(December 19, 2018 at 1:35 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: http://oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.109...40378-e-97
You're welcome.
Right, but there are several problems.
1. What is linked is looking specifically at "The Religious Right" and its influence.
2. The are competing views that suggest something differently.
3. The bit about people mostly keeping religion and politics separate in the 60s and 70s is incorrect.
4. Because there were discrepancies due to competing findings and views, there were additional studies done to examine the relationship more closely.
In the American Journal of Political Science, there was a study entitled "Religion, Stratification, and Politics: American in the 1960s (Knocke, D., May 1974) It was determined that religion had the "largest net effect" on politics.
In the journal "Review of European Studies" a study was published by associates from Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University entitled "Politics, Religion, and Society: Is the United States Experiencing a Period of Religious-Political Polarization? (Hirschl, Booth, Glenna, Green, July 2012)"
From the Abstract:
"The research literature is divided on this question with several investigators finding a positive trend in religious-political polarization since 1980, and others finding no polarization. The study further addresses a putative link between social inequality and religious politics by identifying the race, class, and gender location of religiously influenced voters, using multiple cross sections from the General Social Survey to empirically model Presidential voting over the period 1980 to 2008. The findings demonstrate that religious identity influenced voter choice, and that this influence increased significantly and substantially across the study period. Second, that upper class whites are the source of religious partisan polarity, and upper class whites became more polarized over the period 1980 to 2008. The effect of gender on partisanship is less pronounced, and overshadowed by social class and religious identity."
From the Conclusion (Final Paragraph)
"The U.S. evidence suggests that secularization predicted by earlier social scientists is premature at best, and perhaps altogether misplaced. Religious worldviews continue to play an active role in U.S. Presidential politics,and there is no evidence that this role will diminish in the short-term, or in the medium term. We believe that a fruitful theory for interpreting these phenomena is Durkheim's theory set forth in The Elementary Forms. The empirical link between religion and politics suggests that religion in the United States is not confined to formal institutions, but also is an element in constituting the national community."
