Religion and Politics

Religiously-unaffiliated voters have developing impact on politics

CHAPTER 4: CAPITOL PRAYER GROUP SEEKS DIVINE INTERVENTION

In February, when the Republican National Committee began conducting its “autopsy” of the 2012 election, Youngblood said that she and other members from the Washington-based Coalition, met with Ben Key, the executive director of the RNC’s platform committee.
“We wanted to encourage them to pay attention to non-theistic voters and bring to their attention that they’re losing a large slice of the electorate by aligning themselves so heavily with the religious right,” Youngblood said, adding later that she received a positive reaction from Key.

Even with increases in recognition of the unaffiliated, such as mentions in the president’s speeches or a positive reaction from lawmakers, the religiously unaffiliated still have a problem of being underrepresented by state and national lawmakers.

As of the most recent election, only one member of Congress, Arizona Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, has publicly described her religious affiliation as None. According to a Pew analysis released after the 2012 electio n, the majority of the members of Congress, 299, describe themselves as Protestant while 163 affiliate with Catholicism, 33 as Jewish, 15 as Mormon, five as Orthodox Christian, three as Buddhist, two as Muslim, one as Hindu, and one as Unitarian Universalist. Ten other members said they either didn’t know what religion they would affiliate with or refused to comment.

One of the problems behind reaching out to unaffiliated voters is finding them, Green said, since the unaffiliated are typically less involved in social organizations, such as rotary clubs or church.

“There is no master list of the unaffiliated ... It’s not that that list can’t be developed, it’s just a challenge,” Green said. “If you’re going to try and organize them, you have to be able to find them. Once you found them, you can get messages to them and encourage them to participate in a particular way.”

Youngblood said she thinks it should be simple for lawmakers to reach out to religiously-unaffiliated voters by keeping their personal religious preferences to themselves and making laws based on “reason and science and logic.”

However, Kathy Pulley, a professor of religious studies at Missouri State University, said that the diversity within this section of the population can make it difficult for politicians to understand who they are reaching out to.

“Part of the reason (outreach) is difficult is that I don’t think (the unaffiliated) are or will be an organized movement, so it’s hard to know exactly how to reach out if you’re not getting clear indications from groups as to a certain agenda that a given group has,” Pulley said.
Navarro-Rivera said that it is up to religiously-unaffiliated groups to organize to get what they want, especially if some politicians are already getting the religiously-unaffiliated vote without having to do much outreach.

“The question is whether these large groups can actually create political action committees or other organizations that could mobilize votes with this common identity or even raise money for candidates in a way that they could become relevant to the political parties,” he said. “I think the atheists are trying to do that but then that leaves the majority of the group and how they’re going to do it is a little harder because they can’t really rally around the identity.”

To become an effective political group, however, the unaffiliated must also overcome the inherent diversity within their voting bloc if they want to present a unified political front.

“I don’t know if they have enough in common to really (organize) right now,” Pulley said.

Green said one way the unaffiliated could organize would be to follow the example of organized labor. He said when the labor movement started there was a hope for “one gigantic labor representative group.” Instead of that one group, however, smaller organized groups formed and then worked together.

“That may be what happens with the unaffiliated long term, is that the different persons of that community will be organized by different groups and then you’ll have these federations and alliances,” Green said.

The Secular Coalition of America is one group that, Youngblood said, is attempting to pull religiously-unaffiliated voters together.

“(Organizing is the) challenge that the secular community has been facing over the last 10 to 20 years as they’ve been trying to pull together the movement,” Youngblood said.

Last year, the Coalition began forming state chapters and, as of February, has chapters running in at least six states: California, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Montana and Colorado. While those six states have already been announced, progress has been slow in other states, such as Missouri.

In 2008, 14 percent of Missourians identified themselves as religiously unaffiliated, according to the Trinity College study. Meanwhile, 77 percent of Missourians said they held an “absolute belief” in God, according to a 2009 Pew report.

Youngblood said that there are numerous possibilities for why certain states have been slower than others to form state chapters, such as a lack of interest, smaller population or the feeling that there isn’t an immediate concern about religious involvement in government.

“Each state chapter has its own unique circumstances and issues that need to be dealt with,” Youngblood said. She said that Missouri is one of the slower states being put together, but that she did not know of a specific reason for the group not coming together as quickly as other states.

Political impact
Since the unaffiliated have only recently been recognized as a growing political group, it’s unknown how they will change American politics.

A larger unaffiliated group of voters would have an impact on the country’s two main political parties. If the Democrats and Republicans wanted to cater to the unaffiliated, Navarro-Rivera and Green said they would have to attempt to do so without alienating the religious coalitions that currently make up a large part of their voter base.

For the Democrats, the party would have to reach out to the unaffiliated while not dissuading groups such as African-American Protestants or Latino Catholics. Republicans, meanwhile, run the risk of alienating right-wing Christian groups.

So far, Democrats have benefited the most from the increase in unaffiliated voters, even if they haven’t reached out to them publicly.

“The Democrats have been really careful in how to tap into the contingency without alienating their own religious voters, but as the group becomes more numerous and more defining in terms of how to win elections in the future, (the Democrats) may have to rethink that balance or think of different strategies, instead of keeping it on the down low,” Navarro-Rivera said.

It’s also possible to see how the unaffiliated could affect politics by looking at a group that is normally seen as their polar opposite: the religious right.

Navarro-Rivera said that before conservative religious groups mobilized in the 60s and 70s, they had been politically dormant. After witnessing the hand down of multiple court decisions that fell on the side of liberal issues, the religious right became an important coalition within the Republican Party.

Now, with the unaffiliated, the pendulum could swing the other way. As the unaffiliated gain more recognition, Green said that the potential long-term impact of a larger, more organized unaffiliated voting bloc would be a progressive shift on cultural issues.

“We might potentially reach the point where these cultural disputes will largely go away because there’s a real cost to being on the conservative side of these issues,” Green said.

For now though, it’s difficult to assess exactly how this group will develop as a political force and affect American politics.

“I think we’ll have to wait because we don’t know if this group will keep growing,” Green said. “We know that this group doesn’t vote at the rate that it could. Participation has been increasing, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.”

Yet this heavy lean toward the Democrats is not a guarantee of future support.

“A lot of Nones have been turned off from the Republican Party because they’ve been so intertwined with the religious right, but if that were to change and they were to focus on more economic issues, there is no reason why the religiously unaffiliated would necessarily vote Democratic if our votes are being taken for granted (by Democrats),” said Lauren Anderson Youngblood, the communications manager for the Secular Coalition of America, an advocacy and lobbying group for non-theistic interests.

When compared to the general public, religiously-unaffiliated voters are more liberal on cultural or social issues. The unaffiliated, however, align relatively closely with the general population on other issues, such as the economy or the role of government.

“When you move away from the cultural issues to economic issues, the unaffiliated are not nearly so uniform,” Green said.

It is this divide on economic issues that would possibly attract some of the unaffiliated to the Republican Party.

“After all, on economic issues there may be unaffiliated voters that like the Republican message of lower taxes and smaller budgets,” Green said. “But the trouble for Republicans is, how do they reach out to the unaffiliated without offending the religious right, which has become a very important part of their base.”

Representation and outreach

For Youngblood, Obama’s mention of nonbelievers in his first inaugural address and other speeches represents a start in politicians’ recognition of the religiously unaffiliated.

“Just for lawmakers to simply even mention us and acknowledge us is a start because too often, many lawmakers seem to have the mistaken impression that they don’t even have non-theists in their district,” she said.

In both of those elections, 12 percent of registered voters described themselves as religiously unaffiliated. Of those registered to vote, 63 percent identify as Democrats or leaning Democratic while 26 percent identify as Republican or leaning Republican, according to the Pew report.

“The unaffiliated voters, the ones that went out and voted, were as important for the Democrats as the religious right was for the Republicans,” said John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron.

Green, who is also a senior research advisor at Pew and was involved in designing the 2012 Pew report, said that even if many of the unaffiliated don’t identify as Democratic, they still vote that way.

Green, who is also a senior research advisor at Pew and was involved in designing the 2012 Pew report, said that even if many of the unaffiliated don’t identify as Democratic, they still vote that way.

Navarro-Rivera said Democratic support from the unaffiliated has less to do with the voter outreach efforts by the Democratic Party. Instead, the unaffiliated voteDemocratic because the party’s stances on issues reflect those of the unaffiliated more so than the Republicans.

In 2009, a newly-inaugurated president spoke to the American people for the first time as the nation’s leader. About halfway through his speech, he made reference to a group of people that had typically gone unrecognized by politicians in the past.

“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers,” President Barack Obama said during his first inauguration speech.

That last group, the nonbelievers, had just helped Obama win the presidency by voting overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate. A vast majority of voters who consider themselves religiously unaffiliated chose Obama in 2008, continuing a trend of immense support for the party. These voters would do the same for Obama during his re-election bid in 2012.

The group, often referred to as the Nones, consists of atheists, agnostics, humanists, non-theists and others.

Even though the religiously unaffiliated represent about 20 percent of the population, they are still underrepresented in American politics.

“A lot of the atheists I know got all excited when Obama actually said the word ‘nonbeliever’ in his first inauguration speech,” said Carla Burris, an atheist in Columbia, Mo. “If you get all excited about little piddly crumbs like that, that’s kind of a symptom of how sketchy the non-religious representation is.”

Burris, who is a co-organizer of the Columbia Atheists, said that while she feels she is represented in many aspects, such as being Caucasian and a woman, she does not feel represented as an atheist.

The religiously unaffiliated represent a significant section of the American electorate – one that has the potential to greatly affect the nation’s politics.

“I think that just by sheer size, (the unaffiliated) are certainly going to become more important and how important they become depends on how they organize and not only how they organize but how they play up those numbers within the parties,” said Juhem Navarro-Rivera, a research associate at the Public Religion Research Institute.

Despite their ascendance as one of the largest religion-based demographics in the nation, how the unaffiliated will gain political influence and impact the nation’s political system has yet to be determined.

The politics of the Nones

At first glance, the religiously unaffiliated are firmly in the Democratic corner of American politics.

Navarro-Rivera, who was also a co-author of a 2008 Trinity College study that profiled the unaffiliated, said that, as the religiously-unaffiliated population has continued to grow since 1990, there has been a shift among the unaffiliated away from the GOP and to the Democratic Party.

In the past four presidential elections, religiously-unaffiliated voters have turned out almost exclusively for Democratic candidates, with 75 and 70 percent of these voters supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012, respectively, according to a Pew analysis of the 2012 election.

by Matthew Patane

Religious Makeup of the Electorate: Pew Research Center, “How the Faithful Voted: 2012 Preliminary Analysis,” © 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/How-the-Faithful-Voted-2012-Preliminary-Exit-Poll-Analysis.aspx.