There is a growing political divide between the irreligious and religious. A recent Pew study shows that those who have no religious affiliation (Nones) are the single most ideologically committed cohort of white Americans, rivaled only by Evangelical Protestants. They overwhelmingly support abortion and gay marriage. Seventy-five percent of them voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and they placed a decisive role in his victory in 2012.
In Ohio, Obama lost the Protestant vote by 3 percent and the Catholic vote by 11 percent. (All those numbers rise if we isolate Protestants and Catholics who say they go to church every week.) But he won the Nones, who make up 12 percent of the electorate in Ohio, by an astounding 47 pecent. He racked up similar huge advantages among the Nones in many swing states.
I think its fair to say that Obama ran a values campaign last fall that gambled that secular voters would cast the decisive votes. For the first time in American political history, the winning party deliberately attacked religion. The national convention famously struck God from the platform, only to have it restored by anxious party leaders in a comical session characterized by the kind of frivolity that comes when people recognize that it doesn’t really matter. Democratic talking points included the “war on women” and other well-crafted slogans that rallied their base, which is the cohort that has no religious affiliation. At 24 percent of all Democrat and Democratic-leaning voters the Nones have become the single largest identifiable group in the liberal coalition.
The political reality of the Nones presents the deepest threat to religious liberty. We know from history that the Constitution is a plastic, flexible document. When the most numerous and powerful constituency in the Democratic Party has no time for religion—and their adversaries are most easily identified by their commitment to religion—it’s not hard to see that they’ll try to bend it in a direction that serves their political interests.
February 25th, 2013 | 10:39 am
A recent Pew study shows that those who have no religious affiliation (Nones) are the single most ideologically committed cohort of white Americans, rivaled only by Evangelical Protestants. . . . But he won the Nones, who make up 12 percent of the electorate in Ohio, by an astounding 47 pecent. He racked up similar huge advantages among the Nones in many swing states.
I am wondering why the analysis should be limited to white Americans. Obama won 96% of the African-American vote, which made up 15% of Ohio’s electorate, while Romney won only 4%.
Also, I think “white” here actually means “non-hispanic white.”
I think its fair to say that Obama ran a values campaign last fall that gambled that secular voters would cast the decisive votes.
When assembling a coalition of voters, how do you determine which part of the coalition casts the “decisive votes”?
February 25th, 2013 | 10:45 am
The case “Loyola High School and John Zucchi vs. Michelle Courchesne in her capacity as Minister of Education” demonstrates how far those who subscribe to progressive political theory in Canada are already willing to “bend” existing founding documents.
Richard Garnett (at mirrorofjustice.blogs.com) at “Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy: The Loyola Case” provides a link to testimony prepared by Prof. Douglas Farrow. His presentation serves as a warning and as a valuable resource for those of us who in the United States may face similar struggles.
I have not abandoned hope that our common decency and mutual respect will reject a similar project here – but then I would have thought that true about Quebec as well – until now.
February 25th, 2013 | 11:35 am
“It’s the economy stupid!”
No it’s not – its the social issues.
February 25th, 2013 | 12:27 pm
I believe the First Amendment will afford little protection in practice.
In Reynolds v United States (1878), Waite CJ, in delivering the opinion of the court, said, “Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.”
In Employment Division v Smith (1990), Scalia J, in delivering the opinion of the majority, said, “We have never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition.” He cited with approval Frankfurter J, in Minersville School Dist. Bd. of Ed. v. Gobitis (1940) “Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs.”
The RFPA offers extended protection, in the case of federal laws, but it is not entrenched and could be repealed tomorrow, by the ordinary legislative process and, in any event, it does not apply to the states – City of Bearne v Flores (1997)
At least, that is how it appears to me, as a non- (American) lawyer
February 25th, 2013 | 12:32 pm
Nobody is a proponent of abortion. It is intellectually dishonest to suggest otherwise. People are proponents of reproductive choice in order not to impose their judgment on others.
I loath abortion. However, I would not want the family of a pregnant 15 year-old to substitute my judgment for theirs.
One of the reasons that people are talking past each other on this issue is the absolute determination of pro-life people to refer to pro-choice people as pro-abortion. What? You really need to win the war of semantics?
February 25th, 2013 | 12:46 pm
Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that America had a unique blend of individualism, tempered by traditionalism. He thought the reason our revolution did not turn into a bloody Reign of Terror like the French was because of our common creed of faith. Without it, the good things of classical liberalism turn to tyranny and oppression. How chilling to read his observations now.
February 25th, 2013 | 2:36 pm
It’s not just the nones, but the outwardly religious who profess belief, but who express the cultural ideas of the nones in practice and tend to agree with them. None-religious as a label? The growing divide they would say is between the normal people and the fundamentalists, fundamentalism in its modern incarnation meaning “devout religious people we don’t like.”
Together they make a formidable bloc. The nones alone would act as a conscience for religious believers to prevent us from overreaching, but combined with the none-religious, they might be able to set policy. And if anything, the NR’s can be even more vituperative against their co-religionists than the nones.
February 25th, 2013 | 2:57 pm
Mr. Hart’s unctuous doublespeak is precisely indicative of the linguistic debasement and moral obsfucation of the “choicers,” who “loathe” dead babies but just can’t bring themselves to prohibit the killing of babies.
February 25th, 2013 | 3:34 pm
“I think its fair to say that Obama ran a values campaign last fall that gambled that secular voters would cast the decisive votes. For the first time in American political history, the winning party deliberately attacked religion.”
There is a missing logical step here.
Lets assume the first sentence is true. Wouldn’t pursuit of secular voters be a correct and ultimately winning political strategy? There is nothing inherently anti-religious about that.
Aren’t secular voters entitled to advocate their political positions?
I think the answer is “Yes.” Weren’t their positions also supported by equally large numbers of religous voters?
I think the answer to that question is also “Yes.”
It appears that, at worst, the Democratic party is not against all religious voters –just against the positions that a minority of religiously-motivated voters have advocated.
I’m not sure how a rejection of some political positions advanced by religiously-motivated voters translates into a “deliberate attack” on religion.
February 25th, 2013 | 3:51 pm
I don’t see why the First Amendment needs a religious supermajority, or even majority, to protect religious liberty. If religious people ever make up a minority of American citizens, they will simply be in the same positions as the “nones” now are and have been since 1791. The First Amendment wasn’t intended only to protect the religious from the nonreligious.
And don’t blame liberals if you don’t like Scalia’s opinion in Employment Division v Smith.
February 25th, 2013 | 4:36 pm
David Cary Hart writes:
Why not? If you hate it, why would you want them to do something you hate?
February 25th, 2013 | 6:09 pm
I’m similarly baffled by Reno’s fears. Reno seems to acknowledge that people in power will pursue their own political interests. And Reno surely can’t deny that religious people have been in power since the nation’s founding. Should we assume that religious people have been acting inappropriately since the nation’s founding?
Yes, we should – but there’s not special reason to assume that they act more inappropriately than people who do not subscribe to any particular religion; similarly, I see no reason to assume that people who do not subscribe to any particular religion will behave in a peculiarly bad way.
It’s unclear to me what specific policies Reno fears a more secular government would pursue. Yes, I could imagine changes in tax laws and the growth of government expenditures on things that run contrary to certain religious principles. Perhaps government might become more intrusive regarding child-rearing – clarifying, for example, that Christian Scientist parents may be subject to prosecution for withholding certain life-saving treatments from their own minor children.
But is that it?
February 25th, 2013 | 7:39 pm
Douglas Johnson:
Loathing abortion and not wanting to impose my values on someone else are not mutually exclusive. Let’s make it more personal. Suppose that I had a teenage daughter who got knocked up. What would I do?
I honestly don’t know but abortion would be among the choices to consider. It would be a wrenching decision with life-long implications either way. Just don’t call me “pro-abortion.”
By the way, it is – in most respects – the same decision process regardless of whether my daughter was raped or promiscuous. The obvious solution is to prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place.
February 25th, 2013 | 8:48 pm
“I don’t see why the First Amendment needs a religious supermajority, or even majority, to protect religious liberty. If religious people ever make up a minority of American citizens, they will simply be in the same positions as the “nones” now are and have been since 1791.”
But religious people believe that many of our basic rights come from God and are therefore inalienable. That belief might persist for awhile out of inertia, but I don’t know why an atheistic majority would continue to put any stock in it. Then what?
February 25th, 2013 | 9:20 pm
“Then what?”
We, the people….
like it or not, we have governed ourselves. And it’s been that way since 1790.
I personally think we’ve done a very good job.
February 26th, 2013 | 5:41 am
Peg wrote, “But religious people believe that many of our basic rights come from God and are therefore inalienable…”
But that is not the theory of the US Constitution which, unlike, say, the German Grudgesetz or the French Constitution, contains no unamendable provisions.
This led Scalia J to say in an interview (Catholic News Service, June 14, 1996) that “The whole theory of democracy, my dear fellow, is that the majority rules, that is the whole theory of it. You protect minorities only because the majority determines that there are certain minorities or certain minority positions that deserve protection. Thus in the United States Constitution we have removed from the majoritarian system of democracy the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, and a few other freedoms that are named in the Bill of Rights. The whole purpose of that is that the people themselves, that is to say the majority, agree to the rights of the minority on those subjects — but not on other subjects…” and “The minority loses, except to the extent that the majority, in its document of government, has agreed to accord the minority rights.”
February 26th, 2013 | 8:29 am
“like it or not, we have governed ourselves. And it’s been that way since 1790.
I personally think we’ve done a very good job.”
But we have done so with the assumption that we were all (atheists included) created equal (by God)and endowed (by God) with certain inalienable rights. Take that belief away, and I think we should worry about the future of religious liberty among other things.
My question might be unanswerable. I don’t know what keeps a majority from becoming tyrannical when it believes that all rights are man-made and can be given and taken by the State.
I do also do not know why we can trust humans who operate solely by their own lights to believe all of us are equal and worthy of liberty. Human nature is not promising in that regard.
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