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Table of Contents
Special
Section: Introduction
The New Religion Gap
Hispanic Catholics
Non-Hispanic Catholics
Evangelicals Inside the Beltway
Evangelicals Outside the Beltway
Mainline Protestants
African American Protestants
Jews
Arab Americans: Muslims and Others
Contributors
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Religion is often a critical factor
in American elections, but its salience varies from place to place and
election to election. For 2004, it’s already clear that on issues ranging
from abortion and faith-based social services to the Middle East and the war
on terrorism, candidates and interest groups will be attempting to appeal to
voters on the basis of their religious commitments.
In September, to help journalists
understand current trends and possibilities as they prepare to cover the
2004 campaign, the Leonard E. Greenberg Center and the Ray C. Bliss
Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron sponsored a
Conference on Religion in the 2004 Election. Leading scholars made
presentations on the politics of key religious constituencies: how they
vote, how they are being mobilized, and how best to cover them.
The special section that follows
presents highlights of those talks. The section opens with an overview of
religion and voting patterns by John Green of the Bliss Institute and Mark
Silk of the Greenberg Center that proposes a useful new measure of
religion’s impact on American politics. A series of election exit polls and
opinion surveys now suggests a new and significant pattern in American
public life: Those citizens who are highly observant and those who are less
so—across denominational and religious borders—are drifting into different
political camps. In particular, over the past decade, Americans who attend
worship at least once a week have increasingly tended to vote Republican.
Tracking this "Religion Gap," Green and Silk propose, provides important
insight into today's electoral politics.
The section then moves to a set of
briefings that analyze the political traditions and tensions that
characterize eight major religious groups. Each is written by a scholar who
has produced distinguished work on the group and who continues to follow it
closely.
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