The Politics of Partisan Neutrality

Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio

Americans who want to understand conflicts between Democrats and Republicans during the election season have received precious little help from the media. While reporters usually recognize that there is some sort of problem about “values” and about “faith-based” principles, and that the Democrats and Republicans are often on opposite sides, writers and editors tend to publish news and analysis as if the situation were as follows: The Christian right, having infiltrated the Republican Party, is importing its divisive religious ideas into our public life, whereas the Democratic Party is the neutral camp of tolerant and pluralistic Americans.

This way of framing the matter predominates, not only because it reflects the personal beliefs of many journalists, but also because it draws upon a long American tradition of suspicion and fear of committed Catholics and evangelical Protestants. (In the elite newspapers and magazines, the number of journalists in either of those groups is tiny.) It is thus comfortable for journalists to conceive of religiously based political conflict in terms of an aggressive Christian right advancing upon a beleaguered neutral and pluralistic center and left.

What the journalists leave out of their accounts is the fact that the nonreligious have also become aggressive actors on the political stage and that they possess and promote, in fact, an overarching religious worldview of their own—one that can fairly be called secularism.

This point is strongly supported from the results of our analysis (using the Lexis-Nexis database) of how the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post wrote about the culture wars between 1990 and 2000. Over this ten-year period, these three newspapers published just eighteen articles linking the culture wars to the secularist-religious cleavage dividing the Democratic and Republican parties. During this same time span, however, these papers published 929 news stories about the political machinations of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, while doing only fifty-nine stories about the pivotal role played by secularists in these conflicts. The press did not overlook the culture wars, just the involvement of secularists in them.

Read the rest of the First Things article here.

-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45-nospam@hotmail.com), May 18, 2004

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-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45-nospam@hotmail.com), May 18, 2004.

from the article:

John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, exemplifies very well the secularist direction of the Democratic Party. We created a ten-point secularism (or antitraditionalism) scale from National Journal’s Almanac of American Politics, which compiles congressional roll-call votes over the past decade. These votes concerned education savings accounts and IRAs that could be used for religious schools, restrictions on abortion (such as parental notification and the partial-birth ban), and various bills affecting homosexual issues. A senator’s vote was coded “secularist” if the position taken on the bill was in accord with a majority of secularist sentiment (and in opposition to a majority of religiously traditionalist opinion) on this type of issue in the ANES and Pew surveys. A ten on this scale indicates that the senator had a perfect secularist score; a zero indicates a perfect antisecularist or traditionalist score. The average Democratic Senate score was 8.9; the average for the Republicans was 0.95. Senator Kerry scored a perfect 10. With the retirements of John Breaux from Louisiana (who had a score of 1.0) and Georgia’s Zell Miller (who scored 0 during his tenure), senate Democrats will in all likelihood come to reflect even more the secularism of Kerry and even less the values of cultural traditionalism.

-- Bill Nelson (bnelson45-nospam@hotmail.com), May 18, 2004.