Faith Doesn't Necessarily Determine Political Affiliation.

From Politics Daily, an article about what people believe and how they vote, by Jeffrey Weiss. Check out a couple of interesting points regarding abortion, self-identification, and a new study published at SSRC.

Here's a clip but I recommend you read the whole thing:

Wouldn't you figure that a rainmaker who believes in his power would want to create rain when it's dry? But what people believe, what they say they believe, and how they act are often only loosely linked. As Chaves points out:

"Among respondents to the General Social Survey, conservative Protestants are no less likely than other Protestants to have been divorced, to have seen an X-rated movie in the last year, or to be sexually active even if they aren't married."

When it comes to religion and politics, he offers an example that is too often forgotten: Blacks and whites in America who espouse similar theological positions tend to take very different political positions. So how does their faith explain their behaviors?

Tiptoe carefully into any such speculation, Chaves says. The ways that people behave don't make nearly as much sense as we'd like to think they do. He says:

"Almost every claim of the form, 'People act in a certain way because they are in a particular religion or because they attend religious services or because they hold this or that religious belief,' commits the religious congruence fallacy."

Careful scholar that he is, Chaves offers a counterbalance:

"I want to be clear about something I am not saying. I am not saying that religious congruence is impossible. I am saying that it is rare, and much conventional practice does not appreciate how rare it is."

And yet, scholars and pundits chew up lots of electrons using the tenets and dogmas of religion to explain how people behave. People who go to church a lot tend to vote GOP. Theology driven? Terrorists in the name of Islam attack a town. The Quran tells them so? Pastors fail to live up to the moral code that they preach. Shocking hypocrisy?

Experts and regular folks seem to expect that people will tend to act consistently with the religion they belong to or claim to believe in. Not so much, Chaves told me this week.

"This is the single most important misunderstanding of religion out there in the popular culture," he said. "Religion is fundamentally situational rather than characterological."

Translation: Where you are and who you're with generally has a lot more to do with how you act than where you pray or what you pray. And correlation is not causation.

So sure, there's a statistical link between church attendance and GOP voting. But what's the cause of that link? Don't assume, Chaves said.

"Always and everywhere, religious congruence is rare rather than common," he said.

There are examples where people act consistently with their religious teachings, Chaves said. But they are generally found in a culture where it's difficult to separate the secular from the sacred. Orthodox Jewish communities, or Amish communities, for instance. But even in those situations, plenty of members act in contradiction to their highly reinforced religious moral codes.

One example in modern political culture that Chaves said could show cause and effect: How moral or religious opposition to abortion seems to drive some voting patterns. The long, hard process of internalization has taken place so that people can draw upon that view even in the voting booth, he said.

By coincidence, another paper in this month's SSSR journal examined a phenomenon of the sort that Chaves is talking about. The paper is titled "Belonging Without Belonging: Utilizing Evangelical Self-Identification to Analyze Political Attitudes and Preferences, " by Andrew Lewis of American University and Dana Huyser de Bernardo of the University of Massachusetts.

The paper looks at polling data where Christians were asked what denomination they belonged to, whether they considered themselves to be evangelical, and where they stood on several points of theology. And then they were asked for their positions on abortion policy, same-sex marriage laws, and party identification.

The quick bottom line: "Religious tradition is a good predictor of political attitudes while self-identification is a good predictor of party identification."

Translation: People who belong to denominations that scholars consider evangelical tend to take conservative political positions more than people who self-identify as evangelical but don't belong to those denominations. But people who self-identify as evangelical but don't belong to evangelical denominations are more likely to be Republicans than people who say they belong to evangelical denominations but don't self-identify as evangelical.

Which is a modestly interesting result. The paper is filled with the sorts of symbols that only a statistician can love. When I asked Chaves about it, he said that the basic analysis and results looked pretty good to him.

But he raised an eyebrow at some of the explanations that the researchers used to explain their results. Here's one paragraph Chaves noted:

"Our models also show the importance of including evangelical self-identification into analyses seeking to explain the impact of religious affiliation on political preferences. In particular, the results show that different types of evangelical belonging influence political outcomes in different ways."

Which is to say that religion and religious identification create political outcomes and preferences. That, Chaves told me, is farther than he'd be willing to go.

Tea Party Reporting As Case Study: What is Journalism's Role?

At his blog PressThink (tag lined "Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine"), Jay Rosen, Journalism professor at New York University, hails recent reporting on the Tea Party by New York Times reporter David Barstow but asks:

Running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny…That sounds like the Tea Party movement I have observed, so the truth of the sentence is not in doubt. But what about the truth of the narrative? David Barstow is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. He ought to know whether the United States is on the verge of losing its democracy and succumbing to an authoritarian or despotic form of government. If tyranny was pending in the U.S. that would seem to be a story. The New York Times has done a lot of reporting about the Obama Administration, but it has been silent on the collapse of basic freedoms lurking just around the corner. Barstow commented on the sentence that disturbed me in his interview with CJR:

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways. I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

It kept coming up, but David… did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can.

Rosen's questioning is just that, a question. In the comments it's obvious that he is still thinking about the responsibilities of journalism in our current climate - and of journalists in general who encounter strongly-held ideas that run counter to fact but don't qualify them.

Should it be assumed that New York Times readers understand that the country is not on the verge of tyranny or does the nature of this pervasive "belief," evident in interviews in Barstow's article, evident in the momentum of the Tea Party, require Barstow to do some truth-telling? Or is it ok that he reports the "belief" but not the factual errors that it is based on?

Don't miss the comments.

Cornel West's Video Letter to the President.

Cornel West taped a letter for the president. You should watch it. h/t Sojourner.

What Obama Did Right.

A quick divergence from my usual religion/patients' rights beat:

The president spoke with Republicans in Baltimore today.

Obama did one thing that was absolutely necessary. He brought the conversation around to what works. Facts, statistics, provable solutions to Medicare and Medicaid, trade, health care reform.

Tort reform doesn't work. Selling insurance across state lines (without restrictions) won't work.

He made the Republican proposals that come straight out of impractical ideology sound silly and he debunked them. We need much more of this. We're got a part of the country that is running around mad as hell about ideas and shouting out for solutions that will not meet their objectives. They have been disserved by an unintelligent or manipulative media and party.

A little truth felt awfully good. Instead of putting out ideological solutions to problems, I hope the Republicans (and Democrats) will be held accountable for the viability of their proposals. Not just politically but factually. Today was a first step.

Pastors and Clergy Often Disagree on Political Parties.

A new study, reported at the Indiana/Kentucky Courier-Journal, shows that pastors and their clergy often choose to vote on opposite sides of the political divide.

The Presbyterian survey found that 46 percent of members and 49 percent of elders are Republicans, while only 23 percent of pastors are.

Fifty percent of pastors are Democrats, compared with 31 percent of members and 29 percent of elders.

Jack Marcum, coordinator of Research Services, writes that such information may seem unrelated to churches’ core spiritual mission, but that it’s valuable to have.

He noted that many may be surprised that pastors and elders with such contrasting politics “share leadership of congregations in the same religious denomination. Yet they do, and isn’t this information important for those developing … training materials, or trying to match pastors with congregations?”

Being Presbyterian is “just one characteristic among many that defines each of us, and it is intertwined with political identification, age, gender and many others to make us who we are....

“My guess is that many can recall a meeting or situation where political perspectives or other non-religious considerations seemed more influential to some participants than church teachings,” Marcum added. “That’s one reason why, to understand the church, we need social scientists as well as theologians.”

Science, Religion, And Politics.

Just a snippet of a post from Scienceblogs:

When you get right down to it, the Galileo affair was almost irreducibly complex. The very real conflict between science and religion over who gets to declare what the physical world was certainly a major factor, but it was only one of many. The political context - particularly as it involved challenges to the secular power of the church - was also important. So were the many longstanding interpersonal conflicts between the participants. So were the religious and political disputes involving various factions within the church. I'm not sure you can point to any one of those factors as being clearly the most important one involved.

While I'm at least partially in agreement with Jason over the problem with Dixon's view of the Galileo affair, I'm entirely on Dixon's side when it comes to the more modern ID/creationism issue. Here's Jason's perspective:

Dixon plays this gambit again when talking about evolution and creationism:

The debate about evolution and ID is a conflict not primarily between science and religion but between different views about who should control education.

But why is the control of education such a contentious issue? It is because fundamental questions about sources of knowledge are at stake. Young-Earth creationists believe the Bible constitutes a source of evidence that trumps anything a scientist might discover. Furthermore, failure to recognize that fact places your eternal soul in danger. From the other side scientists believe (with considerable justice, I would add) that their methods are far more reliable than those of religion. Failure to recognize that fact assaults reason and rationality themselves. The ID folks are religiously more diverse than the YEC's, but the source of the dispute is effectively the same.

How is that not primarily a dispute between science and religion?

If I thought that education was such a contentious issue because of the conflict over sources of knowledge, I'd have to agree with Jason. But I'm pretty sure it's not. It is true that creationists have a very different view of what constitutes an appropriate source of knowledge about the physical world than most scientists do, but that is not the source of the education conflict. If the creationists were willing to teach their views only in their churches - something that nobody challenges their right to do - the conflict would not exist.

Look at the Amish, for example. I'm honestly not sure what their view of evolution is, but I strongly suspect that a group that is religiously opposed to automobiles, television, and electric lighting does not view science as a source of authoritative knowledge. Their views on these topics do not create controversy because they have no problem with keeping their beliefs within their own community. They do not ask to be allowed to require our children to be educated in accordance with their views; they educate their children themselves, and leave the rest of us alone. Their views may be incompatible with science, but they do not cause controversy the way that creationists do.

The conflict arises when creationists attempt to force their religious views onto the children of other people, who do not necessarily share those views. That's not a dispute over what the most authoritative source of knowledge is; that's a dispute over the exercise of secular authority. In other words, it's a political conflict.

Stop Stupak's Ideological Imposition.

The fantastic Jodi Jacobson has an article up at RHRealityCheck on the hideous attempt by Representatives Stupak and Pitts to deny women the right to coverage under private insurance plans for abortion services, a legal service in this country. Jodi writes:

A vote originally set for tomorrow on the House health care bill (HR 3200) may be delayed until next week, even after months of drama to arrive at this point. And to get to yes, Democrats are set to make another compromise on abortion care.

If there is one thing this process has revealed it is that there is no real way to find common ground on women's sexual and reproductive health and rights with today's Republican party, or with the majority of the so-called Democrats for Life, who for all intents and purposes under the leadership of Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak are currently acting as the legislative arm of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops. These folks don't even support access to contraception for the purpose of reducing unintended pregnancies, never mind abortion even to save the life of the mother, so "compromise" on an issue of such profound implications for women is an idealized concept to say the least.

And in fact passage of the current bill remains in question in part because of demands by Stupak and anti-choice forces for language that would completely eliminate coverage of abortion care even in private insurance plans.

As noted here before, a Guttmacher Institute study has found that 87 percent of typical employer-based insurance policies cover abortion care. So under Stupak's proposed amendment to the bill, women would actuallylose coverage under health reform. It seems Minority Leader John Boehner had it partly right when he talked about health reform as a threat to freedom, but he was confused because it is the anti-choice amendments to this bill that threaten the freedom of women to choose private insurance plans that meet their needs.

Click here and tell your representative that health care reform should increase services and not be used to further "pro-life" groups' agenda of limiting access to women's services.

More here.

New Study on Why Voters Believe Falsehoods.

From AlterNet, a fascinating story by Emily Badger on a new study that looks at why some voters still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11:

Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Of 49 people included in the study who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn't true.

The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence — even when it came from President Bush himself.

"I was surprised at the diversity of it, what I kind of charitably call the creativity of it," said Steve Hoffman, one of the study's authors and now a visiting assistant professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

The voters weren't dupes of an elaborate misinformation campaign, the researchers concluded; rather, they were actively engaged in reasoning that the belief they already held was true.

This type of "motivated reasoning" — pursuing information that confirms what we already think and discarding the rest — helps explain why viewers gravitate toward partisan cable news and why we tend to see what we want in The Colbert Report. But when it comes to justifying demonstrably false beliefs, the logic stretches even thinner.

By the time the interviews were conducted, just before the 2004 election, the Bush Administration was no longer muddling a link between al-Qaeda and the Iraq war. The researchers chose the topic because, unlike other questions in politics, it had a correct answer.

Subjects were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of this Bush quote: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda."

The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.

"Well, I bet they say that the commission didn't have any proof of it," one subject responded, "but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that."

Reasoned another: "Saddam, I can't judge if he did what he's being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it."

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

(Above italics mine.)

Badger applies the findings to rampant belief in lies regarding health care reform:

The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.

Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war, just as it exists today in the health care debate.

"I do think there's something to be said about people like Sarah Palin, and even more so Chuck Grassley, supporting this idea of death panels in a national forum," Hoffman said.

He won't credit them alone for the phenomenon, though.

"That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea ... " he said. "Our argument is that people aren't just empty vessels. You don't just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They're actually active processing cognitive agents."

Liberals aren't off the hook either, the study shows. And what happens in a democracy where certain segments of the voting public ignore facts in order to maintain beliefs in ideas that may be false?

"I think we'd all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions," said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study.

That some people might not do that even in the face of accurate information, the authors suggest in their article, presents "a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice."

"The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways."

Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts and that has characterized the current health care debate.

Hoffman's advice for crafting such an environment: "The congressional town hall meetings, that is a sort of test case in how not to do it."

Sarah Posner Blogging at ReligionDispatches.

The fabulous Sarah Posner, author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and former keeper of the FundamentaList has a new blog at RelgionDispatches.

In her inaugural post she writes:

Welcome to my new RD blog, which will cover the intersection of religion and politics in Washington and beyond. I will report on and analyze a wide range of topics, including the most recent maneuvering of the religious right, how religious interests are influencing legislation and policy, threats to the separation of church and state, the influence of religion in elections, and more.

Johnny Isakson Over a Barrel.

So that little bit in the reform bill mandating euthanasia? That's right, article 1233. Well, Ezra Klein figured out that it was added by a Republican, Johnny Isakson from Georgia, who, when found and interviewed, talked up his addition as necessary. Wait a beat. He was later heard to be disparaging the health care reform bill as promoting euthanasia. Hmmm. Looks like his party got to him. Or his crazy small, crazy pool of constituents. Isakson is up for reelection in 2010. Good luck with that Johnny.

Video on Isakson on Fox News.

Santorum in 2012?!?

Nothing would make me happier, politically. Personally, I could come up with a few happinesses right now.

More on Terri Schiavo.

From HuffPo, Digby at Hullabaloo, and RHRealityCheck.

And the ever-crazy Jill Stanek. Birthers (those who keep asking for Obama's birth certificate), Deathers (those who think the government is out to save money on their hides), Teabaggers (who have coopted a sex term for their anti-government rallying), Astroturfers (who spout the line of Republicans and corporations on corporate dimes). Watching the town hall videos that are circulating, I am ashamed of how uninformed some of these speakers are, at how unwilling they are to find out the facts, and how quick they are to speak loudly about something they refuse to learn about. This is a true low point in public discourse.

I'm reminded that democracy only works when the voting public is educated.

And me at ReligionDispatches, in case you need the reminder.

Sorry But the Crazy Really Made Me Laugh.

Jon Stewart on the crazy of town halls and health care reform.

Yes, it is that insane.

Geico Pulled Ads from Glenn Beck.

Yippee! I know it wasn't just my email threatening to switch insurance companies (and crossing my fingers that I wouldn't have to), but it sure feels good to know that corporations can be held accountable. May Glenn Beck's ad revenue wither to nothing.

Geico Pulls Its Ads from Glenn Beck Show

Naked Wrestling!?!

I strongly encourage you to read Doonesbury over at Slate as Trudeau chases down The Family. Dark humor indeed!

"So it's not some wacko conspiracy theory?"
"No, no. It's being discussed on CNN."

The Resurrection of Terri Schiavo.

I have a new post up at ReligionDispatches today that examines the contested legacy of Terri Schiavo. Be certain to read the comments - and add one of your own!

Racism and Health Care Reform.

A number of weeks ago, while I was upstate housesitting, I got caught in a rather intense online debate with someone I knew in high school, Dan, but haven't seen since then, and a number of his friends. It happened on facebook; I saw his post which said something to the effect that if the top 2% of the American population was indeed taxed to pay for univeral health care, he was going to leave the country. It was a brutal exchange and one that smacked of unspoken racism and maybe even a dose of mysogyny. I was a lone woman, defending the need for universal health care against 3 white, educated, self-employed southern males.

My high school friend and I managed to keep some of the peace and civility, while one of the other commenters and I made nice and I refuse to exchange comments with the third.

In short, Dan says that government intervention - programs managed by the government to provide services like health care to the uninsured - is something that we should agree to disagree about. But I am left to wonder why this is an issue that has no solution. We already have programs that save the lives of those who are too old or too disadvantaged to make it on their own: Food stamps, medicare and medicaid, student loan programs. I could go on about the successes of these programs. And yet, Dan's crowd feel that most of these programs are teaching an entire class of Americans to suckle at the government's teet.

When I mentioned priviledge, they cried out boot straps. Dan's wife briefly entered the conversation to tell me how she was born dirt poor and had managed to make it out because she worked so hard. The poor, she told me, were lazy and needed to take care of themselves. I asked her if her poor parents were lazy. That didn't go over well.

Those who oppose government's (further) involvement in health care tend to be those who say, I worked for what I have. The poor can too. But in Dan's case, his father was a white college professor. I don't want to take anything away from Dan's intellect and efforts, but it's not like he grew up in the projects or lived in section 8 housing. He never was inside the cell that is poverty.

Priviledge is so seldom acknowledged by those of us who like to think that we deserve what we have. Accepting that we don't deserve what we have is a hard thing to get the mind around - and the powers of marketing have worked so hard at making us believe that "we're worth it!" Buying that new car is a little more dificult when you have to think about whether you need it or not. Because you deserve it you have it; other's who don't deserve it don't have it. This proves their inferiority, their laziness, their lack of contribution to society.

Hand-outs - entitlements - are seen as spoiling those lazy children who don't have the good education, the fine car, the right accent or skin color. And the class structure that keeps the poor poor and the wealthy wealthy is perpetuated - and justified - by those who have. "They're not getting health insurance. They're not getting my health insurance."

All three of these guys were gung-ho for charity! One of them said he would rather give a check each month to three poor families than give his money to the government. To me, this smacked of paternalism, of the ideas in slavery that kept a landowner free from the stigma of slavery as long as he was good to his slaves. Charity elevates us, makes us feel superior. We can feel better about our consumerist excesses when we give something away to the less fortunate. (Another post some day should be looking at how this attitude poisons our international aid and foreign policy!)

The point I am getting at is this: If it weren't for racism, for the fear that a predominently white culture has of being placed on the level with minorities, we would have health care reform by now. Not only do those in this country who are teabagging and brownshirting represent a fascist element within our society that is rife with racism (opression of white men!), obscene nationalism (real Americans!), paranoia and delusion (he wasn't born in America), and ignorance (health care reform equals the Holocaust) and great fear of being on the same level as other citizens (the browns and blacks and poor), but they are getting a free pass to push their violence and agenda from the Republican party, Republican commentors, and the media.

How many gunman deaths does it take to wake us up? Is it acceptible that senators and representatives are being hung in effigy or receiving death threats? Do we really think that government health care will lead to euthanasia. What does our current administration really have in common with the third reich?

I don't want to be alarmist; as Amanda says, I think the violence turns off a majority of independents and basically sane Americans. Yet, some people with volume need to start calling this out for what it is in terms that will be heard.

I got to this post on the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates via Amanda Marcotte's Facebook posts. I highly recommend you read it because it better lays out this position than I have been able to. And it will scare the bejesus out of you.

There are a few in the country who are watching this trend of fascism, who are listening to our racist fellow citizens struggle with their sense of threatened priviledge, entitlement and authority. I only hope they will speak up more loudly. Obama's election (and Sotomoyor's appointment) wrongly left us with the belief that racism was over. We could all pat ourselves on the back for being so anti-racist. But we are a long way from equal opportunity. I am reminded of this every time Pat Buchanan says that the white man is being oppressed by a colored man's success.

Gibbs Flubs Assisted Suicide Count.

Oh geez. Lifenews takes Press Secretary Gibbs to task for only naming Oregon during an end-of-life, assisted suicide question at a press conference. The two other states where assisted suicide is legal are Washington (as with Oregon, by state vote) and Montana, where it was legalized by court ruling and is still under contention.

Regardless, it was a shoddy answer that got no one, not the press, not the administration, not the public, talking about end-of-life issues. And when the "pro-life" camp talks about end-of-life, they do so in absolutes.

Like abortion, assisted suicide, when legal is increasingly difficult to obtain. When not legal, it occurs among the desperate, lonely and determined. Legalization ensures a humane end for those who wish to no longer be sustained by artificial means or have come to the end of their thread.

You can read more at Lifenews, if you want to get pissy about it.

The Family Doonesbury.

You know your friend has made it when the subject of his muckraking book shows up in the frames of Doonesbury. Super nice, Jeff Sharlet.

Of course appearances on Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher are impressive too.

GOP, Look at Yourself.

Blogger JR at DailyKos posts this image and asks the GOP to look at themselves. Here is a young boy calling the first black president of the US a monkey.

This is not an example of democracy at work. This is a racist, shameful example of the baser elements within our society scaring themselves into a frenzy of willful ignorance, lies, deceit, and violence.