Peter Steinfels: In Politics, the ‘God Gap’ Overshadows Other Differences
Why is there so much fascination with the so-called God gap, the finding that the more religiously observant Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Republican? Or, to put it the other way round, the more secular Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Democratic?
The question was raised Tuesday by Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow and public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, at a conference for journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Ms. Bowman was not questioning the reality of the God gap, which actually widened in the November elections. Although Democrats made gains among virtually every religious group and even cut into the Republican advantage among weekly worshipers, the gap still widened because Democrats made even greater gains among the less religiously active and affiliated.
But given the general continuity of religious trends, which Ms. Bowman also underlined, why has the God gap so thoroughly overshadowed the attention given to other persistent gaps in public life and voting patterns? She mentioned the generation gap, the gender gap, the education gap between people with or without college degrees, the income gap, the marriage gap, and, of course, the racial gap between whites and blacks.
By her way of calculating these gaps in the recent election, two of them (income and marriage) are comparable to the voting gap between weekly worshipers and less frequent ones, and one of them (race) is far greater.
There is enough thinking about these many divisions among voters that some political scientists have even begun to write about “gapology.”
Plausible answers to Ms. Bowman’s question are not hard to come by. Some may be obvious. But spelling them out sheds a little light on the public role of religion and a lot more light on the way that role is discussed.
Every gap, of course, has its 15 minutes of fame. The generation gap rode the wave of student antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s and ’70s along with the lowering of the voting age to 18.
The gender gap followed on the crest of feminism and the growing entry of women into politics. Actually, as Ms. Bowman pointed out in an e-mail message, the gender gap “was always a two-sided coin (Democrats were doing better with women, and Republicans with men), but most of the journalistic commentary — at least to my recollection — focused on the female side of the story.”...
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The question was raised Tuesday by Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow and public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, at a conference for journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Ms. Bowman was not questioning the reality of the God gap, which actually widened in the November elections. Although Democrats made gains among virtually every religious group and even cut into the Republican advantage among weekly worshipers, the gap still widened because Democrats made even greater gains among the less religiously active and affiliated.
But given the general continuity of religious trends, which Ms. Bowman also underlined, why has the God gap so thoroughly overshadowed the attention given to other persistent gaps in public life and voting patterns? She mentioned the generation gap, the gender gap, the education gap between people with or without college degrees, the income gap, the marriage gap, and, of course, the racial gap between whites and blacks.
By her way of calculating these gaps in the recent election, two of them (income and marriage) are comparable to the voting gap between weekly worshipers and less frequent ones, and one of them (race) is far greater.
There is enough thinking about these many divisions among voters that some political scientists have even begun to write about “gapology.”
Plausible answers to Ms. Bowman’s question are not hard to come by. Some may be obvious. But spelling them out sheds a little light on the public role of religion and a lot more light on the way that role is discussed.
Every gap, of course, has its 15 minutes of fame. The generation gap rode the wave of student antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s and ’70s along with the lowering of the voting age to 18.
The gender gap followed on the crest of feminism and the growing entry of women into politics. Actually, as Ms. Bowman pointed out in an e-mail message, the gender gap “was always a two-sided coin (Democrats were doing better with women, and Republicans with men), but most of the journalistic commentary — at least to my recollection — focused on the female side of the story.”...