Religious Coalitions in American Politics

[CornField]

This is a very interesting article from christianitytoday.com - http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2005/006/16.32.html

American politics is the politics of coalitions, and religious groups are not exempt from the need to build alliances. Indeed, religious coalitions have often been the subject of hot debate by observers and activists alike. Ever since the presidential election a year ago, the media has been full of reports about "new religious coalitions," at the very same time that battles over abortion, same-sex marriage, and judicial nominees have revived some old ones. The controversy over the current state of religious alliances slides almost imperceptibly from empirical—how do religious groups cooperate in contemporary politics?—to prescriptive: how should religious groups coalesce so that appropriate values shape public policy?

The article goes on from there and is, for the most part, a pretty good (albeit dry) read. There is also a very interesting graph at the bottom of the page which shows how the different sects align on cultural and other political issues.

[Dissent Is Patriotic]

1. Interesting but I find the graph

at the bottom sort of confusing and I wonder about its relative accuracy. The author states the following regarding the graph:

5. With the exception of the Bush vote and capital punishment, all the issue scores in the table are based on multi-item scales, scored to run from most conservative (100) to most liberal (0). For information on the items included in the scales, contact the first author.


The idea of the graph certainly has a lot of value if its accuracy can be corroborated.

[swwallace81]

2. Just a couple of questions:

If Bush is so religious, where does he go to church? I assume Laura is a Methodist due to her SMU background but I've never heard if he's even a member somewhere. Also, I'm not the coldest beer in the cooler, but I am ignorant to this "falafel". What in the world does that mean?

[RB TexLa]

5. Methodist

from Wikipedia

Wiki entry


Religious beliefs and practices

After meeting evangelist Billy Graham in 1985, Bush became much more involved in Christian belief and practice. <12> During this period, he left the Bush family's Episcopalian faith to join his wife's United Methodist Church, a denomination that in part represents a more socially conservative worldview (see United Methodist Church "Diversity Within Methodist Beliefs"). Bush is generally recognized as a born-again Christian.

[RB TexLa]

6. Oh and he doesn't attend regularly eom

[CornField]

3. It says they took information from Pew Forum. I found a link there

http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/green-full.pdf

This is to a PDF document which discusses the Fourth National Survey of Religion and Politics.

And here is a link to an HTML page about the survey: http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=55
That one includes a link to a PDF version of the full survey.

[Dissent Is Patriotic]

4. Thanks a bunch...I'm going there right now