Search

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to understanding how individuals’ political and economic attitudes shape their views toward government policies designed to alleviate growing income inequality in the United States. However, much less attention has been paid to the question of how religion shapes Americans’ attitudes toward income inequality and redistributive policies. Using data drawn from the 2013 Economic Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we explore the role that religion—including religious affiliation, the degree and nature of religiosity, the nexus of politics and religion, and interpretations of biblical text—plays in structuring individuals’ attitudes toward government redistribution policies. We find that religious affiliation and participation do not meaningfully shape attitudes toward redistributive policies; however, identification with the “religious right” and specific interpretations of scripture do influence how Americans think about redistribution. These findings provide evidence that standard treatments of religion focusing primarily on affiliation and religiosity may have somewhat limited explanatory power with regard to attitudes about issues that fall outside of the standard “culture wars” framework, at least relative to the explanatory power of more specific expressions of religious belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of representation are widespread in the congressional literature, with recent work focusing on both descriptive and substantive representation of various minority groups. The authors focus on religious representation in Congress, examining the extent to which senators' own religious affiliation and the relative size of their religious constituencies affect substantive representation of Religious Right interests. The authors find that Christian senators (evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and Mormons alike) provide better representation of the Religious Right, as do senators from states with larger Christian constituencies. The findings demonstrate that substantive representation is the product of characteristics of both the representatives and the represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We operationalize three dimensions of religion—religious affiliation, religious commitment, and religious belief—to offer a detailed analysis of how religion affects presidential approval ratings. Using data from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 American National Election Studies, we demonstrate that operationalizing religion as a rudimentary Protestant-Catholic affiliation dichotomy masks its influence on presidential approval. We find that religious affiliation, even when measured more precisely than with a Protestant-Catholic dichotomy, contributes less to models of presidential approval than do measures of religious commitment and (especially) orthodoxy of religious belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do clergy approve of official lobbying by their denominations? Using a data set of nearly 2,300 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and Episcopal Church clergy surveyed in 1998, we investigate how clergy evaluate the work of their official denominational Washington lobbying offices. In particular, we assess the effects of four factors—political ideology, social theology, political engagement, and internal denominational politics—on clergy's evaluations of these Washington offices. We find that clergy evaluations of their Washington office are driven by (1) their own politics, (2) whether they feel it is appropriate for their denomination to pursue political ends, and (3) their support for the general direction of the denomination-not directly connected to the lobby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]