Splitting society, not hairs
Antagonism. More and more, religiously committed people tend to vote Republican, largely because of "the increased prominence of secularists within the Democratic Party and the party's resulting antagonism toward traditional values." That's the judgment of Bolce and his Baruch colleague Gerald De Maio in "Our Secularist Democratic Party," an article in the conservative intellectual journal Public Interest.
The gap started opening at the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern: A third of the white delegates were secular, compared with 5 percent of the general population. By 1992, the year the culture war is said to have broken into the open, 60 percent of first-time white delegates to the Democratic convention were secularists or nominally religious people who said they attend services a few times a year or less.
The secular-religious gap, larger than the gender and class gaps journalists like to focus on, is simply not on the media radar. Bolce and De Maio think the Republicans became the traditionalist party almost by default--it had less to do with Republican efforts than with the impact of secular progressives on the Democratic Party. Many secularists in the Republican Party are leaving to vote Democratic. The most intensely religious Democrats are heading the other way. The obvious word for a shift like this is polarization.
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