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The Effects of Religious Separatism on White Protestants in the 1984 PresidentialElection
Ted G. Jelen
Sociological Analysis
, Vol. 48, No. 1. (Spring, 1987), pp. 30-45.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-0210%28198721%2948%3A1%3C30%3ATEORSO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7
Sociological Analysis
is currently published by Association for the Sociology of Religion, Inc..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/asr.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 22:11:12 2007
 
The Effects of Religious Separatism onWhite Protestants in the
1984
Presidential Election.
Ted
G.
Jelen
Illinois Benedictine College
A
distinction is made between fundamentalists and evangelicals, based uponattitudes of religious separatism. While the two groups do not differ in terns ofpartisanship or voting behavior, there appear to exist important differences in theissue attitudes of the two groups. While both groups seem likely to embracepersonally conservative positions on the moral issues, the data analyzed heresuggest that fundamentalists are significantly more likely to translate personalvalues into demands for the legal enforcement of these values. However, theresults of this study suggest the possibility that evangelicals were somewhat morelikely than fundamentalists to use moral or social issues
as
criteria for presiden-tial vote choice in
1984.
The relationship between religion and politics has long fascinated social scien-tists. This perennial topic has recently received a great deal of scholarly attention inthe context of American national elections. This attention has perhaps been occa-sioned by the rise of such religiously-motivated interest groups such as MoralMajority, (recently subsumed into the "Liberty Federation") Religious Roundtable,and Christian Voice.Perhaps regrettably, this level of scholarly activity has not yet produced anythingapproaching a consensus regarding the effects of religious belief on political behav-ior. While some observers have dismissed the "New Christian Right" as essentiallyoverrated as an electoral force (Lipset and Raab, 1981 25-3 I), others have discernedstatistically significant effects of religious beliefs on electoral choices (Smidt, 1983,1985), partisan affections (Smidt, 1985), and issue positions (Jelen, 1984:225;1986, Kellstedt, 1985, 1986; Smidt, 1983, 1985) However, the observed effects ofreligious belief on political attitudes, while often statistically significant, are typi-cally of a very low magnitude. With the possible exception of the 1960 Presidentialrace (Converse,1966:97, 191) it seems unlikely that religion
has
been observed tobe a decisive consideration in an American national election.Why do the effects of religious beliefs on political attitudes and behavior seem sosmall? One possible explanation is that political scientists studying conservativereligious influence have not defined such concepts as "fundamentalism" or "evan-
 
THE EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS SEPARATISM
3
1
gelicalism" with sufficient methodological rigor. While a number of different opera-tional definitions have been attempted (see Kellstedt, 1984; and Kellstedt and Smidt,1985, for excellent reviews of this literature) the fact remains that most of thesestudies rely on secondary analyses of national surveys, in which the effects ofreligious belief are not of primary importance. Typically, the scholar wishing toexamine the impact of religious belief is restricted to one or two fairly crude items,tapping either denominational preference, the importance of religion in everydaylife, or subjective Biblical literalism. Survey items such as these obviously do not tapthe richness or complexity with which many citizens experience religious belief.One prominent exception to this generalization is
The
Evangelical
Vorer
(Rothenberg and Newport, 1984). The Rothenberg and Newport survey utilizes avariety of operationalizations of "evangelicalism" in a study specifically designed tomeasure the impact of religious variables on political behavior (see Rothenberg andNewport, 1984: 20-27) and thus avoids the limitations of most survey treatments ofthis topic. While the data reported in
The
Evangelical
Voter
show that "evangelical-ism" is significantly related to attitudes on "social issues" (Rothenberg and New-port, 1984:78), religious variables are not strongly related to foreign policy atti-tudes, partisanship, or Presidential voting behavior (Rothenberg and Newport,198453, 83,91). Thus, in one of the few studies which measures religious belief indetail, the connection between religious attitudes and political behavior is tenuous orindirect.The Rothenberg and Newport results raise the possibility that the weak relation-ships between religious and political attitudes do
not
result from methodologicallimitations, but may reflect the lack of religious effects within the population. Thatis, it may be that strong religious effects on political attitudes are infrequentlyobserved because such effects infrequently exist. It may be the voters, rather than ourmeasuring instruments, which are at fault.
A
number of variations on this theme arepossible. First, it has been suggested that religion is a somewhat specialized short-term force, which attains political importance only within rather restricted circum-stances. For example, Smidt (1986) has noted that the apparently high level ofmobilization among evangelicals during the 1980 elections was not replicated duringthe 1984, despite the fact that Ronald Reagan was a candidate during both years.'Similarly, Lopatto (1985: Chap.
4)
has shown that the impact of religious belief onvote choice is rather sensitive to the nature of alternative candidates offered to voters.Thus, analysts of religion and politics may need to accustom themselves to the factthat the range of candidates (or perhaps issues) to which religious belief is relevantmay be somewhat restricted.Second, it may be that a lack of sophistication on the part of evangelical orfundamentalist voters inhibits the translation of religious beliefs into political atti-tudes and behavior. That is, many citizens simply may not perceive that theirreligious beliefs are relevant to contemporary political choices. For example, somereligious voters may be unaware that a religiously relevant issue is on the politicalagenda, due to a general inattention to things political (see Converse, 1964:229,238-
1.
Smidt
notes a disparity between the
ICPR
results and those obtained by
the
Gallup organization for
1984.
The results reported here tend to support Smidt's findings.
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