Michael Wear explores the essential role of religion in US politics. How is the political landscape changing? 19/07/2024

What a week it has been in US politics. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and the announcement of J.D Vance as his Republican running mate followed days of speculation about Joe Biden’s age, and fitness to be the Democratic candidate. These are uncertain times for America, but what we do know is that – whatever happens – religion will necessarily play a role in the upcoming presidential election because America, as a sociological and demographic fact, is a profoundly religious nation. It would be difficult to find any identification—not male or female, Black or White, Republican or Democrat—that will unite the American electorate more than the identification of “religious.” This is the case even as religious affiliation has notably declined in America this century. Religion matters a great deal in American politics and public life.  

When asked to assess the role religion will play in the American presidential election, my initial instinct is to turn to the kinds of tools, questions and metrics that informed my work as a former presidential campaign staffer and strategist. We could look at public polling and campaign infrastructure. We could break down the religious vote by denomination and gender and race. We could assess how various religious communities relate to key issues in the campaign, like immigration or abortion.  

Yet, I must express my deep level of dissatisfaction in how this kind of analysis matches the moment.  

We have been through a period of great moral and cultural decline in American politics. The spectacle of the culture wars leveraged religious feelings and motivations to support political causes. This became so enculturated that political outcomes and partisan victory came to take on profound religious meaning.  If Christianity was constituted by a set of discrete policy positions, then the political loss of candidates who hold those positions could be taken as a blow to Christianity itself. Over time, what started, perhaps, as the use of religion to motivate and give meaning to our politics, turned in on itself so that it was politics that was providing meaning to religion. We see this reflected in the ways in which, for example, the term evangelical in America has come to encompass more political beliefs than theological ones. Take the startling statistic from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, which found that 14 per cent of Muslims and 12 per cent of Hindus described themselves as ‘born again’ or evangelical Christians. Some 43 per cent of evangelicals in the survey said they did not believe in the divinity of Christ.  

This alarming development has been described in different ways by different people, including Robert Putnam and David Campbell in their book, American Grace, and Michelle Margolis in her book From Politics to the Pews. I refer to the leveraging of religious meaning to provide supplemental support for one’s political views as Political Therapeutic Deism, a concept I coined in my new book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life. Here I describe it as “a kind of religious perspective that exists to offer divine affirmation of one’s politics”. 

When I think about the role of religion in this presidential election, it is this vacillation between the decadent and the existential that draws my attention. We have so undermined the possibility of religion producing new and contrary impulses in our politics, of providing moral knowledge that would guide or limit our political decisions. The ways in which the role of religion in our elections is thought about and discussed remains decadent even as the subjects of our politics become serious and even existential.  

American religion, and the ways in which religion in America relates to politics, is in a period of tremendous upheaval.  Our politics feels both historically consequential and unserious. The very people who make the most serious claims in our politics regularly undermine the credibility of those claims. And while the culture of our politics is dominated by a small minority of Americans, those who the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls “political hobbyists” – essentially, people who engage in politics as a form of entertainment—that culture both influences and obscures voters’ motivations and intentions.  

An existential politics can enliven or eviscerate religious meaning in our politics, and what makes the difference is moral knowledge. If this election is about “saving democracy,” as some have claimed, does this make voting this year an act charged with moral agency, or are the stakes so obscene that the whole process itself is vulgarized? Might the immorality of politicians leave little room for the moral agency of voters?  

Over the course of the next several months, this is the dynamic that has my attention: Is religion at the service of politics, or are there moments in which religion prompts new questions, new ideas, new challenges to the political status quo? Can religion distinguish itself in such an undistinguished politics, or will American religion be distinguished by politics alone? Much rides on the answers to these questions, including not only the character of religion, but the wellbeing of our political life in the States.  

On Theos’ ‘Religion Counts’ series

This blog is part of a larger body of work including briefing papers and articles exploring the impact of religion on voting patterns in the UK, and worldwide. 

Learn more about our Religion Counts work here.