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Factors Influencing Vote for a Christian Right Candidate
Stephen D. Johnson; Joseph B. Tamney; Ronald Burton
 Review of Religious Research
, Vol. 31, No. 3. (Mar., 1990), pp. 291-304.
Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0034-673X%28199003%2931%3A3%3C291%3AFIVFAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0
 Review of Religious Research
is currently published by Religious Research Association, 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/rra.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.orgSun Jul 1 05:41:57 2007
 
FACTORS INFLUENCING VOTE FOR A CHRISTIAN RIGHT CANDIDATE
Stephen D. Johnson, Joseph B. Tamney, Ronald Burton
Ball State University
Review of Religious Research, Vol.
31,
No.
3
(March,
1990)
Zhe research reported here analyzed what factors influenced the vote for anavowed Christian Right candidate who ran for a seat in the US. House ofRepresentatives from the state of Indiana in the Fall of
1986.
The ChristianRight candidate was rather easily beaten. But this candidate was able to drawsome support from politically conservative Fundamentalists and from "OldGuard" Re~ublicanswho ~robablv lwavs vote Re~ublican.The ChristianRight candidate was able td obtain high percentage'of the votefrom Republi-cans who were also older ~oliticallv onservative Fundamentalists. but thesewere fm in number. The i&plicatiois of thesePndings indicate that ChristianRight candidates will have great di'culty in obtaining elective ofice at thefederal level.
In the latter 1970s America saw the development of what has come to be calledthe Christian Right movement
(Hill
and Owen, 1982; Kater, 1982; Johnson andTamney, 1986).
Led
by such politically conservative Fundamentalist preachers asJerry Falwell and Pat Robertson a number of like-minded individuals came tobelieve political action was necessary to overcome what they saw as attacks on theirtraditional values. To these religiously and politically conservative people suchchanges as the liberalization of the abortion laws and the elimination of schoolprayer were seen as a threat to their traditional value perspectives, especially totheir traditional views of what a family should
be
like. So perceiving that Americanpolitical institutions had betrayed them, they felt political action was needed torectify this situation. In fact in 1986 at least three candidates who were labelledChristian Rightists ran in congressional races around the country (Lawrence,1986). This paper is an analysis of one such race.THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
As
suggested by Luckmann (1967) and Wilson (1976), among others, it has beenfound that in the
United
States religion has greater influence in the private worldthan in the public realm (Tamney and Johnson, 1985; Hoge and DeZulueta, 1985;Cheal, 1987). Religious influence on elections seems especially weak. In part thisis a result of the traditional cultural emphasis on not mixing religion and politics(Tamney and Johnson, 1987). However, it has been found that religiously conserva-tive Protestants are more likely to want church-state entanglement (Tamney andJohnson, 1987) and to say that religious beliefs and values influence their selectionof candidates (Tarnney and Johnson, 1985).Previous research on the impact of the Christian Right on political events,however, has indicated that this movement has had little impact on who was elected
 
to office in the 1980s (Johnson and Ta&ey, 1982; Johnson and Tamney, 1985a;Lipset, 1981). Johnson and Tarnney found in studies of the 1980 and 1984 presi-dential elections that people who were classified as Christian Rightists were nomore likely to vote for Reagan than those who were not so classified (Johnson andTamney, 1982; Johnson and Tarnney, 1985a). In the 1984 election Johnson andTamney (1985a) also examined the impact of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority,which is the major political-action organization within the Christian Right move-ment. They found that the presence of the Moral Majority led more people to votefor Mondale than Reagan, i.e., there were more people who said they were againstthe Moral Majority and voted for Mondale than there were people who supportedthe Moral Majority and voted for Reagan. In both elections economic views werefound to be by far the most important factors in Reagan's election wins.
A
somewhat different study, which used some of the same variables as theaforementioned projects, examined support for President Ronald Reagan (Tamneyand Johnson, 1983). Specifically respondents were asked to rate Reagan's perform-ance as poor, fair, good, or excellent.
A
favorable evaluation was positively relatedto party identification, as well as measures of political conservatism, economicconservatism, and social traditionalism (i.e., commitment to a traditional moralcode centering on conservative family issues). Neither Fundamentalism nor Chris-tian Rightism was directly related to how people evaluated Reagan.There is some evidence that social traditionalism has affected candidate choice(Jelen, 1987; Simpson, 1985; Woodrum, 1987). However, the relevant studiesfailed to control for key variables such as party affiliation, so it remains an openquestion whether social traditionalist issues significantly affect electoral outcomes.Overall, the evidence is consistent that even among religiously conservativeChristians the privatization thesis seems valid. That is, religion has relevancemainly for private matters such as how to raise children and appropriate sexualconduct and that election results seem to be determined by factors that are primarilypolitical or economic and not religious
in
nature. The question addressed in thispaper is whether moral or religious variables assume greater salience when theelection in question involves an explicitly Christian Right candidate.THE ELECTIONThe 1986 U.S. Congressional race in the Second District of Indiana offered agood opportunity
to
evaluate how an avowed Christian Right candidate could do inan election. The significance of this election is indicated by the fact that it waswritten up in
The
New
York Times
(Toner, 1986) and the
Wall
Street
Journal
(Fialka, 1986). In this race, Donald Lynch, an Indianapolis Nazarene minister, wasthe surprise winner of the Republican primary gaining the chance to face the six-term incumbent Democratic Congressman from this district, Phil Sharp (Fran-cisco, 1986a
&
1986b; Richardson, 1986). Lynch was not the candidate endorsedby the Republican party in Indiana. Local political analysts believed that hissuccess was due to the low name recognition of both Lynch and the other Republi-can primary candidate, and to the low voter turnout in the primary coupled with theextra effort conservative fundamentalist churches made to get members out
to
the
of 00

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