302 Jeff Manza and Nathan Wright
The typical European pattern of religious organization – in which a state-sanctioned
religious body dominated the religious landscape – failed to materialize in the United
States. The absence of a state church has resulted in the flourishing of an unprece-
dented range of denominations and sects since the beginning of the Republic. The
remarkable history of denominational growth and schisms has long interested soci-
ologists of religion (e.g., Liebman, Sutton, and Wuthnow 1988). Alongside periodic
moves toward ecumenicism (particularly among the largest and most well-established
denominational bodies) has been a long-term process of denominational change that
has continually expanded the options for religious practice available to most Americans
(Finke and Stark 1992).
Historical Evidence of Electoral Impacts
Religion has long been understood to be an important source of political division in
the United States.^5 The “new political history” that developed in the 1960s and 1970s
established quantitative evidence of the growth and persistence of religious cleavages
in shaping voter alignments throughout the nineteenth century (e.g., Benson 1961;
Jensen 1971; Kleppner 1979; Swierenga 1990). “Ethnoreligious” cleavages, as they came
to be known in this literature, reflected the intersection of denominational member-
ships and ethnicity in shaping political behavior. Controversies over the disestablish-
ment of official state churches provided the earliest source of religious political division,
beginning virtually at the founding of the Republic (Murrin 1990). Supporters of state
churches, especially the Congregationalists, were generally aligned with the Federal-
ist Party, while members of lower status churches challenging the hegemony of the
traditional churches were more likely to line up with the Jeffersonian Democratic-
Republicans. The antebellum period (1828–60) is generally conceded to have been
loosely characterized by the alignment of voters from “liturgical” or “ritualist” reli-
gious traditions with the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson and his heirs, and voters
from pietist and evangelical denominations with first the Whig Party and later the
Republican Party (Jensen 1971: 62–73; Kleppner 1979; Howe 1990; Swierenga 1990:
151–5).
In the post–Civil War period, party competition in the North and Midwestern sec-
tions of the country for white votes appears to have been even more decisively struc-
tured by ethnic and religious divides (Kleppner [1979: 196] even goes so far as to describe
late-nineteenth-century parties as “political churches.”) Up until 1896, the Republican
Party received very strong support from Episcopalians, Congregationalists, New School
Presbyterians, and Methodists; while the Democrats drew support most heavily from
Catholics, and less broadly from Lutherans and Unitarians (Swierenga 1990: 157). In
the “system of 1896,” Republican domination of the North and Midwest involved
strong support from nearly all Protestant denominations, while with rare exceptions
the Democrats were limited to the votes of Catholics and the relatively small unionized
working class. The post-Reconstruction South, of course, was a very different matter;
(^5) InAmerican Commonwealth, Bryce (1891: 36) claimed, for example, that “Roman Catholics
are normally Democrats, because, except in Maryland, which is Democratic anyhow, they are
mainly Irish. Congregationalists and Unitarians, being presumably sprung from New England,
are apt to be Republicans.”