Recently in Mainline Protestants Category

Since the outbreak of the Great Notre Dame Invitation War, there has been a certain journalistic impulse to discern political consequences in President Obama's pro-choice words and deeds, with the focus on Catholics. GOP partisan Michael Gerson was out of the blocks two weeks ago with a column contending that Obama's Catholic support was faltering. At the end of last week, Time's Amy Sullivan delivered herself of a piece titled, "Catholic Democrats: Is Their Support Fraying?" The answer, actually, is no.

Here's the problem, journalistically speaking. There is no evidence that the Catholic vote for president is affected by a candidate's position on abortion. Yet you can't just tell your editor that it makes no difference to rank-and-file Catholics that a bunch of bishops are het up over the president's abortion moves, or she'll want to know why the hell you're writing the story in the first place.

This morning, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown took the inside-the-Beltway track, reporting on an increase in activity among the anti-abortion organizations in DC--not exactly stop-the-presses news. To her credit, Brown notes:

In a poll released last week, Obama's disapproval ratings among Catholic and Protestant voters rose between February and April, but it was consistent with an increase in dissatisfaction among all voters. The fluctuation among white evangelicals was more severe, according to the survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. A 31 percent disapproval rating in February jumped to 47 percent in April, making it one of the steeper spikes among demographic groups.

Even this bespeaks the kind of slight massaging that journalists do when the statistics don't really support the storyline. The truly honest way to put it would have been:
 

Obama's approval rating among Catholic and Protestant voters rebounded in April after a drop from February to March, suggesting that the president's abortion positions have thus far had little if any effect on voters' opinions. The only faith group that might be paying attention are the evangelicals, whose approval of Mr. Obama has experienced a steady decline since January.

I'm inclined to doubt that last surmise as well, however. Look at it this way. Obama won 47 percent of white Catholic voters; as of this month, 56 percent of them approve his performance, for a net of +9 percentage points. Among white evangelicals, the numbers are 24, 37, +13. White Mainline Protestants are 44, 54, +10. And for all whites, the numbers are 43, 55, +12.

In sum, Obama's approval rating for each major white religious grouping is currently about 10 points higher than that group's vote for him in November--exactly what the margin is for white people as a whole. In conclusion, Obama's moves on abortion have not had any discernible effect on his support among voters presumed to care most about that issue.

Pastordan, good UCC clergy that he is, laments the ARIS news on shrinking Mainline Protestantism. This is hardly new news, but there has been an acceleration in the shrinkage during this decade--down from 17.2 percent of the adult population in 2001 to 12.9 percent today. The good pastor stresses the importance of the Mainline maintaining and strengthening its distinctive vision of progressive morality (leave us not say moralism). The latest Mainline Protestant clergy survey, released a few days ago by Public Religion Research, shows a modest liberalizing trend among this already pretty liberal group. The question is whether they became just the voices of a few crying in the wilderness--whether there will be enough fannies in the pews to make anyone else pay attention. In this regard, it's interesting the most liberal of the mainline denominations, Pastordan's own United Church of Christ, has actually increased its (modest) numbers (and percentage of the population) since 1990. So maybe there's a public out there waiting for a prophetically energized Mainline.

But there's another possiblity. The late, great church historian Bill Hutchison always used to point out that what came to be called the Mainline was historically always being replenished by the civilizing, so to speak, of evangelicalism. The main case in point was Methodism, which evolved from circuit riding revivalism to central Mainline pillar in a couple of generations. There's a real possiblity that a good segment of the new non-denominationalism will take on enough of the socially conscious, community-building role of the Mainline to be, to all intents and purposes, part of it. This is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the "common ground" politics that is exercising some of us, for better or worse, these days. While it may not make the lefties happy, it may be their salvation.

Steve Waldman poses a question that has been gnawing at those of us who spend way too much of our time poring over exit polls by religious category; namely: Why didn't any more white mainline Protestants vote for Barack Obama? Like Steve, I expected Obama to make real inroads among his co-religionists, a onetime heartland Republican constituency that had been trending Democratic in recent elections. In the event, they voted (according to Pew's account), 55-44 for McCain (as opposed to 56-44 for George Bush in 2004.) Meanwhile, Obama reduced the Republican margin among white evangelicals, whom he wasn't supposed to be making headway with, by a full 11 points. What gives? Here's the best I can manage by way of an answer, based on currently available data.

Mainliners were the only Judeo-Christian grouping whose vote for Bush decreased from 2000 to 2004. And that decline occurred solely among those who attended worship frequently (once a week or more), to the tune of 8 percentage points. Bush actually picked up one percentage point among the less frequent attenders. (These data, worked up by John Green for an article in Religion in the News, can be found here.) We don't yet have the crosstabs for religious traditions by frequency of attendance in 2008, but we do know that among white Protestants, the evangelical portion of the vote increased (by three points), while mainliners dropped by a point. And in the overall attendance categories, there was a drop in turnout only among the more-than-weekly attenders. I'm guessing that the part of the mainline community that had not been in motion--the less frequent attenders--remained in place as it had in 2004, while among those who had been in motion--the frequent attenders--all that changed was that a small number decided not to vote for president this time around.

OK, but so what? My hypothesis is that 1) lukewarm mainliners have for the past decade been frozen into their partisan commitments in a way that may have more to do with where they live and what particular denomination they belong to than with their identity as generic mainline Protestants; and 2) worshipful mainliners reached a new partisan equilibrium in 2004, such that in 2008 just a few were sufficiently torn between conflicting impulses (economic conservatism, anti-Palinism, whatever) that they crossed their arms and stayed at home. Bottom line: White mainliners are now kind of like white Catholics--modestly more Republican than Democratic but less likely to shift around.

It's hard to imagine that Mainline Protestantism, however exactly conceived, won't have more of a talking presence in and around the Obama administration than it has had during the Bush dispensation. Barack Obama's own religious beliefs and values seem to me to be as mainline as they come. In this regard, the Christian Century uses a somewhat odd locution in reporting the good wishes extended to Obama from mainline denominations:

Continued pastoral support to the Obama family was offered by the top executive of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that the Illinois senator was aligned with until he broke with Chicago's Trinity UCC over inflammatory remarks by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Isn't Trinity UCC part of the UCC? And didn't Obama belong to that church for most of his adult life? And didn't Obama address the national convention of that church as its most prominent member in 2007? In any event, it will be interesting to see where the Obamas decide to worship once they take up residence in the nation's capital. Amy Sullivan speculates.

Steve Waldman had a good post yesterday on how, for all the endless chatter about evangelicals, it's with mainline Protestants that Obama is really making hay. All I'd add directly to what he says is that mainliners have been trending in a Democratic direction for a few election cycles now--and, indeed, it does seem directly related to evangelicals. The more evangelical the GOP seems--as in the selection of Sarah Palin--the more they head in the other direction. They're kind of like Jews that way.

More generally, it does seem to me that there's been a good deal too much attention devoted to taking the partisan temperature of evangelicals this election cycle. Between the wishful thinking of an Amy Sullivan and the insistence of a Jim Wallis that yes, Virginia, there are progressive evangelicals--not to mention the decades' old liberal hope that the religious right would just go away--we've been mesmerized by the prospect of white evangelicals switching sides. Real politics means focusing on big groups that are evenly balanced, and which therefore are actually likely to swing one way or another--and that means mainliners and white Catholics. OK, and maybe evangelicals in the Midwest, some significant number of whom just might be prepared to cross party lines and vote this year for a liberal mainliner who hails from their part of country.