Religion and Political Behavior 303
the Democratic monopoly through World War II made religious differences of little
consequence in that region.
With the coming of the New Deal, many analysts assumed that the sharp ethnore-
ligious cleavages in the North would decline in strength as class factors appeared to be
increasingly important. But it appears instead that the increase in class divisions during
the New Deal largely developed alongside, not in place of, traditional religious cleav-
ages. Roosevelt generally performed better among all electoral groups than Democratic
candidate Al Smith did in 1928, leaving mostly unchangedrelativelevels of support
from most key religious groups (except for Jews; e.g., Gamm 1986: 45–74). The core
of the Democratic coalition continued to be defined by working class Catholic and
Jewish voters in the North and Midwest (and white voters of all religions in the one-
party South). The greatly weakened Republican coalitions of the 1930s and 1940s, by
contrast, continued to receive disproportionate support from Northern white mainline
Protestants (Sundquist 1983: Chapter 10; Reichley 1985: 225–9).
The early post–World War II period was one of unusual religious stability but, by the
late 1960s and early 1970s, important changes were taking place in nearly every major
religious denomination. The mainline Protestant denominations had been experienc-
ing arelativemembership decline (in which they were losing religious market share)
for many decades, and beginning in the late 1960s this decline accelerated. Long asso-
ciated with the political and economic status quo, these denominations were deeply
influenced by the great moral crusades of the period: The Civil Rights Movement (CRM)
and the demand for racial justice, protests against the war in Vietnam, and the women’s
movement. A growing split between liberal Protestant clergy supporting the CRM and
other 1960s’ movements and a more conservative laity appeared to generate intrade-
nomination (or intrachurch) tensions (see the studies collected in Wuthnow and Evans
[2001] for a broad overview of political tensions within mainline Protestant churches).
The evangelical Protestant churches also reacted sharply – but very differently – to the
social and cultural movements of the period. Resisting most of the trends of the period,
many leaders of evangelical churches became involved in organizing or promoting new
Christian Right movements and discourses which sought to defend “traditional values”
(Bruce 1988; Himmelstein 1983; Smith 1998). Among Catholics, internal reforms asso-
ciated with the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s produced profound transfor-
mations within the Church, as have rapidly changing social practices among Catholics
(and all Americans) which fundamentally challenge Church teachings on issues such
as sex, abortion, and other social issues (Greeley 1985: 55ff). In addition to the changes
within the major religious traditions, there also appeared during this period numer-
ous new religious movements of dizzying variety (Wuthnow 1988), large unaffiliated
evangelical churches (e.g., Shibley 1996) as well as the rapid growth of more established
religious groups outside the mainstream (such as the Mormon Church).
Empirical Research on Recent Trends in Religious Voting
The availability of survey data that go beyond the crude (and largely uninformative)
Protestant versus Catholic divide has largely constrained systematic scholarly inves-
tigations of religious influence on voting behavior in the United States to the period
after 1960 (Manza and Brooks 1999: 102–03). However, this is precisely the period
in which the most rapid changes have been hypothesized to have occurred, and not