Politics Trumping Religion, Notre Dame Professor Says

BCLA | The complex interactions between religion and politics, on personal and national levels, have become increasingly fraught, said David Campbell, Packey J. Dee Chair of Political Science and chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame. And, he said, “Increasingly, Americans are putting their politics ahead of their religion.”

Campbell’s lecture, titled “Faith at the Polls: Religious Voters and the Midterm Elections,” before about 80 students, faculty and staff members in the McIntosh Center on Oct. 26, traced the changes in voting behavior by self-identified religious voters. He was invited to Loyola Marymount University by Academy of Catholic Thought and Imagination and the LMU Political Science Department.

He stressed that the role of religion in politics has historically been that of an engine of civic engagement, including the abolition movement of the 1850s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Though he traced the ebb and flow of religious voters, Campbell noticed a marked trend among Americans who identified themselves as religious and conservative: They gradually identified more and more with the Republican Party. To illustrate that point, he showed several political campaign ads from 2012 to 2016 that pointedly identified the candidate as equal measures conservative, Republican and Christian.

Campbell then examined the surprising embrace by evangelicals of then-candidate Donald J. Trump, and said that his research revealed the relationship to be transactional, not one of identity. He explained that during the administration of President Clinton, evangelicals said that a president’s personal morality was a crucial part of a president’s ability to lead. By 2016, that had flipped. Campbell explained that religious conservative voters looked the other way with regard to Trump’s personal morality and instead focused on the candidate’s promise to fulfill their political wishes.

His primary concern, he said, is that this trend results in corrupting religious principles by coarsening the prophetic language at the core of many religions’ discourse. During the question-and-answer period, Campbell talked directly to the students in the audience: “Voting is worth the effort, and young people need to develop the habit of voting.”

Campbell’s most recent book is “Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics” (with John Green and Quin Monson). He is also co-author (with Robert Putnam) of “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” which has been described by the New York Times as intellectually powerful, by America magazine as an instant classic and by the San Francisco Chronicle as the most successfully argued sociological study of American religion in more than half a century. “American Grace” received both the 2011 Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs, and the Wilbur Award from the Religious Communicators Council for the best nonfiction book of 2010.

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