DOI: 10.7910/dvn/gfg3k8
title: Replication Data for: "When Theology Responds: How Politics Shapes Religious Belief"

description: Abstract:

Scholars and political observers widely recognize that religion affects important political behaviors, including voting choices and policy preferences. Political scientists have also turned in recent years to understanding influence in the other direction, that is, exploring how political stances and attachments influence religious behaviors and ideas. Especially to the deeply religious, the idea that temporal political issues would impact thinking about the eternal questions of theology may feel surprising. Yet recent evidence in behavioral political science demonstrates that political attachments drive individuals’ expressions of religious belonging and their choices about religious affiliation and attendance. On the other hand, existing literature relies heavily on survey research, and therefore faces limitations in speaking to questions of nuanced religious belief, particularly among the clergy and theologians most engaged in abstract theological thought. Where it does examine belief as an outcome variable over time, the literature often uses broad measures more likely to detect belief change among loosely attached believers. In contrast, this dissertation project asks whether and how politics can shape expressed religious belief among religious elites—thinkers who work to understand and articulate theological ideas for the laity. 

Building from a novel understanding of religious belief, I focus in this project on tracing the trajectories of three sets of religious ideas as they are presented in a well-known religious periodical across a span of over sixty years. This approach allows me to examine expressed belief in detail, noting nuanced changes in how thinkers understand and articulate ideas for their followers over time. I intersperse keyword-based quantitative analysis of these texts, digitized for the first time for this project, with qualitative, close readings that isolate changes in how religious thinkers convey their ideas. This approach allows me to identify key features of the politics-belief relationship and induce a theory for when and how politics can shape religious elites’ thinking. In doing so, I move beyond existing literature both in theorizing about how politics drives belief and in proposing a new framework and method for considering religious beliefs more robustly than much of the previous literature. 

In the first portion of the book, I provide an overview of my theoretical contribution and explain the methodological choices that support it. I clarify definitions and measurement approaches in two chapters. First, I explore “expressed religious beliefs,” which I conceive of as complex webs of ideas connected by logic, history, tradition, or some other source of constraint, and articulated by religious thinkers for their followers. I further classify religious beliefs into ideas about either doctrine—abstract concepts or principles about the nature of divine or human reality—or practice—applications of doctrine to concrete situations. I then justify my choices of the evangelical tradition and the periodical Christianity Today as data sources for my project. Next, I review the religious sociology literature to develop expectations for patterns of division and conflict across religious and political groups throughout the second half of the twenty-first century. I then use keyword-based quantitative analysis to measure the salience of various lines of group division in the texts of my main corpus, confirming that patterns observed in my corpus are consistent with the literature. This observed variation motivates my selection of three sets of religious belief trajectories—which also vary in their focus on matters of doctrine or practice—to examine as cases.
The second portion of the project offers in-depth examination of these three sets of religious beliefs. These include beliefs surrounding the Protestant Reformation, the Incarnation and the celebration of Christmas, and the theology of contraception. In my first case, I demonstrate that changes in the salience of certain Reformation doctrines are logically connected to, retrospectively explained by, and temporally follow changes in religious group dynamics experienced by evangelicals. In my second case, I find that evangelicals emphasize distinct aspects of the Incarnation and its observance depending on the group dynamics of the time, but also that these shifts are heightened and solidified by acute politicizing events that precipitate writers’ behaviors. Finally, the case of evangelicals’ changing positions regarding contraception demonstrates that politics can have the clearest impact when a religious group’s interests are also at stake in relation to a set of beliefs. From patterns of change in these three sets of beliefs, I induce a new way of understanding “politics” as comprised of three parts: the group dynamics that make up a religious group’s social environment, acute or precipitating events pertaining to a particular belief set, and the group’s interests with respect to these events. I argue that when the combination of all three components of politics—group dynamics, precipitating events, and group interests—align in relation to a set of religious ideas, religious elites’ thoughts regarding these beliefs are most likely to change. When some of these factors are in play, but others are not, changes in expressed belief are likely to be more gradual or muted, with changes in salience more common than outright reversals in thinking. 

In the six decades of my analysis, evangelical thinking varies across these three cases in nuanced ways. The events of the past several years have clarified the high stakes of patterns of religious thought in these cases and others, as religious beliefs have motivated costly political actions by some elites, bringing the politics-beliefs relationship full circle. Understanding the triple pulls of conflictual group dynamics, precipitating events, and group interests can assist religious thinkers in recognizing how politics can influence their theology, both for good and for ill. Moreover, my findings illuminate the value of a rich conceptualization of religious belief for the political science literature. By bringing together the literatures on group dynamics, elite thought, and religion and politics, my dissertation provides a tool for religious thinkers and academic observers who seek to understand when and how theology responds.