Putting Politics First: The Impact of Politics on American Religious and Secular Orientations

Nearly all research on the political impact of Americans’ religious and secular orientations assumes that such orientations are exogenous to politics. Using multiwave panel and experimental data, we find that religious and secular orientations are endogenous to political orientations. In other words, religion and secularism are a consequence as well as a cause of politics. In showing this, we make three major contributions. First, we conceptualize and measure secular orientations in a new way—not just as the absence of religion, but also as an affirmative secular identity and positive commitment to secular principles. Second, our panel and experimental data allow for the most definitive test to date of whether political orientations exert a causal effect on religious and secular orientations. Third, we isolate the conditions under which politics affects religious–secular perspectives, thus identifying the mechanism that underlies political orientations. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YM4LDG. The increasing polarization of American politics has been accompanied by increasing sociodemographic differences between partisan and ideological camps (Mason 2016). As the link between sociodemographic orientations and politics has grown, scholars have theorized that causality runs in both directions. People not only choose political sides based on their sociodemographic profiles, but also may base some social preferences—including their feelings about nonpolitical social groups (Iyengar and Westwood 2015), where they want to live (Bishop 2009), and even whom they want to date or marry (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012)—on their political profiles. At the forefront of such speculation have been Americans’ religious and secular orientations. Party David E. Campbell is Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy, University of Notre Dame, 2060 Jenkins Nanovic Halls, Notre Dame, IN 46556 (dave_campbell@nd.edu). Geoffrey C. Layman is Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 2060 Jenkins Nanovic Halls, Notre Dame, IN 46556 (glayman@nd.edu). John C. Green is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Akron, 325 Olin Hall, Akron, OH 44325-1914 (green@uakron.edu). Nathanael G. Sumaktoyo is post-doctoral fellow, Global Religion Research Initiative, University of Notre Dame, 4020 Jenkins Nanovic Halls Jenkins Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556 (nsumakto@nd.edu). This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES-0961700. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We are grateful for the research assistance of Patrick Schoettmer and Jeremy Castle. Thanks also to Christ the King Lutheran Church of South Bend, Indiana, for the use of their facilities, as well as Todd Adkins and Dan Hubert for appearing in the experiment’s news stories. coalitions have grown increasingly divided along religious lines, with the GOP becoming more religious and the Democrats growing more secular and nonreligious (D’Antonio, Tuch, and Baker 2013). Scholars typically have assumed that this expanding divide has resulted from individuals’ choosing a partisan side based on their religious and secular orientations (e.g., Layman 2001). However, recent work suggests that people also abandon religion or become more religiously devout based on their partisan and ideological tendencies (Patrikios 2008; Putnam and Campbell 2010). In fact, a leading explanation for the recent surge in the percentage of Americans claiming no religious affiliation is politics: Liberals’ and Democrats’ rejection of organized religion as traditionalist religion becomes increasingly associated American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 0, xxxx 2018, Pp. 1–15 C ©2018, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12365