Joe Biden at McKinley Elementary School in Des Moines, Iowa. Phil Roeder/Flickr, CC BY
On March 17, Joe Biden took firm control of the Democratic nomination process, winning primaries Florida, Illinois and Arizona by significant margins. The ongoing coronavirus epidemic is in part responsible, having reshaped votors’ worries and expectations, but the role played by religion in Biden’s resurrection should not be overlooked.
Black Americans, who are largely Democrats and and older and less liberal , are the most religious group: 83%say they believe in God (compared with 61%of whites). They are also more likely to attend church and pray.
A match between a secular socialist and a centrist Catholic
Of all of the presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders is probably the least religious. He identifies himself as both Jewish and secular, does not participate in any organized religion and defends the separation of church and state.
But the rise and success of identity politics suggests that race or religion may matter more than economic justice.
Sharing faith, making connections
Joe Biden’s record on race .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/us/politics/biden-busing.html .. may [not?] be great, but he was vice president to the first black president, Barack Obama. Contrary to Sanders, he has not been talking about religion but rather about his faith. And he has done so not in political terms but in emotional and personal terms. For instance in a town hall meeting in South Carolina .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/26/politics/joe-biden-pastor-charleston-church-shooting/index.html , he was able to connect with an African American pastor whose wife was killed by a white supremacist by sharing personal tragedy: the loss of his own wife and daughter in 1972 and his son in 2015.
While expressing genuine grief, he has turned his sorrow and pain into political assets, having no qualms about using them in this campaign ad, for example, where he says almost word for word what he expressed in the CNN town hall interview with the pastor.
Only one elected representative, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (Democrat of Arizona), claims to be nonreligious and no member describes themselves as an atheist. Even someone as far to the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentions her Catholic faith in Congress and even quotes the Bible on social networks .. https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1088200188089565184 .
Beyond the particular case of Donald Trump, all presidents of the modern era have identified as Protestant Christians, with the notable exception of John Kennedy whose Catholicism proved to be a campaign issue for him. No person of the Jewish faith has received a presidential nomination from a major party (Joseph Lieberman received only the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 2000), and the Mormon affiliation of Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in 2008, was not without controversy .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/mormonism-hurt-mitt-romney-in-2008-what-about-2012/2012/05/22/gIQAerBjiU_story.html .
A changing religious landscape
The ever-increasing presence of religious rhetoric in political discourse is both the reason for and the consequence of the politicization of religion .. https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/4113, particularly of white Evangelicals, since the 1970s.This politicization has highlighted the racial divide that exists in the United States. According to the PRRI .. https://www.prri.org/research/american-religious-landscape-christian-religiously-unaffiliated/ (Public Religion Research Institute), a non-profit, non-partisan organization, “no religious group is more closely linked to the Republican Party than white Evangelical Protestants.”
Party Religious Affiliation.
The label “evangelical,” however, is a complex one. It is a trans-denominational movement mostly within Protestant Christianity based on a set of personal core beliefs:
* The Bible at the center of faith
* The atonement for sins through Jesus’ death on the cross.
* Personal conversion and salvation.
* The sharing of the gospel, from which this movement takes its name.
Nevertheless, statistics show a slow erosion in the number of Americans who identify as Evangelical Protestants__ since the 1990s, particularly in the younger generations. Similarly, the number of Catholics has slowly declined, while the number of historic Mainline Protestants has virtually collapsed .. https://religioninpublic.blog/2018/06/28/what-is-a-mainline-protestant/ .
America s Changing Landscape.
The trend most discussed by academics (here, here, or here) is the increase in the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion, namely the nones (not affiliated with a religion). They are now at least as numerous as evangelicals, if not more. But as researcher Lauric Henneton notes, nones have in common only that they do not want to be counted as belonging to a religious group or established traditions. It says nothing about their actual beliefs.
A 2014 Pew Research Center survey .. https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ .. shows that atheists and agnostics are on the rise, but still account for less than a third of nones, with the rest identifying themselves as “nothing special.” Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders is a favorite among the nones.
Religion and younger voters
Younger generations are increasingly unaffiliated with a religion or a church, but they are also the generations least likely to vote which reduces their impact on the elections. Even if they voted more, as they did in 2018, America’s institutional political structure amplifies the power of whiter, more rural, more Christian voters .. shorturl.at/rDEJM .
“Today we have science that can actually imagine that God doesn't live in the clouds, other than those amyloid plaque clouds that are responsible for geriatric dementia.”
God is a concept, By which we measure our pain.
I give myself, credit for my accomplishments, and I am not punished when I fail.
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