308 Jeff Manza and Nathan Wright
the Democratic Party in 1976 (and to a lesser extent in 1980) in response to the
candidacy of the born-again Christian, Jimmy Carter.
Catholic voters have not undergone any significant realignment since the 1950s.
The elevated levels of Democratic voting in 1960 and 1964 are not to be found in the
1950s and should properly be understood as reflecting the unusual political context
of those elections. While analysts of Catholic dealignment were right to suggest that
Catholics were becoming more economically conservative, their Republican shift
on economic questions has essentially been offset by increasingly moderate views
on social issues.
Significant changes in the impact of the religious cleavage on the Democratic and
Republican parties has occurred. Because of their shrinking size and decreasing loy-
alty to the Republican Party, mainline Protestants have provided a drastically re-
duced share of Republican votes in recent elections (declining from 30 percent of
all Republican voters in 1960 to just 12 percent in 1992). Conservative Protestants
have increased their share of votes within the Republican Party primarily because of
the reduction in votes from mainline sources, not because of changing partisanship
or increased overall size in the electorate. Voters without any religious preference
have grown in both parties from very low percentages to about 7 percent of Repub-
lican voters and 14 percent of Democratic voters.To be sure, these findings hardly settle these issues, and debates can be expected to
continue in the future (of particular controversy are findings about the lack of a clear
shift among conservative Protestants: see, e.g., Kohut et al. 2000; Layman 2001; we
respond to these and other challenges in Brooks and Manza 2002). Furthermore, our
investigations – along with those of most other analysts of religion and politics – have
primarily focused on presidential elections; it may be that in Congressional elections,
or in state and local elections, the impact of religious identities on political behavior
will have different effects (cf. Layman 2001). These questions deserve further attention.
And of course, future changes in the religious marketplace (a perpetual feature of U.S.
religion) and the issue of ideological controversies dividing large religious groups ensure
a dynamic environment in which new analyses of old questions will be called for.
A Note on Religion and African-American Voters
To this point, our discussion of religion and politics in the United States has focused
almost entirely on the impact of religious identities on white voters. The reason for this
is fairly straightforward: The strong alliance of black voters with the Republican Party
before the New Deal, and the Democratic Party afterward (an alignment that strength-
ened significantly in the 1960s and the passage of civil and voting rights legislation) has
not been significantly shaped by religious differences among blacks in the same way
as among whites. For example, recent surveys find that even African Americans who
support a socially conservative agenda are still much more likely to vote Democratic
(Wilcox 1992).
Black churches tend to be more embedded in political life than their white counter-
parts. In national surveys, African Americans consistently report that religion is more
important in their daily lives than white respondents, as well as reporting more praying,
higher levels of attendance at religious services, and higher rates of church membership.