Religion and Political Behavior 309
Church services more often feature political addresses from public officials, and civic
political meetings more often feature prayers, hymns, call-and-response-style oratories,
and even the passing of offering plates for political contributions, than would be found
in comparable white churches and communities (cf. Harris 1999; Pattillo-McCoy 1998;
see also McRoberts, Chapter 28, this volume). And African-American religious theol-
ogy and practice is often characterized by being distinctively concerned with collective
political issues. African-American churches are dominated by the key themes of oppres-
sion and deliverance, expressed as collective properties that require collective efforts to
provide increased opportunities (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). The powerful and central
institutional presence of African-American churches allowed them to be central play-
ers in the mobilization of political protests in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s
and 1960s (Morris 1984). Many African-American churches have made and continue
to make explicit efforts to register voters and mobilize them to vote for Democratic
candidates (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990; Harris 1994, 1999; Calhoun-Brown 1996).
Given such evidence, however, only small impacts of religion have been found
among African-American voters. There is some very modest evidence that religious in-
volvement promotes political participation among African Americans (cf. Harris 1994,
1999). Data from the 1984 Black Election Study indicate that although church atten-
dance is not a strong predictor of voting rates, going to a “political church” strongly
influenced the likelihood of voting in a positive direction (Calhoun-Brown 1996). Fi-
nally, some analysts have found that both voter turnout and interest in politics are
lowest among African Americans with no religious affiliation (Kellstedt et al. 1994).
In short, the existing evidence suggests that the political impact of black churches is
strongest in arenas other than voting behavior – for example, on local, community, or
neighborhood politics (see McRoberts, Chapter 28, this volume), recruitment to social
movements, or as a direct voice through lobbying or other political activities.
RELIGION AND POLITICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE:
WESTERN EUROPE
Two peculiarities of the American electoral system and religious landscape potentially
make the relationship between religion and political behavior unique: the electoral sys-
tem and the high degree of pluralism in the religious marketplace. The electoral system,
in which legislative candidates compete in single-member districts and in which two
political parties have been invariably dominant at the national level for over 130 years,
has precluded the emergence of religious parties. In other democratic countries, reli-
gious parties have not been so hobbled, and in many cases they have thrived alongside
secular parties of the right and left. In the United States, no such party ever developed.
The second important difference is that the high level of religious pluralism in the
United States opens the possibility of multiple lines of religious cleavage in compar-
ison to polities with one or two main denominational groupings. In this section, we
highlight some of these differences from the American model by considering some
features of West European party systems.
The comparison between Western Europe and the United States is additionally in-
formative because of the historical origins of the religious cleavage, and significant vari-
ation in the religious landscape across Europe. Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) landmark
theoretical overview of the sources of social cleavages in democratic societies outlined a