After several months of Republicans hoping to prove their piety, a new report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a non-partisan organization, showed that the GOP’s efforts didn’t work — and maybe even did more harm than good.
A new poll shows that fewer Americans view the Republican Party as “friendly to religion” than a year ago, with the decline particularly steep among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants — constituencies at the core of the Republicans’ conservative Christian voting bloc.
The survey found that the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion fell 8 percentage points in the last year, to 47 percent from 55 percent. Among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants, the decline was 14 percentage points.
Of course, the public still perceives Dems as not being friendly enough to religion, but the results were largely unchanged from the previous year. Indeed, the exact same percentage said the Dems were “unfriendly” to religion as 12 months ago. It was the GOP that saw the major drop.
John Green, senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum said the change among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants was striking. “It’s unclear how directly this will translate into voting behavior,” Green said, “but this is a baseline indicator that religious conservatives see the party they’ve chosen to support as less friendly to religion than they used to.”
It’s worth taking a moment to consider why, though the answer is less than obvious. Indeed, some of the possible explanations contradict each other.
One possibility is that conservative Christians feel used and neglected. They expected Republican majorities to embrace a Taliban-like agenda that intertwined their faith and the government, but they’ve recently come to realize that GOP leaders like to talk about religion, but there’s no real follow through. It’s a campaign gimmick that cynically exploits the religious right base without tangible victories. Maybe the precipitous drop is symptomatic of the religious right saying, “Enough. You guys aren’t what we had hoped for.”
Or maybe it’s the opposite. It seems almost as likely that Catholics and white evangelical Protestants take a far broader view of what it means to be “friendly to religion” than the Republican habit of exploiting anti-gay animus and backing the occasional Ten Commandments monument. The GOP’s emphasis shows no real spiritual depth; it’s just another political issue to the party.
In either case, Green said, “At the minimum, there will be less good will toward the Republican Party by these conservative religious groups, and a disenchantment that the party will be able to deliver on its promises.”
I don’t expect religious-right-friendly voters to suddenly start contributing to the DNC — though some might — but if a sizable percentage of Christian conservatives no longer consider the GOP friendly to religion, and are less inclined to be the party’s foot-soldiers, these poll results may hint at a serious problem for the Republican Party in the coming cycle or two.
This question, of course, was just a small part of a thorough and interesting report from Pew Forum (brought to my attention by reader R.P.), which is definitely worth checking out.