What is the role of religion and values in shaping political beliefs?
Religion plays a role in shaping political beliefs because it is one of the central sources for moral and ethical frameworks, which mostly serve as the foundation for individuals making decisions regarding their personal politics. This in turn affects their policy preferences and voting behavior. Furthermore, religion can affect institutional structures and processes.
Religion affects individuals on three different levels – believing, behaving, and belonging (Smidt, 2009). This way, religion provides a basis of doctrines that guide people towards certain behaviors that align with certain political beliefs. In addition, religion provides a sense of belonging to those who subscribe to it, as it allows them to be a part of a bigger group. This sense of belonging can lead to a sort of “group think”, in which individuals subscribe to policy preferences according to what the people in the group they are a member of follow.
There are many different theories regarding how to interpret the relationships between religion, politics, and culture in the United States. Hertzke proposes a series of these: civil religion theory, unconventional partners theory, culture wars theory, secularization theory, populism theory, the religious marketplace theory, and the culture shift theory (Hertzke, 2019). The civil religion theory proposes that, in the United States, there is a vague shared political religion that celebrates America and its culture, emphazising the “blessed” status of the United States among other nations in the world. A key factor of religion in it is the fact that it assumes that there is something spiritual at the root of being American. The unconventional partners theory proposes that religion and political institutions play a role as partners in American society, in which religion serves as a source of meaning, morality, and community that neither the culture nor the government can provide. In doing so, religion plays a significant political role in the United States because it helps sustain both the political culture and its governmental institutions. In return, the American government accepts religious freedom, as the religious sector thrives and is integrated as a part of the policy and overall political conversation. The culture wars theory brings about the fact that to understand religion and politics in the United States, one must understand that there are intense and ongoing clashes over the merits of fundamental values and lifestyles. In these clashes, the conservatives and the progressives are pitted against eachother over irreconcilable differences, that are intensified by the fact that each groups sees their well-being and existence threatened by the other group. This intensifies political divide over fundamental moral issues. The secularization theory brings to the table the idea that the number of non-religious Americans is increasing, therefore bringing about the secularization of political institutions. However, a key factor in this theory highlights that the recent surge of politicized religion is a reaction against its weakening social relevance, once again bringing religion to the political conversation. The populism theory argues that religion plays such and important role in politics in the United States because membership to religious communities is not elite like in other influential interest groups. Therefore, churches are a place to organize and develop political mobilization. The religious marketplace theory argues that the strong engagement in religious discourse in the United States comes as a direct effect from the fact that the country has the equivalent of a “free market” for religion. This causes religious groups to compete with eachother over influence and relevance. Lastly, the culture shift theory argues that there has been a move towards spirituality from organized religion in the United States, which causes many antiquated institutions to be replaced. Although all these theories provide different explanations regarding the relationship between religion and politics, they all shed light into the intricated ways in which religion is deeply interwting to morality and culture, making it so that it is impossible for politics to fully escape from its influence.
Examining religion's role in public policy formation, Koopman (2010) highlights the challenge of distinguishing between religious and moral claims. He questions whether all public policies, in a sense, legislate morality, emphasizing the interconnectedness of morality and policymaking. Ultimately, this sheds light on the fact that religion, being a direct influence on the ocnversation over morality, will inevitably affect the way in which individuals personally chose to relate to and engage with politics and different lines of policy.
(Writen in Spring 2024 for the course "Morality Politics and the Culture Wars" at the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame)
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