After years of talk about the centrality of conservative Protestants and Catholics in the Republican Party coalition, an opposite factor is gaining wider notice: the Democrats' reliance upon non-religious voters.
"Seculars have become an increasing portion of the Democratic electoral coalition and especially of the party's activist base," says Geoffrey Layman of the University of Maryland, author of "The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics." The trend originated in 1972 and had become obvious to political scientists by 1992, he says.
A religiously linked values clash is redefining U.S. politics, according to Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio of City University of New York. And if Republicans are labeled the party of religious traditionalists, they assert, "the Democrats with equal validity, can be called the secularist party."
A University of Akron poll of 4,000 adults this spring showed that those with no religious affiliation are 17 percent of self-identified Democrats, rivaling the party's traditional blocs of white Catholics (18 percent) and black Protestants (16 percent). The secularists favored John Kerry over George W. Bush by 57.4 percent to 27.2 percent (with the rest backing others or undecided).
The Akron polling since 1992 is particularly useful because samples are large and interviewers press for specifics on affiliation rather than vague religious identifications. (The 2004 margin of error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.)
A Pew Research Center poll of 1,512 adults, reported Tuesday, showed more Americans see the Republican Party as "generally friendly to religion" (52 percent) than the Democratic Party (40 percent). Among blacks, only 28 percent saw the Republicans as faith-friendly and among Republicans, only 27 percent saw the Democrats as friendly.
Political scientists say polls that correlate religious behavior or belief with party alignment indicate the "God gap" is more significant than most factors, including the much-touted gender gap.
Similarly, scholars' surveys of delegates to the parties' 2000 conventions found contrasts on weekly worship attendance (59 percent for Republican delegates, 35 percent for Democrats), expressing "a great deal" of reliance upon religion (41 percent for Republicans, 23 percent for Democrats) and conservative beliefs about the Bible (54 percent for Republicans, 26 percent for Democrats).
Moreover, Bolce observes, some Americans aren't just non-religious but anti-religious. Surveys have shown hostility toward evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants among a segment of Democrats, including more than half the party's 1992 convention delegates. He likens this to anti-Catholic bias from the 1850s through the 1920s, except that this time "it's more a prejudice of the educated classes."
Since America's secular ranks are growing, the trend might seem to help the Democrats. In National Opinion Research Center surveys during 2002, 13.8 percent answered "none" when asked their current religion, compared with 6.3 percent in 1991.
But overt appeals to secularists could backfire, Layman says, because blacks are more devout than other Americans and the Democrats also need some support from churchgoing Catholics and white Protestants.
Last year Amy Sullivan, a former aide to Sen. Tom Daschle, complained in a Washington Monthly article that Democratic leaders worried so much about "their core base of secularists and religious minorities" that they shunned religious appeals, thus undercutting "any chance of building a sustainable electoral coalition."
Sullivan thinks in 2004 the Democrats are finding "ways to acknowledge the importance of religion," luring religious moderates without alienating non-religious supporters.
One sign of the new emphasis came the Friday before the party's Boston convention when chairman Terry McAuliffe named Brenda Bartella Peterson, a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister, as the Democratic National Committee's first religious outreach staffer within memory. McAuliffe said this reflected Democrats' "commitment to reaching all people of faith."
But Peterson resigned less than two weeks later, after the conservative Catholic League pointed out that Peterson had joined a legal brief asking the Supreme Court to remove "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Peterson is now organizing religious opposition to the proposed ban on gay marriages and civil unions in Kentucky.
She says Akron-type polling overstates secularism's impact because many Americans are personally religious but "far more dedicated to acting out their faith" through politics than by church involvement.
In practical terms that's precisely the problem for Democrats, says John C. Green, an expert on religious factors in politics who runs the Akron surveys. Unlike Republicans networking at weekly worship or with other groups or listening to religious broadcasts, the unchurched voters "are much harder to find and organize," he says. Worse yet, they're less likely to vote.
To Bolce, the Democrats' new religious rhetoric doesn't alter the fact that the two parties have become markedly different on disputes that divide secularists and religious traditionalists. He and De Maio rated U.S. senators' records the past decade from 0 to 10 in voting on matters like abortion, homosexuality and aid for religious schools.
Republicans had an average of 0.95 and Democrats 8.9 on their secularism scale. John Kerry scored a perfect 10, as did John Edwards once he joined the Senate. Zell Miller, the Democratic turncoat that Republicans named as their convention keynoter last week, scored zero.