Religion's role in congressional polarization remains elusive

[SecularMotion]

Most Americans who lived through Congress's recent inability to agree on the annual budget, fund the government, and raise the debt ceiling would readily agree that it is more polarized today than 30 years ago. But why? What pulls the Congress apart so powerfully that they can no longer collaborate?

It would seem that religion might explain much of this. After all, religion shapes our understanding of ultimate meaning and lays the foundation for our most basic values. We know that religious leaders have raised powerful voices in public debates about abortion, health care and, to a lesser degree, welfare. It ought to be easy to highlight religion's powerful influence in shaping Congress's recent trajectory to conflict. And yet Religion, Politics, and Polarization tempers any such conclusion. Despite its authors' clear expectation that they would uncover religion's power, it appears that party affiliation matters far more than religion.

Few social scientists have attempted to measure religion's influence on the U.S. Congress with the level of precision that William D'Antonio, Steven Tuch and Josiah Baker exercise in their fine new study. Their brief but dense work traces representatives' and senators' voting patterns over the past 35 years and reveals, unsurprisingly, that Democrats and Republicans have become more uniform within their parties and more set against their opponents on key issues such as abortion rights, defense spending, support for programs that aid the poor, and taxes.

The surprise comes when the authors try to determine religion's role in dividing Congress. It appears that party affiliation matters much more than religious affiliation even on an issue like abortion. Democrats cast fully 90 percent of their votes taken in recent years in the House and Senate in favor of a woman's right to choose, while only 10 percent of Republicans did so. Catholic Democrats supported abortion rights in their votes only a bit less than other Democrats, while Catholic Republicans opposed those rights slightly more than other Republicans. Party affiliation better predicted how a senator or representative voted on even the lightning-rod moral question of abortion than did religion. On other issues of Catholic social teaching, Catholic Democrats also followed their party's strong support for the poor, while Catholic Republicans veered from Catholic teaching to follow their party's opposition to the social safety net.

http://ncronline.org/books/2013/12/religions-role-congressional-polarization-remains-elusive

[trotsky]

1. Sounds like they studied the wrong thing.

It's not that beliefs come FROM religion that causes a problem - in fact we find that very few political beliefs do. People generally adapt their religious beliefs (and interpret their religion's texts) to fit their personal beliefs, rather than the other way around.

What causes problems in the political arena is when those political positions are argued for and justified with religious beliefs, which by definition are not based on reason or logic and therefore are receptive to neither.

Basically this study confirms that people will decide what they want to believe, then bolt on a religious justification for it if they are religious, thus anchoring it to resist dialog and compromise. Hooray.