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THE GREAT DIVIDE
Church, political
beliefs align
People decide where to worship based on the
congregation's culture
By Bill Bishop
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
STAFF
Sunday, July
25, 2004
On a Sunday morning at Tarrytown United Methodist Church, people worship to
the flights of Handel played with classical precision on a stomach-rumbling
pipe organ. Just four miles away, at
Trinity United Methodist Church, the congregation sings and sways to Sting's
mystical rocker "Love is the Seventh Wave."
When President Bush was governor, he worshipped at
Tarrytown. Republican Governor Rick
Perry is a member now. Trinity,
meanwhile, is the only United Methodist church in Austin that has voted to
support gay rights.
Not all members of Tarrytown are Republican, nor all
the Trinity congregation Democratic.
But it is just as unlikely to find Bush or Perry
attending Trinity, a church of the "cultural left" that seeks to
"promote social and ecological justice," as it would be to find
those from Trinity worshipping in the straight-line pews and traditional
formality of Tarrytown.
According to stock wisdom of American politics,
churchgoers overwhelmingly support Bush for president. And it is true that 60 percent of those
who say they attended church once a week voted Republican in 2000.
But the great divide in American religious life is
not merely between those who go to church and those who do not.
Churchgoers are sorting themselves on Sunday
morning, Republicans going to their places of worship, Democrats to others.
Regardless of denomination, churches have
increasingly attracted new members by appealing to cultural and political
similarities. The result is that
congregations have become some of the most politically homogenous social
institutions in America.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in the late
1950s "the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on
Sunday morning. King was referring
to race. Today, the segregation is
political.
Parallel divides
Americans live in communities that have grown more politically
like-minded since the mid-1970s, according to a study of the last 14
presidential elections conducted by the Austin American-Statesman and its
statistical consultant, Robert Cushing.
Six out of 10 voters live in counties that haven't changed their
political party choice in presidential elections since the 1980s. Since 1976, the gap between Republican and
Democratic voters has increased in eight out of 10 U.S. counties.
The sorting is more evident and more intense in
society's niches. Neighborhoods are
more singularly Democratic or Republican than counties, according to an
ongoing American-Statesman study of precinct voting patterns in Texas. People gravitate toward volunteer groups
that share their political leanings.
And, perhaps most strongly, that sorting is taking
place in church.
In the late 1990s, University of Pennsylvania
political scientist Diana Mutz surveyed people about their partners in
political discussions.
"Overwhelmingly, people said the people they met in church were
extremely homogenous with them politically," Mutz says. Church congregations, she says, exhibit
"strong, extreme homogeneity."
At the same time, religious beliefs and practices
have come to align with political party, according to surveys conducted by
John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron. People who follow more traditional
religious practices Protestants who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible
and Catholics who accept the authority of the Pope generally supported Bush
in 2000 and say they will vote for him again this year.
Those in what Green describes as
"modernist" religious congregations, for example, churchgoers who
were more ecumenical, or universalist, in their beliefs, tend to vote
Democratic, regardless of denomination.
Traditional evangelicals support Bush by 68
percentage points over Kerry in Green's latest poll, taken in the
spring. But modernist evangelicals
back Kerry by 8 percentage points over Bush.
Since 2000, Green has seen these political and
religious demarcations harden, in part, perhaps, because like-minded groups
tend, over time, to become more adamant in their beliefs.
"What it means is that to the extent that
people receive information from congregations, they are likely to have that
information reinforced by the people they worship with," says Green.
In early June, the Gallup poll found "extreme
and unprecedented levels of polarization" in the approval ratings for
Bush. Democrats and Republicans had
firm and utterly opposite views of the president.
American politics is divided between people of
different parties and different beliefs.
And it is driven, to some extent, by people who not only seek to live
among those who are like-minded, but to worship among them, too.
A religious brand
Teachers at the Fuller Theological Seminary in
California realized in the 1960s and '70s that "like attracts like"
was the quickest strategy for building church membership. If ministers could appeal to the needs and
desires of those moving to the nation's fast-growing suburbs, their churches
would grow.
This became the organizing scheme for many of the
nondenominational "mega-churches" that have beached in the suburbs.
"The cardinal principle among many evangelical
church growth theorists is the homogeneity principle," says David Roozen,
professor of religion and society at Hartford Seminary. "And it basically and simply says,
people are more likely to want to go to church with people like
themselves."
Young parents want to be with other young
parents. People who oppose abortion want
to be with others who are anti-abortion.
Ministers inspired by "church growth" consultants walked
neighborhoods, essentially doing religious market research, and designed
churches that met the social and cultural needs they found.
In the past, "there used to be a sense that you
got your church along with your genetic package," says Martin Marty,
former dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Baptists raised children who became
Baptists. When a Presbyterian moved
to a new town, she went to the Presbyterian church.
Organized around tradition and place, churches were
"town meeting places," Marty says, "where people with very
different commitments" could interact.
"And now it simply doesn't happen."
It doesn't happen, in part, because the Fuller
"church growth" specialists understood something fundamental about
today's churchgoers: They are consumers.
Given a choice, they will pick social comfort over tradition or
denomination.
Denomination has come to mean less and less, and
picking a church isn't so much a theological decision, says Marty, as it is a
"choice of a way of life."
"I hate to use this term with regard to
religion, but it fits," says Green: "There isn't the kind of
'brand' loyalty there once was."
To attract new "customers," ministers
"try to market their church, to find a niche, whether it's being open to
gays or lesbians or being strong as a pro-life church," says northern
Virginia Presbyterian minister and newspaper columnist Henry Brinton. "It's really finding a niche in the religious
marketplace and then exploiting it."
The role of the church has changed in this battle
for religious market share. Churches
serve less to mold opinion now, says University of Maryland political
demographer James Gimpel. Rather,
they seek to reinforce existing beliefs.
"We shouldn't be surprised that we find
suburban churches who are going easy on the whole wealth thing, downplaying
any message that would condemn people for making a lot of money," says
Gimpel. "And yet you go to that
same denomination in the inner city, and you'd hear a very different tone and
content. There's not a lot of
transforming power . . . today. It's
conformity all the way."
Culture change
Some churches have built new congregations through
market research and promotion. At
Trinity, tucked into the neighborhood behind the Flightpath Coffeehouse on
Duval Street, the church that plays Sting on Sunday morning just
"happened."
"It was almost by accident," Minister Sid
Hall recalls. Hall was opening Trinity
to neighborhood meetings in the late 1980s, and the church sponsored a weekly
"parents' night out. Hall
talked with mothers and fathers when they came for their children and with
neighbors who stayed after the meetings.
Hall began describing a church open to gay and
lesbian congregants (an increasing presence in the neighborhood) and defining
a church for what he describes as the "cultural left."
Alice Embree came to Trinity for a neighborhood
meeting. She'd grown up in Austin and
attended the University of Texas, where she'd been active in the local
chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, a 1960s organization of the
political left. She had "drifted
away" from her church as she became more deeply involved in the civil
rights movement.
Embree eventually began attending Trinity's Sunday
services. So did others like her, and
Embree says Trinity "made this transition" in the early 1990s. In 1992, Trinity became the only United
Methodist church in Austin and the 58th nationally to become a
"reconciling" congregation, welcoming all, regardless of
"gender identity" or "sexual orientation."
Like attracted like, and the congregation grew based
on Hall's openness and a ministry that explores mysticism and celebrates
"women's wisdom and the cosmologies of indigenous cultures around the
planet."
"I had to set aside a lot of the assumptions
and conventional methods I had learned in seminary that are geared toward the
standard church," Hall says.
"I always felt like the best thing I did was to get out of the
way."
Hall wasn't trying to build a mega-church. He was attempting to serve people rejected
by mainline churches. He was also
trying to keep alive a church that had tallied more funerals than new
members.
"We have (today) eight members who were here
when I got here," Hall explains.
"The church would be dead if we hadn't redefined ourselves. An earlier generation would attend a
church because it was Episcopalian or Presbyterian, Hall says. "But those of us who came after,
we're more discriminating.
Denominational labels don't mean that much."
The culture and the politics of the individual
congregation means more.
Church acceptance
People don't hunt for the most Republican church in
town, explains Green. "They say,
'Where is the church that is most like me?' which means that nine out of 10
people in the church are going to be Republican."
There is nothing overtly political at either the
services at Tarrytown or Trinity.
Politics "doesn't come up in a sermon or a liturgy," says
Embree, "and I wouldn't particularly like that if it did. I want the connection to be more
spiritual."
What Green has found, however, is that spiritual
choices are more closely paralleling political party. Six out of 10 traditional Catholics back
Bush, according to Green's polling.
Meanwhile, six out of 10 modernist Catholics favor Kerry.
The issue of whether gay people should be accepted
as full members of a church, as clergy or in marital unions, has produced
stark divisions in almost every denomination.
United Methodists have "reconciling"
congregations that support gay clergy and unions. The United Church of Christ has "open and affirming"
congregations. Some Unitarian
congregations have chosen to be "welcoming. There is an "Evergreen" association of Baptist churches. Lutheran churches are
"reconciling-in-Christ.
Presbyterians have "more light" congregations.
The urge for people to find like-minded places of
worship is so compelling that churches attempting to straddle these political
divisions can find their congregations splitting internally. At Austin's First United Methodist
Church, for example, two Sunday school classes have adopted the same
"reconciling" pledge Trinity adopted in 1992. In one class, a vote to conform to the
reconciling principles led some members to leave, says the Rev. Mimi Raper.
Raper says some in the church asked that First
United hold a separate reconciling service.
The ministers refused, and in early May the Rev. John McMullen gave a
sermon on the polarization of American politics and religion. "I fear that we have become religious
about our politics and political about our religion," McMullen preached.
As congregations become increasingly homogenous,
Marty says, society "has lost one of the great interchanges where people
of different outlooks can meet on transcending issues."
Marty recalls that as an intern at a parish in
Washington, D.C., during the late 1940s, a member of his church, a
congressman from Michigan, scuffled with a member from Mississippi on the
floor of the House.
"The following Sunday, their two pastors had
the two families together at some club," Marty says. "Why? Because Monday they had to be talking to each other again. Well, now that doesn't happen."
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