McCain, Obama and the Christian Voter
June 27, 2008
It’s not your father’s Christianity. The faithful still play an important role for the McCain and Obama campaigns, but changes in the lives of younger Christians may make courting the religious demographic a whole new game.
We asked Paul Lichterman and Richard Flory of the USC College’s School of Religion about changes within this group, and how they affect the Democratic and Republican nominees.
Do the nominations of John McCain and Barack Obama signify a shift in the power of the activist Christian movement?
Lichterman: The fact that Republicans seem to have settled on a candidate who plays up his own religious faith much less than George W. Bush (or Mike Huckabee) says less about the vote-delivering power of conservative Christian operatives at the moment than about the fact that religion still takes a back seat to politics, even when religion is conservative, strident or loud. It’s McCain’s relatively moderate political positions, not his religion, that have put him in the No. 1 Republican position.
Flory: I would argue that the fundamentalist/evangelical leadership is aging, and increasingly out of touch with the younger generations of believers. It seems clear that although they may oppose abortion, etc., younger Christians — like their counterparts in other religious traditions or with no religious tradition — have concerns that transcend those narrowly focused issues. They consistently talk about social justice issues more broadly (such as caring for the poor, racial justice, etc.), which for them is a natural outcome of their religious commitment.
Does Obama represent a new generation of young Americans — immersed in a global community on YouTube and MySpace and going to schools that are often more diverse — who are more accepting of people who are different?
Lichterman: I think young people have been ready to vote for a youngish African American man for a long time, but a major political party may not have been ready to put one up as a serious contender.
Flory: The access to difference among post-boomers, through schooling, the Internet and other experiences, has clearly led to a different response to a candidate like Obama than would have been possible even 10 years ago. It seems that among young people that support Obama, the focus is on his “hope” or “change” message, and not at all on his race. I think that, on average, they take racial or ethnic differences as just another part of life, not as dividing lines as in the past. This doesn’t mean that racial inequality is no longer an issue, just that their experiences are much broader than previous generations on issues relating to race and ethnicity.
For McCain, is there potential power in reaching out to the moderate Christian rather than the conservative Christian?
Lichterman: McCain courted pastors who made extreme-sounding statements about Hurricane Katrina and the Holocaust because he wants the votes of religious conservative Republicans and knows that their spokespeople carry weight. Those voters may not be more numerous than moderate Christians, but they probably vote more self-consciously as Christians than others do. And they have more powerful organizations that claim to speak for them.
Flory: The power may lie in the similarity of concerns across moderate and conservative Christian young people, in tapping the issues they share, rather than focusing on the “culture wars” issues that conservative Christians have focused on for many years. I wouldn’t, however, make that sort of argument about older generations of conservative Christians! I think most of them are stuck in the old “culture wars” mindset.
Paul Lichterman, associate professor of Sociology and Religion in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is an expert on culture, religion, civic organizations, social movements and politics. His book Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying To Bridge America’s Divisions looks at the ways in which mainline and evangelical Protestant groups tried — and often failed — to reach out to other community organizations and low-income people.
Richard Flory, research associate in the USC College’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, studies the intersection of religion, culture and urban life. He is the author of Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation.