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Political Christianity: A Contextual Analysis

Ted G. Jelen

American Journal of Political Science

, Vol. 36, No. 3. (Aug., 1992), pp. 692-714.

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0092-5853%28199208%2936%3A3%3C692%3APCACA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

American Journal of Political Science

is currently published by Midwest Political Science Association.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/mpsa.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgWed Jul 4 22:08:43 2007

Political Christianity: A Contextual Analysis*

Ted G. Jelen,

Illinois Benedictine College

In this paper, an attempt is made to assess the relative importance of individual attributes andcongregational-level contextual variables in explaining support for New Christian Right figures andfor the Republican party. Using data gathered from 14 rural midwestem churches, the analysis sug-gests the following: (1) contextual effects are important and often are stronger than the effects ofindividual-level variables; (2) the unique effects of contextual-level variables are occasionally nega-tive, suggesting that simple social learning models of contextual effects may be inadequate; and(3) contextual effects are likely to be weaker at simpler levels of conceptualization.

In recent years, political scientists have paid renewed attention to politicalenvironments. The general hypothesis that political attitudes and behavior areoften affected by the social context in which they occur has received empiricalsupport in a number of studies and has challenged the methodological individu-alism that has dominated the study of political behavior (see Mandelbaum 1973;Lukes 1973; Miller 1978). The work on contextual analysis that has appearedover the past several years provides an empirically based alternative to the pre-vailing individualistic analyses of public opinion (for an excellent overview ofthis research, see Books and Prysby 1988, 1991).The mechanisms by which social context influences individual attitudeshave received some attention and have been the subject of imaginative and rigor-ous research designs. While the units of analysis in some studies have been geo-graphical units (see Miller 1956; Huckfeldt 1986), these studies are susceptibleto the possibility that mere physical proximity may not result in politically rele-vant communication. Thus, contextual effects on individual behavior may be un-derstated. The problem of inferred communication is to some extent reduced byother studies (MacKuen and Brown 1987; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987, 1991;Finifter 1974; Eulau and Rothenberg 1986; Gilbert 1989) in which friendshipgroups or self-reported communications networks define social or political envi-ronments. In each case, the working hypothesis is that exposure to informal com-munications can be quite efficacious in influencing individual behavior.Sprague (1982) has suggested a simple, reinforcement model as theindividual-level process by which political environments can influence individu-als. Rapid communications result in agreement (positive reinforcement) or dis-agreement (negative reinforcement). Thus, social approval or approbation serves

*A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political ScienceAssociation, September 1990, San Francisco. Thanks are due to Michael Lewis-Beck and three anon-ymous reviewers, whose comments on an earlier draft of this paper were quite helpful.

American Journal of Political Science,

Vol. 36, No. 3, August 1992, Pp. 692-714

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1992 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713

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as the force by which an individual comes into conformity with his or her envi-ronment. Differences in political environments suggest that diverse environmentshave different "reinforcement schedules" or "informational biases" (1982, 113).In more recent work (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1987), it has been suggested thatpolitical environments are, to a limited extent, subject to self-selection biases(people have some capacity to choose congenial social contexts), but that contex-tual effects are particularly visible to deviant members of a communications net-work. As Huckfeldt and Sprague point out, "Not only are members of the minor-ity more likely to produce dissonance-producing information, they are morelikely to recognize it as such" (1987, 1213). Over time, one might anticipate that(given Sprague's initial operant conditioning model) dissonant opinions may becommunicated less frequently. Indeed, Noelle-Neumann (1984) has suggested asort of reverse "Gresham's law" of minority opinions, in which the fear of socialdisapproval inhibits the expression of unpopular opinion. All of this assumes, ofcourse, that the cycle of expression, reinforcement, and modification occursfairly frequently and rapidly.In their recent work, Wald, Owen, and Hill (1988, 1990) have shown thatchurches can serve as effective transmitters of political information. In their ele-gant "Churches as Political Communities" (1988), Wald, Owen, and Hill showthat a contextual "theological conservatism" (defined as the congregational meanscore on a doctrinal orthodoxy index) was a powerful predictor of both "moralconservatism" and ideological self-identification. Indeed, the congregationallevel of theological conservatism proved to predict the dependent variables morestrongly than did individual theological orthodoxy. However, it should be notedthat churches may be atypical of political environments in at least one crucialrespect: important communications may not be subject to the feedback mech-anism that Sprague and others regard as central to contextual influences onindividual behavior. Certainly, as Wald, Owen, and Hill (1990) have shown,congregations vary in their level of social interaction, and this type of "associa-tionalism" is related to the political cohesion of the church. However, it must benoted that the sermon is the central feature of most Christian services. The ser-mon may be concerned with political topics but will more often deal with doc-trinal or "spiritual" matters. Regardless of the content, the sermon is a vertical,"one-way" communication from an elite (pastor) to a mass (laity). Individualmembers of the congregation may not have the opportunity to check their under-standing of the messages contained in sermons with other church members orwith the pastor. To this extent, then, theologically (or politically) relevant mes-sages may be distorted, simplified, or simply not received. In other words, whilethe interaction between church members may ensure a certain high level of agree-ment between members of the laity, there is only limited assurance that the con-tent of the agreement would be approved by community elites. Of course, indi-vidual congregations will vary in the extent to which the pastor engages in

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