Within political science, and especially within the study of American politics, religion is typically treated as an independent variable that arises through means exogenous to politics. Students of public opinion and voting behavior, for example, often include religious identity or participation as an explanatory variable shaping a person’s party affiliation, attitudes on political issues, and choices in elections. Religious interest groups, meanwhile, work from preexisting theological understandings when advocating for their causes. Some scholars have begun complicating this religion-to-politics paradigm in recent years, but none so powerfully as Michele F. Margolis in her book From Politics to the Pews. While acknowledging that a person’s religion can sometimes influence how he or she thinks and acts politically, especially in the presence of cues received within religious communities, Margolis stresses the reverse process, whereby politics affects whether and how religious identities develop.
The book is a model work of political science in that it draws from existing knowledge while managing to advance and defend a novel thesis. Sociologists of religion have long known that people (in the United States, at least) are typically raised with some exposure to religion but turn to other pursuits during late adolescence and early adulthood as they move away from home, enter the labor force, pursue higher education, and/or begin romantic relationships. Many people then return to the religious tradition of their childhood, or find another one, after getting married and having children. Margolis takes these patterns as her starting point for showing how politics can drive a person’s religious commitments. Because partisan identities generally form and solidify in early adulthood, she argues, they can influence whether or not people increase their levels of religious activity in subsequent years.
The backdrop to Margolis’s research is the fact that elites within the two major American parties have taken contrasting positions on religiously inflected issues since the late 1970s. The Republican Party has become the home of evangelicals and Catholics who hold conservative views on abortion, gay rights, and other “culture war” issues, while the Democratic Party has attracted the religiously unaffiliated and those who support a strong separation of church and state. The author’s contribution is to show that persons who are already Republicans will be more likely (upon getting married and having children) to seek out a church where they can find like-minded congregants. Democrats, conversely, will be less likely to do so even if they were raised in a religious tradition because they often do not perceive churches as welcoming of people like them. These behavioral patterns then persist into middle age and beyond. Religious participation is thus profoundly affected by the larger political environment at key moments of a person’s life.
To support her causal claims, Margolis taps several different data sources and employs a variety of analytic techniques. Perhaps her most important data come from the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel, initially collected by M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi in 1965, with follow-up surveys of the same respondents in 1973, 1982, and 1997. The data include people who were high-school seniors in 1965 and their parents. Republicans and Democrats in 1965 were equally likely to have been raised in a religious home, and by 1973, when they were young adults, they had decreased their levels of church attendance at equal rates. However, Republicans reengaged with religion at a higher rate than Democrats did by 1982, when most of the subjects were ages 34–35. That effect was concentrated among people who were married and had children, just as Margolis predicted.
In one of the strongest features of the book, the author works to address every possible objection to her conclusions. How can politics drive religious identification, given that many people do not pay much attention to politics and do not know the parties’ stances on matters connected to religion? Margolis shows that the effects she describes can be easily detected within the population as a whole, but are strongest among those with the highest levels of political knowledge, who presumably know the parties’ reputations and issue positions, while shrinking to zero among those with the lowest levels of political knowledge. Is it not possible that the observational data on which she relies is somehow blocking her ability to tease apart the causal relationships? She answers that concern by corroborating her findings through a survey experiment performed on a national sample. When primed with an innocuous flyer mentioning the person’s party, the strength of religious affiliation became stronger for Republicans and weaker for Democrats, but only among respondents whose religious identities are in flux: people with children at home. Similar results emerged after priming people with a news story about Republican presidential candidates courting the Religious Right.
Finally, what about African Americans, who have high rates of religious commitment and church attendance but maintain allegiance to the Democratic Party? In a persuasive chapter, Margolis demonstrates that there is no contradiction here. African Americans disproportionately attend churches in the black Protestant tradition that stress social justice issues rather than the culture war issues of white evangelicals. Because the Democratic Party holds more favorable stances on the issues of greatest concern to them, African Americans see no conflict between their partisan and religious affiliations. As a result, African American Democrats show the same pattern as white Republicans in turning away from religion during late adolescence and early adulthood while commonly returning to it in subsequent years.
Margolis also does an exemplary job in assessing the generalizability of her theory. The parties of the last three decades have taken distinctive stands on matters of interest to various religious groups, but her theory does not depend on any particular alignment of party positions. Any connection of the parties with religious matters will lead partisans in the electorate to change their religious identities in corresponding ways. To show that connection, Margolis includes a chapter examining the 1960 presidential election, where considerable national attention focused on John F. Kennedy’s status as a Catholic. If her theory is generalizable, that linkage should have affected the religious expression of ordinary people—and it did. By comparison to the previous few years, Democratic and Republican Catholics became more and less likely, respectively, to attend church. The opposite effect held for Democratic and Republican Protestants.
Margolis is aware, of course, that the United States contains members of many non-Christian religions, but they do not show up in sufficient numbers in national surveys for her to study them separately. She has nevertheless made a signal contribution to an understanding of the intersection of religion and politics in America. No longer will political scientists be able to treat religion as an independent variable untainted by the political environment. By showing that the reality is more complicated and, frankly, more interesting, From Politics to the Pews will take its place among the instant classics in the field.
