ABSTRACT

Throughout American history, religious currents have flowed powerfully, defining partisan attachments and shaping voting behavior. This chapter charts the voting patterns of the key American religious traditions and offers evidence for the existence of value- and religion-based cleavages in the American electorate. Religion has played an important role in national elections since the founding of the United States. Emigration of Catholics from Europe, which increased significantly in the 1830s and continued unabated until 1920, resulted in a softening of earlier cleavages between Protestant denominations and the development of something far more durable: a Catholic-Protestant cultural political divide. This division profoundly shaped political and voting patterns for more than a century. The growing divide between religiously observant and more secular Americans has led some commentators to wonder whether a European-style party alignment is emerging in the United States, pitting a Christian conservative party (the Republicans) against a more secular, liberal party (the Democrats).