Article: Majority of Voters in Both Parties are Religious, Study Finds (1 Viewer)

[timschochet]

You also have the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (therein after referred to Paul) but the conversion occurred in the New Testament before he was used by God) To be honest I am more of a New Testament guy.

It would be difficult to compare Trump to Paul, IMO. I’m not seeing any Road to Damascus moment. 

 

[zoonation]

Not sure how much stock I would put into polls. Did they ask you? I wasn’t polled on it either. Still feel like Christian values are under attack primarily by liberal leaders.

 Christian values are under attack by Donald Trump.  

 

[msommer]

It would be difficult to compare Trump to Paul, IMO. I’m not seeing any Road to Damascus moment. 

Unless he were to invade Syria, perhaps...

 

[roadkill1292]

A really good piece at fivethirtyeight today about how, similar to the belief that Democrats' policy veers leftward provokes moderate voters into voting Republican, the Christian right's close identification with the GOP and insistence on increasingly outdated social policies is pushing voters into liberal secularism and the Democratic Party. Ugh, that's awkwardly worded on my part. But the piece covers a lot of ground re: voters' increasing polarization of religion along political lines.

But when two sociologists, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, began to look at possible explanations for why so many Americans were suddenly becoming secular, those conventional reasons couldn’t explain why religious affiliation started to fall in the mid-1990s. Demographic and generational shifts also couldn’t fully account for why liberals and moderates were leaving in larger numbers than conservatives. In a paper published in 2002, they offered a new theory: Distaste for the Christian right’s involvement with politics was prompting some left-leaning Americans to walk away from religion.

It was a simple but compelling explanation. For one thing, the timing made sense. In the 1990s, white evangelical Protestants were becoming more politically powerful and visible within conservative politics. As white evangelical Protestants became an increasingly important constituency for the GOP, the Christian conservative political agenda — focused primarily on issues of sexual morality, including opposition to gay marriage and abortion — became an integral part of the the party’s pitch to voters, but it was still framed as part of an existential struggle to protect the country’s religious foundation from incursions by the secular left. Hout and Fischer argued that the Christian right hadn’t just roused religious voters from their political slumber — left-leaning people with weaker religious ties also started opting out of religion because they disliked Christian conservatives’ social agenda.