Journal Time

with Ray Waddle

Politics and religion.

In the old days these were the two subjects you weren't supposed to discuss in polite company. Now we all do. It's hard to avoid. Like never before in modern American politics, one's level of religious commitment and worship attendance predicts how a person will vote in national elections. It might mean the difference in the presidential vote on November 2. If you attend church at least once a week, for instance, chances are you'll vote Republican, according to Voter News Service (VNS) exit polling data. The less you go to worship, the greater the odds you'll go Democrat. The gap between these voting patterns has never been so wide.

Conservative white Christians and "frequent-attending" white Protestants are President Bush's biggest supporters, VNS reports. Democratic challenger John Kerry can expect a big vote from black Protestants, Jews, Latino Catholics "less-attending" white Catholics and "less-attending" white Protestants.

How did these alignments happen? Is God synonymous with GOP? Do the Democrats have a prayer?

Familiar explanations try to account for today's assertive Christian conservatism. One reason is continued disgust with Bill Clinton — and resentment toward his senatorial wife, Hillary. That disgust gets transferred to all things Democrat.

Another is the appeal of culture war. Republicans have learned to connect with religious-minded voters who rally around issues of cultural decline and renewal. They oppose abortion and homosexuality; they support official school prayer.

Still another is the growing confidence and self-awareness of evangelical Protestants as a national demographic. Their purchasing power sends books at the top of bestseller lists (the Left Behind series of Armageddon novels) and turns movies into blockbusters (The Passion of the Christ). And they've learned how to organize political support. President Bush's personal faith — the way he talks about his born-again experience with simple conviction -- energizes these Christian voters too. He sounds decisive, unapologetic and won't mince words about world evils.

But two other cultural shifts account for this rising religious conservatism — the public use of the Bible and the dominance of suburban values in worship and belief. It has taken 30 years to accomplish, but now conservatives practically "own" the Bible in public, making it synonymous with family values and pride of country. They quote it to underwrite opposition to gay rights, Hollywood vulgarity and reproductive choice.

Why don't Democrats quote the Bible? Biblical themes abound that Christian progressives welcome — God's care for the underdog and the poor, the prophets' thunder against injustice, Jesus' blessings on peacemakers.

Yet somewhere down the line, religious liberals abdicated the Bible to the other side. After the 1960s it seems they lost confidence in the authority of Scripture — or at least stopped using the Bible to argue against fundamentalism. The Democrats' broad tent of diversity — and commitment to church-state separation — add to a reluctance to quote from any group's holy writ.

Another explanation for religious conservatism is more secular than spiritual — the anti-government suburban attitude that has reshaped the nation since the 1970s. Market values and consumerism now dominate public life. Inevitably, they leave their mark on preaching and worship style at influential megachurches and other places of worship.

Churches isolated from the larger city create their own communities. This often means preaching a gospel of individual prosperity that assumes tax cuts, deregulation and gun ownership go hand-in-hand with Jesus, redemption and evangelism. Emphasis falls on individual sin, not collective evils. The enemy is Big Government, never Big Business. The increasingly raunchy titillations of pop culture are blamed on liberalism, not on Wall Street's demand for higher and higher profits from the big media. Even so, this election is tight because people of faith on both sides are making it so. Religious liberals and moderates have lately been raising their voices after long public silence. They oppose the Bush administration on religious grounds. They say the Iraq war is immoral and deceitful. They say the president's tax policies are unbiblical, favoring the very rich at the expense of the poor.

A dramatic Bush-Kerry finish might come down to one group — mainline Protestants (Presbyterians, United Methodists, Episcopalian and millions of others). They represent 20 percent of the population, probably 20 percent of the electorate: They could be the swing votes that throw the election, according to scholar Laura Olson, writing in the publication "Religion in the News." They are largely centrist — with better educations than average and higher paying jobs, she notes. They are also aging. Many could be attracted to Democrat Kerry if he sounds moderate, embraces social justice — and protects Social Security.

Politics and religion — those old conversational taboos — are a godsend in a 24/7 media world eager to fill time slots with culture war slugfests. They're transforming an American society that's no longer as polite as it once was.

(Ray Waddle, a religion writer based in Nashville, is author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time, published by Upper Room Books.)