The nature of American politics 35velopment of an immigrants’ rights movement. Concern about the extent of
illegal immigration led to attempts by the government to control the border
with Mexico more effectively and to find a solution to the problem raised
by approximately 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. The
possibility of large-scale deportations led to demonstrations by hundreds of
thousands of Latinos in a number of cities, threats of strikes, boycotts and
other action. This issue will be considered further in Chapter 11. The prob-
lems of establishing a multicultural society in America may mirror those of
other societies faced with similar challenges in other parts of the world.
Religion and religiosity
Religion has been a factor in American politics ever since the Pilgrim Fa-
thers made landfall on Cape Cod. Furthermore, the regional distribution of
religious belief has served to complicate the sectional differences of Ameri-
can politics. In colonial times Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania, the Roman
Catholics of Maryland and the Dutch Reformed Church in New York sepa-
rated Puritan New England and Anglican Virginia. The mass immigration of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the pattern of religious
affiliation, for a very high proportion of the immigrants were Catholic. There
are 50 million Catholics in the United States today, more than in Italy. Be-
cause the waves of immigrants headed for the cities of the North and East,
the pattern of sectional attitudes became further complicated, and because
they were poor, Catholic immigrants contributed a further dimension to the
pattern of sectional, class and religious influences that today form the fab-
ric of American politics. Thus the electorate of the Southern states remains
almost completely Protestant in composition, whereas the concentration of
Catholics in Northern states such as Massachusetts gives to those states a
quite distinctive political style. The Statistical Abstract of the United States lists
thirty-five different Christian denominations and twenty-one ‘other reli-
gions’ to which Americans declared their adherence in 2001, in addition to
the nearly 30 million Americans who stated they had no religion.
Like the other factors in American politics, religion plays a significant
but varying role at the national level. In state and local politics its impact
varies greatly from area to area and from issue to issue; but of its importance
there can be little doubt. Religious factors have played an important role in
presidential politics, in helping to influence the voting behaviour of Senators
and Congressmen, or in the determination of political battles over contra-
ception laws in Massachusetts or the closed shop in Ohio. The comparison
between the candidacy of two Catholics for the presidency in the twentieth
century with that of John Kerry in 2004 illustrates the way in which attitudes
to Catholicism have changed. The candidacy of Al Smith in 1928 evidenced
the extent of the bitterness that then existed against Catholics, although
his defeat cannot be attributed primarily to religious motivations among the
electorate. In 1956, when Eisenhower’s personal appeal was so great, Catho-