picture is complex given Republicans and Democrats themselves have changed. Abraham Lincoln was Republican and yet racism seems more connected to the Republican Party now.
"Seems." Your experiences may be different than mine, as I've never personally met any racist Republicans, that I know of. Truly. A lot of people make a lot of noise in this direction, and I'm sure there are plenty of racist Republicans... but my conclusion is in direct conflict with my personal experience. =)
I live in rural Illinois. I have certainly met racist Republicans. I would not say I've met plenty of them, but I bet I hear the N word used once or twice a year.
I am most certainly not saying that all (or even most) Republicans are racist. But there are racist Republicans in my neck of the words.
Ryan’s reference to the Southern Strategy in the post is a good place to start in understanding how the parties have changed over time. I like thinking about it in terms of progressive/conservative. Republicans of Lincoln’s time were the progressives/liberals and Dems were the Conservative Party. Over time, this has shifted and the Dems of today would be considered the progressive/liberal party and Republicans have shifted to conservative policies. Of course there are lots of reasons for this - big business, views on the role of the government specifically during the Great Depression, urban vs rural, and civil rights policies.
Only able to read the post, not anything beyond the post. Would have like to see the absolute numbers as well as the percentage distributions. As we get to later elections, the fraction of the composite population that remain evangelicals is smaller, so if the Democrats disaffiliated, the fraction of remaining Republicans would be higher as would the fraction of vote going that way, so the very lopsided numbers are no surprise.
Being a contemporary of Lee Atwater, sharing his birth year, his contribution came much later than Nixon, really into the 1980s. What Ryan could have mentioned was the 1968 third party candidate, George Wallace, the last third party candidate to secure electoral votes. No ambiguity about where his appeal derived. Nixon won despite this. I think the graphs would have been more revealing if the evangelical vote for Wallace was included in the 1968 assessment of how evangelicals voted.
When Stephen Covey published his 7 Habits, probably toward the end of the Reagan years, he devoted an early chapter to how people define what is most important to them, whether money, recognition, or a dozen other attributes, then act on their personal centers. The two that got the most scathing assessments were people who lived their lives around fulfilling what their religion told them to do or those who devoted their lives to staying one step ahead of their enemies. I think Ryan's graphs and commentary expose elements of both in that segment of America.
I think there are important regional differences in evangelicals, which sometimes get lost when you look at the national data which gets swamped by the effect of Southerners. And of course, even among Southerners, there are going to be distinct subcultural or subregional differences.
I recall in J.D. Vance's memoir, his maternal grandmother and grandfather -- Appalachian "hillbillies" -- are strong Democrats (including voting Democrat without hesitation up through at least the Bill Clinton Administration), don't really go to church but identify strongly with Christianity and at least in his grandmother's case, she regularly reads the Bible.
His father joins a church that we could call "fundamentalist" (though I hate that term, per Plantinga's definition), but specifically we're talking Jack Chick, dispensational, Magic: The Gathering is the devil. They are more of the Weekly or Weekly+ attender crowd and, of course, vote Republican and despise Bill Clinton.
Both groups would probably check the "evangelical" box but Vance, growing up between them, saw them as two different worlds.
I mean, consider the fact that a majority of ELCA folks voted for Trump in 2020. Those are the Country Club Republicans. They don't really care about gay marriage or abortion. They just want low taxes.
Then you have the cultural warrior evangelicals who most certainly care about gay marriage and abortion. But aren't strongly motivated by economic stuff.
Vote choice in a two party system is an incredibly blunt measurement, the more I think about it.
There is an argument to be made that all political realignment in America starts with desegregation. Even the rise of abortion as a political wedge seems tied to it, linking conservative Catholic and conservative Protestant interests in a way they had not been before. Talk radio, Heritage schools, states rights vs. greater federalism--desegregation was the reformulation of the Civil War. Identity is slow to follow practice, but it happens eventually.
The relative amity between conservative Catholicism and conservative Protestantism probably has a lot to do with the expanding divide between liberal and conservative Protestants. It also has to do with the effectively complete assimilation of Ellis Island Catholics.
The conservative-liberal divide was well-documented in the seminary by Gresham Machen 100 years ago, in which he describes liberal Christianity (unlike Catholicism) as a distinct Abrahamic religion from traditional Christianity, but it took longer to be fully realized on the ground and in the pews.
Unlike in the mid-20th century, there is very little common ground any longer between conservative and liberal Protestants in terms of religious ideas, values, or politics, which makes Catholics on one's side of the culture war rather less alien by comparison.
Good points....sigh.
Your final paragraph asserts that white evangelicals voted republican in the past because they were motivated by racism. The inference seems to be that white evangelical vote today are motivated by that same racism. Is that what you intended to say?
I do not believe that, nor do I believe I inferred that in the post. I think that issues regarding race did shift a significant numbers of white evangelicals from Democrats to Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s.
But, I specifically mention generational replacement in the paragraph. Younger white evangelicals were politically socialized in homes that were right leaning and they continued to vote for the Republican, with little knowledge of anything related to the racial discussion of the prior era.
Makes sense to me....a social historian.
Also, didn't see the "racist" intent....more of an economic and social one.
Fair response... thanks for the points of clarification on your framing of the research. I appreciate your work. It is excellent.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate greatly the articles you post. Yes, one data point does not make a trend, I overstated my point. My main point though is that the trends in voting and party identification you identified which developed over 60 years have multiple factor causation, not just racism. Anit Catholicism was a factor in 1960 as you point out. The Republican fight against “atheistic” communism beginning in the late 40’s through the 80’s was another factor. By the Reagan election of 1980, “traditional family values” represented a host of non-racial issues, including opposition to abortion, which were/are important to evangelicals. So, while racist views within evangelicalism in the Bible Belt certainly persisted far too long, there also are other “legitimate” reasons why white evangelicals shifted in the Republican direction. This single factor analysis also unfairly brands the Republican party with the sins of Attwater for 60 years, 10 maybe but not 60, and even during those 10 years appeals like “law and order”, were not overtly racist and were taken by many at face value, not as dog whistles for racist motives. Thanks again for responding and for your ongoing research.
Also, we need to compare/contrast what is going on here in the US (both politically and religiously) with what's going on in the rest of the (not just Western) world. My gut tells me that A LOT of what fuels what's going on here and everywhere else in the world has more to do with economics that rel/pol. (PS. AND the rise of extremism(s), autocratic govts and all kinds of fill-in-the blank ____________ nationalism.)
Fascinating data! And it leads to another question for me - what is the impact of the Pro Life conservative movement following Roe v Wade in 1973, on the White Evangelicals that voted Republican yet claimed to be Democrats - to shift their stated party affiliation to Republican?
In other words, as White Evangelicals shifted their actual votes to Republican due to the Southern Strategy, they were still claiming to be Democrats. But as the Pro Life movement took hold of the Republican party, now these White Evangelicals no longer felt the need to claim to be Democrat, because they could now own being a Republican because they are Pro Life?
This made me wonder how much difference there is between the Democrat/Republican party system and those who identify as liberal/conservative. And now liberal/conservative/populist AKA angry. I would suspect there are differences. It would also be interesting and probably difficult to impossible what each party and ideology meant/self-defined when asked what does being a Democrat/Republican/Liberal/Conservative mean to you. And the context, since states and regions may favor identifying in a political party more so as access than belief.
I have a post in the hopper about Black Protestants.
They are overwhelmingly Democrat.
They are also overwhelmingly moderate when asked about their political ideology.
Very interesting findings here. Thank you for taking the time to pull together these two sources and map them against each other. An angle on partisanship that I hadn’t seen but that makes intuitive sense. It would be interesting to look at the timing of Southern politicians’ who swapped parties while in office and map that against the narrowing gap between voting patterns and self-identified party among voters (perhaps looking at state governors and U.S. Senators). Great work here!
Good observation! Definitely would have contributed to "normalization" discussed in Dr. B's response to one of the comments.
Eric
It is a shame that Ryan attributes this voting and partisan shift to a single variable, racism. That conclusion is contradicted by his own data. His graph shows evangelical votes for Republicans in 1960 at 63%, years before the civil rights legislation signed by LBJ. Evangelicals including Billy Graham were attracted to Republican anticommunist sentiments beginning in the late 40’s and extending through the Regan era. Nixon’s appeal in 1968 was both law and order and anticommunist, win in Vietnam through Vietnamization of the war. His appeal to law and order was a response to antiwar protests as well as race riots. One could certainly oppose riots without having racist motives, as was true for Dr. King. The same was true for affirmative action quotas, opposition did not require one to have a racist motive. Atwater’s description of his Southern Strategy reveals his racism, but his strategy used non-race terminology which certainly had support from many for nonracist motives as has already stated relative to “forced bussing” and “law and order” terminology. Attributing the white evangelical voting shift to one variable, and that one itself suspect, is the type of mistake Ryan does not often make.
I think it's pretty fair to say that the election of 1960 does not provide strong empirical support for the claim that white evangelicals had already shifted to the Republicans prior to LBJ.
JFK's Catholicism had to have played a role in the minds of white evangelical voters. There's just too much historical evidence of anti-Catholic sentiment to argue otherwise. I don't have any data prior to this, though. So I can't look at the election of 1956, for instance.
See the Southern Strategy.
You might be interested in this post from a decade ago on "Southern White as an ethnicity" https://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/16/southern-white-as-an-ethnicity/
Thanks for this very interesting post. Do the more recent numbers take into account than many non-evangelicals (theologically) have adopted the term evangelical as a political term? I suppose in some ways it doesn’t matter since non-evangelicals began using the term because so many actual evangelicals created this political connotation through their political alignment. On another note, is it possible to go back further in history? When did evangelicals become predominantly Republican or have they always been? And why is that the case, esp. pre abortion debates? Thoughts?
Interestingly enough - this is as far back as survey data goes. At least any survey that I know of that has good questions about religion.
Also, I suppose the picture is complex given Republicans and Democrats themselves have changed. Abraham Lincoln was Republican and yet racism seems more connected to the Republican Party now.
"Seems." Your experiences may be different than mine, as I've never personally met any racist Republicans, that I know of. Truly. A lot of people make a lot of noise in this direction, and I'm sure there are plenty of racist Republicans... but my conclusion is in direct conflict with my personal experience. =)
* I'm not a Republican, by the way.
I live in rural Illinois. I have certainly met racist Republicans. I would not say I've met plenty of them, but I bet I hear the N word used once or twice a year.
I am most certainly not saying that all (or even most) Republicans are racist. But there are racist Republicans in my neck of the words.
My family is full of them....sigh.
Sad to say, sad to hear.
Ryan’s reference to the Southern Strategy in the post is a good place to start in understanding how the parties have changed over time. I like thinking about it in terms of progressive/conservative. Republicans of Lincoln’s time were the progressives/liberals and Dems were the Conservative Party. Over time, this has shifted and the Dems of today would be considered the progressive/liberal party and Republicans have shifted to conservative policies. Of course there are lots of reasons for this - big business, views on the role of the government specifically during the Great Depression, urban vs rural, and civil rights policies.
Only able to read the post, not anything beyond the post. Would have like to see the absolute numbers as well as the percentage distributions. As we get to later elections, the fraction of the composite population that remain evangelicals is smaller, so if the Democrats disaffiliated, the fraction of remaining Republicans would be higher as would the fraction of vote going that way, so the very lopsided numbers are no surprise.
Being a contemporary of Lee Atwater, sharing his birth year, his contribution came much later than Nixon, really into the 1980s. What Ryan could have mentioned was the 1968 third party candidate, George Wallace, the last third party candidate to secure electoral votes. No ambiguity about where his appeal derived. Nixon won despite this. I think the graphs would have been more revealing if the evangelical vote for Wallace was included in the 1968 assessment of how evangelicals voted.
When Stephen Covey published his 7 Habits, probably toward the end of the Reagan years, he devoted an early chapter to how people define what is most important to them, whether money, recognition, or a dozen other attributes, then act on their personal centers. The two that got the most scathing assessments were people who lived their lives around fulfilling what their religion told them to do or those who devoted their lives to staying one step ahead of their enemies. I think Ryan's graphs and commentary expose elements of both in that segment of America.
I think there are important regional differences in evangelicals, which sometimes get lost when you look at the national data which gets swamped by the effect of Southerners. And of course, even among Southerners, there are going to be distinct subcultural or subregional differences.
I recall in J.D. Vance's memoir, his maternal grandmother and grandfather -- Appalachian "hillbillies" -- are strong Democrats (including voting Democrat without hesitation up through at least the Bill Clinton Administration), don't really go to church but identify strongly with Christianity and at least in his grandmother's case, she regularly reads the Bible.
His father joins a church that we could call "fundamentalist" (though I hate that term, per Plantinga's definition), but specifically we're talking Jack Chick, dispensational, Magic: The Gathering is the devil. They are more of the Weekly or Weekly+ attender crowd and, of course, vote Republican and despise Bill Clinton.
Both groups would probably check the "evangelical" box but Vance, growing up between them, saw them as two different worlds.
I mean, consider the fact that a majority of ELCA folks voted for Trump in 2020. Those are the Country Club Republicans. They don't really care about gay marriage or abortion. They just want low taxes.
Then you have the cultural warrior evangelicals who most certainly care about gay marriage and abortion. But aren't strongly motivated by economic stuff.
Vote choice in a two party system is an incredibly blunt measurement, the more I think about it.
Blunt instrument, more like.
Interesting observation.
Is there such a thing a a "New Deal" Democrat....never heard the term used, but it certainly applies ( I think) to Yellow Dog Dems.