The Weekly Standard has noticed that article about the religious-secular party divide that I keep forgetting to post about. The original piece, by Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, found that the "religion gap" between the two major parties is far wider than the gender gap — even though the gender gap gets far more press coverage.

Another striking finding is the intensity of many secularists' dislike of conservative Christians—vastly greater than any dislike of Jews of Catholics discernible in the survey data from the University of Michigan that the authors analyze. "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America," they write, "when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group."



As for why the Democrats' secularist support goes unreported, Bolce and De Maio articulate well the obvious explanation. Mostly secularists and Democratic voters themselves, elite journalists tend to see the influence of conservative Christians as a danger and therefore a story. At the same time, they are all too aware that Americans at large remain a predominantly religious people; thus, journalists "implicitly understand the political ramifications of characterizing the Democrats" as the party of unbelievers—a group even more disliked than Conservative Christians.

Fascinating stuff, with implications that might well make both parties squirm. The original article is here — well worth a look (scroll down to "Fall 2002").

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