here & there

Will the Religious Left take too much credit?

by Ruth Braunstein November 5, 2008

Dan Gilgoff at God-o-Meter responds to Faith in Public Life’s claim that Obama’s success among religious voters stems from “Democrats’ faith outreach, the rise of the Religious Left, and shifting terrain on hot button issues among evangelicals and the broader electorate”:

But Faith in Public Life has left out the biggest reason for the shift of various faith constituencies to the Democratic column. It’s the economy, stupid.

Beliefnet’s recent 12 Tribes of American politics survey showed that economic woes had dramatically eclipsed hot button social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. In one of the most dramatic examples, one in three Latino Christians said social issues were most important in 2004, when Bush won 45-percent of them. This year, only one in eight say those social issues are most important. And 61 percent say the economy is their topmost concern.

The Iraq war, too, has turned off relgious voters to the GOP.

Read the full post here.

Ruth Braunstein

Ruth Braunstein is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research on the role of religion and culture in American political life has been published in the American Sociological Review, Contexts, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Qualitative Sociology, among other outlets. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide (University of California Press, 2017), based on a comparative ethnographic study of progressive faith-based community organizing and Tea Party activism, and coeditor of Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories about Faith and Politics (NYU Press, 2017). She has previously served as Editor-at-Large and Managing Editor of The Immanent Frame, and has consulted with the SSRC’s program on Religion and the Public Sphere.