The Partisan Dimensions of Civil Religion in the United States

• In Event: Surveys and Measurement of Religion

Abstract

Civil religion has been described as the story of America (Gorski 2019) or the unifying values and “common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share” (Bellah 1967). There have been recent calls for a revitalized civil religion (Gorski 2019), but the idea that civil religion can truly be a unifying public consciousness has long been debated Importantly, the connection of civil religion to mass polarization has been under-analyzed. Public opinion work on civil religion has shown that these attitudes can be coherent in the mass public, especially in light of the polarization of the mass public. We seek to unravel an empirical question about civil religion, with normative implications: Can civil religion be unifying, or does is it fractured by partisanship and social identities?

To address this question, we use two different survey research strategies. First, we created a civil religion battery and deployed it on two different cross-sectional surveys in 2020. The results indicate that there are multiple dimensions to civil religion, and these dimensions are structured along partisan lines. This seems to indicate that rather than promoting unity, civil religion as prone to being interpreted in partisan lenses.

Second, we have developed two survey experiments to not only understand the dimensions of civil religion but to improve on the causal mechanisms that link civil religion to political behavior. In the first survey experiment, we randomize the type of language a politician uses when supporting coronavirus mask mandates (control, civil religion, ideological), and we do so for both pro- and anti-mask arguments. In the second, we randomize a group who is engaging in a political protest (control, Black Lives Matter, Trump Supporters), while keeping the civil religion language constant. These experiments will allow us to compare how specific civil religious language affects public opinion, how it varies by the issue presented, and how it interacts with identities. Both will be deployed by Winter/Spring 2021.

In the end, our research should help scholars better understand the dynamics of civil religion in public opinion, and it should contribute to scholarship on politics and religious rhetoric in the U.S.

Authors

• Andrew R. Lewis, University of Cincinnati

• Abigail Vegter, Berry College

• Cammie Jo Bolin, Georgetown University