The Greatest Commandments: How Religious Polarization Can Reshape Belief

• In Event: Religious Identities

Abstract

The religion and politics literature has long argued that religious beliefs influence political preferences. Recent works also suggest the causal arrow between religion and politics may be flipped, pointing to the influence politics can have on religious affiliation. Less well-developed, however, is our understanding of the relationship from politics to religious belief. While some scholars explore how religious belief may be abandoned due to political identity, our picture of the way politics influences theology among those who retain their faith is less clear, in part due to the relatively narrow aspects of belief typically measured in large-n, longitudinal survey research.

In this paper, I use new evidence to explore politics-driven shifts within the religious belief systems of American evangelicals. Applying the tools of automated text analysis to a set of Christian periodicals spanning over half a century, I first recover measurable trends in sentiment toward religious and political out-groups over time. I quantify religious polarization with these trends, showing that that as patterns of group sentiment shift, religious and political cleavages overlap in distinct ways. I then build novel text dictionaries to measure significant variation in intra-group expressions of religious beliefs, arguing that political science can learn from its understanding of ideology in its approach to theology. I offer preliminary evidence for changes in theological emphases among American Christians, specifically evangelicals, driven by overlapping group cleavages associated with religious polarization.

Using qualitative data from the same set of periodicals to support my claims, I theorize that overlapping group divisions drive logical associations between political and theological issues among religious elites, resulting in changing beliefs and theological emphases over time. In this way, I build from existing works on religious polarization, which emphasize division between believers and non-believers. Finally, I speculate on the ways that these politics-driven shifts in elite conversation influence religious believers more broadly.

Author

• Amy Lakeman, Harvard University