 Good evening everyone. Thank you for being here as the first half of a long evening of political conversation. I'm sure you are all rushing off at 9 o'clock to watch the third and last debate. We promise we will finish by about 8.45 so that you'll have no excuse for not being there when it all gets started. So we're glad that you're here. My name is Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies. And this is the Christopher F. Mooney Lecture on Religion and Society. Almost all of you here do not remember Christopher Mooney, but Christopher Mooney was the academic vice president at Fairfield University some 25 years ago now and a very distinguished scholar. He died suddenly and we established this lecture in his honor and he will be delighted to see you all here this evening. In fact, everything that he liked, he always said was marvelous. So it's marvelous to see you here. And we're also very pleased to have Professor Mark Silk with us this evening to give us the benefit of his wisdom on the advertised topic of the roles of religion in the presidential election process. For the last 20 years, Professor Silk has been the director of the Leonard Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford where he is also professor of religion in public life. So we really couldn't have a better guide through the confluence and the confrontations between religion and politics. He graduated from Harvard College. I was going to tell you what year, but he probably doesn't want me to say. So long ago, he graduated from Harvard College and then he earned his PhD in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. He taught at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for several years, became editor of the Boston Review. And then in 1987, he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal Constitution where he worked for some of the time as reporter, editorial writer, and columnist. Then in 1996, he moved to Trinity and took up this position in the Greenberg Center. And in 1998, became the founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine that's published by his center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In June 2005, he was also named director of the Trinity College program on public values, which brings together the Greenberg Center and a new institute for the study of secularism in society and culture. He's the author or co-author of several books. Most recently, a book called One Nation Divisible, How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics, and he's been the editor or co-editor of many more books. He's a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the American Society of Church History. And then for the social media types among you, it looks like almost everybody from the third row back. He can frequently be found online at Religion News Service, hosts his own blog, Spiritual Politics, and tweets at Director Silk. After his presentation, he'd be happy to take questions and we'll have a couple of mics to pass around so that we can hear your questions. So please join me in welcoming Mark Silk to deliver the Christopher F. Mooney lecture. Thank you, Paul, and it's a pleasure to be back at Fairfield and I feel right at home not having anybody except the introducer and the first two rows. You know, it's like, keep your distance. We're talking about the two things that in a bar you're never supposed to discuss, religion and politics. And so the farther you stay away from the presenter, the better. But it is a delight to be here. My training, as you probably gathered, we're not going back to the Middle Ages, but I am a historian by training. And so necessarily, I'm afraid, I'm going to have to inflict some history on you because historians only understand the present by way of the past and there is no way around it. I only play a social scientist on TV. So let me begin on this auspicious night by talking a little bit about the time, which is the next worst time in American politics to today, the elections of 1796 and 1800, Thomas Jefferson, the supporter of the French Revolution versus the Federalists. This was an ugly time, I think not as ugly as we are today, but American historians up until now have tended to regard to this the worst time in terms of just the general sense of how people talk. And it's astonishing in a way, it's comparable to, for those of you in religious studies, to the Israelites in the Golden Calf. Here you have the appearance, the theophany at Sinai, God appears, and two minutes later the Golden Calf is being built in the late 1790s and early 1800s. Here are the founding fathers, the great figures in American history, fighting, not only fighting with each other, tooth and nail, but accusing each other of all kinds of misbehavior, sexual, financial, and otherwise. So it has always been thus. The point of all this is only in terms of the present subject is to say that really at this early time American politics did experience some interesting divisions in terms of religion. You had this very odd alliance on behalf of the Jeffersonians between evangelical Protestants at the time, who were almost all Baptists, who believed as strongly in separation of church and state as it's possible to believe, and liberal deists and even atheist types against establishment sorts, Congregationalists in Connecticut and Anglican types, Episcopalians in Virginia. This was really the earliest time in which religion played a part in American politics, and it even led someone as unreligious in his early days as Alexander Hamilton to propose in 1802 to a friend that the country established, or that the federalists established, something called basically the moral majority of its time, the Christian Constitutional Society, which would have chapters in every state and every town, and which would sort of ramp up federalist propaganda, elect the right people, and kick out the Jeffersonians. His friend, who was a member of the House of Representatives from Delaware, thought it was a bad idea, this was in April in the spring of 1802, going up to the midterm elections in 1802, and instead, so Hamilton never got this little thing off the ground, rather what the federalists cooked up, or at least one of them did, was the scandal, the sexual scandal of Thomas Jefferson and the slave who belonged to him, Sally Hemings. That story broke, it was not an October surprise, but a September surprise, the first of September of 1802, and I just put this picture up because I happen to write an article, which you can look up in the Smithsonian Magazine in the November issue right now, but we're gonna move right along past this, this is just a bit of self-promotion. All right, enough for the Founding Fathers. What I really wanna talk about for the next few minutes is how religion matters through most of American history up until now, not Baptists and deists and congregationalist establishmentarians, but rather, well, Catholics and anti-Catholics. American religious politics really establishes its sort of present modality in the 1840s when the country is inundated with Irish Catholics, there may be a few descendants of Irish Catholics who emigrated to these shores because of the potato famine in the 1840s. They arrived particularly in places like New England, but also in Philadelphia and other cities on the East Coast and the people who called themselves then Native Americans, Protestants, did not like them. And so we began to have a politics divided between Native American Protestants and Catholics. The most notorious moment of all this involves a party that was really a set of parties that came to call itself different things, sometimes the American party, but actually have come down in history known as the know-nothings. The know-nothings were so-called because when you asked them what their positions were, what their party platform was, they said they knew nothing about it because they didn't want to tell you. And there was a certain sense then as now that actively doing politics on sectarian grounds, on religious grounds was a bad thing. It was kind of un-American after all, this was a country in some sense believed to be established for people to worship as they pleased. So the idea of having a party which was anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic immigrant was something that you didn't want to talk about, although in fact in states like this very one in Connecticut, know-nothing candidates, anti-Catholic candidates were elected to office, took over in the 1850s, in the 1854 election in particular, and passed various laws, one of which was, for example, we didn't want these Catholics voting, so we would require them, anybody who emigrated to these shores to wait 20 years before they could become naturalized citizens. Those are the good old days when America was great, that we want to make America great again. Just kidding, of course. The know-nothings were absorbed in the late 1850s by a new party, it was called the Republican Party, and they sort of scooped up the know-nothings who were, and I should say this by the way, historians now regard the know-nothings as not simply a bunch of bigots, but actually people who were sort of working-class, not very well-educated people who felt that both parties didn't represent their interests. I know that this is hard to believe in today's time, that there could be any group of Americans who didn't feel sufficiently represented by the existing political parties, but it did happen. I detected a giggle here or there, and it's meant to be giggled. All right, it's a tough crowd. But what could I do? All right, so there it was. The Republicans' parties suck up the know-nothings, and of course, a choir as happens when you get a kind of biological connection, absorption of this sort, absorb an anti-immigrant gene, which is alive to this day, one might say. How that happens in politics, as opposed to biology? I don't presume to say, not being a biologist, but in any event, by the time we get done with the Civil War, we begin to see how these things sort out, how really religious, and one might better say ethno-religious groups sort of find their political identities. So let's go through a kind of list. After the Civil War, white Southerners, who were, by the end of Reconstruction, the only people voting in the South since African Americans are disenfranchised, white Southerners become almost exclusively, except in parts of the up and south, which didn't leave the Union or in Tennessee, Upper East Tennessee, which continued to send troops to the Union, but became Democrats. So if you were a white evangelical Protestant Southerner, and almost all Southerners were really evangelical Protestants, there were some Catholics in South Louisiana, and maybe in Charleston and a few places like that, but by and large, this was who Southerners were, and you became, died in the wool, Democrats. In fact, over time, people began to consider these people, they would be called yellow dog Democrats, a term which was meant to refer to the fact that if a yellow dog was put on the ballot, but it had a D next to its name, you would vote for it. So that was white evangelical Protestants. African Americans who vote before the end of reconstruction in the South and certainly throughout the North become allied to the party of Lincoln, they become Republicans, this is the party that freed the slaves really, and so African Americans are Republicans. Catholics who are immigrants, and most immigrant populations who come and live in the big cities in the East and the Midwest increasingly become Democrats. And so there is this sense of division by ethno-religious groups in terms of our partisan politics. Anti-Catholicism is the kind of light motif of American politics through the 19th century and well into the 20th. One of the most famous moments of this happens in the 1884 election, the Republican candidate whose name is James Blaine, James G. Blaine, sometimes called the Continental Liar from the state of Maine by his enemies. Just before the election, holds a big rally of Protestant ministers in New York City and the elderly Presbyterian minister who introduces him much less civilly than I was introduced, and says that he is opposing the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion. The Democratic Party, James Blaine, is distressed at this introduction because he would like to scoop up some votes from those people. But unfortunately for him, there's an AP reporter in the crowd with a stenographer, which is how things worked in 1884, and the story went coast to coast and cost him the election very probably to Grover Cleveland Alexander. All right, so we have this kind of post-Civil War ethno-religious division in the country and it has to be dealt with by politics. So if you're a Democratic politician in the early 20th century, such as the famous populist William Jennings Brine, you know that you're gonna have to put together a coalition in order to win of Southern white evangelicals and Northern ethnic Catholics. The evangelicals in the South don't like alcohol and don't believe in selling it. The Catholics in the North don't have any problem with alcohol. And so there's a lot of compromising of that sort that has to be done, particularly in the Democratic Party, which has to put together these kinds of coalitions. The Republican Party becomes, is pretty much the party of Northern white Protestants, of whom there is no shortage and to the extent that they vote African-Americans. All right, so these are, as anybody who knows anything about how ethno-religious political arrangements work now know that these are not, these allegiances are not set in stone. And the next big movement, which really begins in the late 20s with the candidacy, I mean you can see it in the candidacy of the first Roman Catholic to be nominated by a major American political party, Al Smith, the governor of New York in 1928. But particularly during the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's coalition of Democrats that carry all before it in order to deal with the Great Depression in the 1930s, the New Deal coalition features, or sets in place, a sort of ethno-religious grouping or way of understanding things, which differs in some respects from what happened immediately after the Civil War, namely groups like Jews who have been pretty democratic now become solidly democratic. African-Americans begin to shift away from the Republican Party seeing that the New Deal and the Democratic Party is going to be looking after their interests more than the Republican Party. And we get in a place like Connecticut, since we happen to be in Connecticut, it's an interesting place, it's a very strongly Republican establishment here in order for the Democrats to win as they did under Governor Wilbur Cross, who has, if you take the Merritt Parkway up far enough, you'll get to the Wilbur Cross. Wilbur Cross is an interesting character, an Episcopalian, a kind of what some people used to call around here, Swamp Yankee from Eastern Connecticut, near Stores, Mansfield, Connecticut. And he was a Yale professor who decided after he retired that he'd do something easy, like go into politics, he was elected four times as governor of the state. And he presided over a kind of interesting emergent coalition in this state of ethnic Catholics, of Jews, and the odd Swamp Yankees that you could pick up who were still Democrats and was able to prevail with that kind of thing. So the Democratic Party was that kind of a coalition that often included rather disagreeing groups but united in a dislike of Yankee Republicans. All right, just to move forward quickly here, that New Deal coalition after World War II begins to change itself. One of the ways, and perhaps in terms of how things have developed towards our time, one of the most significant, then probably the most significant development was the shift of white Southerners away from the Democratic Party. Very slowly, a gradual change, but really moved initially by the position of the Democratic Party on issues of race. In 1948, President Harry Truman desegregates the army and really sets the Democratic Party, which has depended on Southern segregation as Democrats, but sets the National Democratic Party on the road to supporting civil rights. And this pushes Republicans, pushes white Southerners at least initially on national issues towards the Republican Party and eventually turning lots of white Southerners into what we might call today, yellow dog Republicans. If you go to parts of the South, and as you heard, I worked there for almost a decade, traditional white Southerners now in most states of the Confederacy are Republicans, except with immigrants, and we can talk about places like Florida and Virginia, but let me not delay too much on that. In terms of Catholics, after World War II, white Catholics, and that's most Catholics in the country at the time, move out of their urban enclaves, out of South Boston and, you know, Brooklyn and Queens and other parts, other major cities, move into the suburbs, start to make some real money, start to make some money, and become Republicans, many of them. And so the Catholic vote, which was really an important and solid group begins to turn into something else, such that nowadays, and I'll come back to this, white Catholics are now somewhat more Republican than they are Democratic as a general rule. This would have appalled lots of leading Catholics back in the 1930s, but, you know, this is the price you pay for living a good life in the suburbs, in Fairfield. Okay. You know, this kind of change doesn't happen everywhere. Jews, for some reason, remain very allied with the Democratic Party, even though they move out of their urban enclaves and into the suburbs. Why that is, is something of an interesting thing to ponder, but the joke is, some of you will have heard it, but that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. Some people haven't heard this. That's good. And it's actually, it's, well, I don't think Episcopalians are actually doing that well these days, but the Puerto Ricans are very Democratic voters. All right. African-Americans become very solidly Democratic. And, you know, and this takes a while, particularly for the African-American elite. Martin Luther King Jr.'s father, so-called Daddy King, who was the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church before Martin Luther King Jr. took it over, was a Republican to his dying day. He was maintaining, keeping the faith with the party of Lincoln. But such African-Americans are, and became very few and far between. Mormons, interestingly enough, and Mormons are an interesting group, particularly because although they're a small minority, the population is a whole, they're quite strong in a couple of places, Utah, most northern Arizona, southern Idaho. Mormons were fairly divided between Democrats and Republicans when they first become a state and through the early part of the 20th century. By now they are as Republican a crowd as you could have. So that's the sort of evolution of religious voting blocks. One of the interesting things that happens, however, well, let me just, as long as we're doing things, this is just an indication of how Republican white evangelicals are. This is from two years ago. You can see that if you divide the entire population into white evangelicals and non-white evangelicals, if we just got rid of all the white evangelicals, it would be a different country. All right, so that's the basic picture there. This is very old story, slow shifts, ethno-religious groups who are pretty identifiable with a couple of big exceptions, which we'll get to at least one of them shortly. One of the things that happens though in the 1990s is we begin to get a new way and religion becomes a new kind of factor in American electoral politics. And here's a way of seeing it. It's not completely up to date, but it will give you a good picture. The basic deal here is you can divide the population and these are, I should say, you know, the issue here is really not which religious group you belong to, but how religious you are. And there are various ways in which you can measure how religious someone is. You can sit down with them for a couple of hours and kind of try to draw them out on how important religious is to their lives, but if you're doing big surveys, you don't have time for that kind of stuff. You've got to find some rough and ready way of determining how religious someone is and the way it's been determined that we do that is by asking people in an exit poll how often they go to religious services. And if they say once a week or more, they're pretty religious as far as you're concerned. Even if they've been dragged there by their wives and have to sit at mass every week, even though they would much rather be watching football. That's just, but that's the way we do it and it's not a bad indication. Now, of course, when you ask people, and this takes place, I don't know if you've ever, anybody here has ever been approached by someone doing an exit poll, but that's how we determine it. People come out of the voting booth, they're corralled in certain places, they're asked a whole bunch of questions, you mark them down whether they're a woman, they're a man, you ask them about their income, you ask them about their religion, you ask them how often they go to religious services, and all that provides the information that we have about how different groups have voted. So people come out and some of them, when you ask them how often they attend religious services, some proportion of them say weekly or more. In fact, they're not always telling the truth. We know this because more people say that they're weekly attenders than, by other means, we know attend services weekly, but nonetheless, we don't worry about this because what people are really telling you when they say that is that they're the kind of person who attends weekly. I mean, last week, the dog was sick, he had to go to the vet the week before my mother-in-law was in town, and so he didn't have a chance to go to mass, but I am someone who goes weekly. So if we do that, and we don't pay any attention to what religion any of these people say they are, but we just look at everybody in terms of how often they attend. The weekly people, this is just, you just take all the people who say they attend weekly and you ask them whether they voted for the Republican or the Democrat, what you're gonna find, and what we found consistently, at least up until this year, and people haven't voted this year yet, is that since about the year 2000, by a margin of 6040, weekly attenders have voted Republican. And this has created what journalists and other journalistic types came to call the God Gap, the tendency of more religious people to vote Republican. And this is in contrast, or at least one of the reasons we started talking about gaps is because of something called the gender gap, which had sort of been recognized before that, the gender gap being the proclivity of women to vote Democratic versus men voting Republican. And likewise, your non-weekly attenders tended to be more Democratic in their vote. So you have this bifurcation, or a double bifurcation in American voting patterns based on religion, based on religious attendance, regardless of what your particular faith happened to be. But religiosity as a division, as gender was a division. And in fact, the religion or God Gap has been larger throughout this whole period than the gender gap. And you can see that through the year, just for up until the year 2004, I could have extended it, but this happened to be the chart at hand. And you can see that beginning really importantly in the 1990s, there is this growth in both gaps, but that particularly in these last elections, and this has persisted up until today, the God Gap, the religion gap, has been up around 20%, which is to say frequent attenders preferring the Republican Party by 20 points, whereas the gender gap has been somewhere in the neighborhood of around 10%. So that's that kind of picture. And one of the things that you can look at, if you look at a series of recent elections is how this works. Remember that every four years we elect a president, and then in between we have midterm elections where only Congress is elected, and Democrats tend to do well in presidential election years because lots more people turn out, Republicans do well in off-year elections. And what you can see here is that despite that difference in turnout, when it comes to worship attendance, the religion gap or God Gap has held pretty solid through these two different kinds of elections, whereas in the case of gender, there's actually been some considerable variation, more of a differentiation in the off-year elections when Republicans have done particularly well. I'm not gonna delay on that very much, but I wanna get to, and this is where I can play a social scientist, is a four-cell display. Political scientists love this kind of thing. From the 2000 election, the 2000 election is good because as most of you undergraduates will not recall, but some of you elderly people may, that the popular vote was almost identical. In fact, the Democrat who lost Al Gore had more votes by some hundreds of thousands than the Republican who won, but since we don't vote, don't determine presidential elections by popular vote, but by electoral college vote, he did not win. Of course, there was a Florida situation, but that's somebody else's lecture. All right, so this box, this graphic shows, I think a quite interesting way in which religion and gender interact in our electoral politics. What you have here are more religious men and women, less religious men and women, and what you can see is that the more religious women divided their vote, that is the weekly attending women, divided their vote between the Democrat and the Republican, the less religious men did, but the more religious men voted three to one Republican and the less religious women voted three to one Democratic. So this whole difference, this whole God gap as demonstrated by this graphic is the difference between men who don't go to church very much and I mean, men who do go to church a lot and women who don't go very much. The question, and if I were doing this in a class, I would ask for a show of, for all of you to tell me why this, how to explain these differences of votes, but since time is short and this is not a class, I will give you the answers or at least what political scientists think are the answers for this, and that is that, and it makes common sense, it's a common sensical explanation, which I don't dispute even if it is common sense, that if you think about the issues that the Republican Party has taken and the issues that the Democratic Party has taken an advanced positions on abortion, on gay rights, on education spending, on social welfare spending, on a host of things, on gun control. If you think about all those issues, what you will find or what you will, what we can say is that in the case of, there are certain kinds of issues which men, and we're talking in a generality, men are going to be more supportive or more opposed to and certain kinds of issues that appeal to women or don't appeal to women. So if you take gun control, men are opposed to gun control more than women are. So that means that's gonna push a man on the gun control issue towards the Republican Party. It will push a woman towards the Democratic Party. But say this woman is also a very devout Catholic and takes very seriously the abortion issue. Well, on the abortion issue, unlike the gun issue, she's pushed back towards the Republican Party, which is very much pro-life. So she's, on those two issues, she's divided. The man, on the other hand, no gun control, church going, anti-abortion. So he's there with the Republican Party on both of those things. And if we go down the list, what we'll find is that frequent attending men will have most of their issues on the Republican side and less attending women will have most of their issues on the Democratic side. And where you have people whose issues pull you in opposite directions, you're gonna have a more divided population, at least in this way. So that's the kind of picture that we can see. And so that's the kind of situation, I'm gonna go back so you can look at this and meditate on it. I wouldn't say that it's something Jesuits would take on retreat, but it's still something worth pondering. All right. One of the things that happens in the recent political past is that the Democratic Party around 2004 becomes aware of this God gap. So for example, when Barack Obama, then just a state senator from the state of Illinois, is brought forward for his, maybe some people thought 15 minutes of fame, that would eventually turn into eight years of being the American president. He gives a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, which John Kerry is nominated. And among the things he says is, we worship an awesome God in the blue states. In other words, the Democratic Party is not against religion. We still worship an awesome God in Connecticut and Illinois and New York and California. And that suggested the way that some Democrats, and increasingly large of them, saw this problem that they had to overcome. Namely, the perception that the Democratic Party was the party that was really hostile to religion. It wasn't true, and it certainly wasn't true for all of those African Americans who were voting Democratic, but in that great world of partisan politics, this was a case that needed to be made. And the new, after John Kerry has defeated his president, the new head of the Democratic National Committee is Howard Dean, a not very religious guy from former governor of Vermont, but he decides that the Democratic Party has to get up to speed on religion. He hires a Pentecostal minister, a woman named Leah Daughtry. Decides on a 50-state approach to elections. Decides that they need to recruit religious, evangelical Democrats around the country against the kind of prejudices or whatever one wants to call it, of the sort of inside the Beltway Democratic Pulse. He pushes this approach and lo and behold, the Democrats succeed. He succeeds. Democratic Party recaptures both houses of Congress in 2006, and we have a new political reality. Of course, they're helped along by the fact that the Iraq war is not going so well. George W. Bush's desire to partially privatize social security is not looking so hot. There are a lot of reasons why in 2006, the American people have had it with the Bush presidency, but this religious thing actually matters. And the Democrats take a lesson from this. In the 2008 election, both the major candidates, Hillary Clinton, as well as Barack Obama, make serious efforts to kind of demonstrate their religious bona fides and announce religious, heads of religious outreach and all this kind of stuff and go around and curry favor with leading evangelical pastors like Rick Warren from Saddleback Church in California, if that name means anything. And so this all matters. It doesn't actually work out so well. I mean, the election works out well. The nomination works out well for Barack Obama. Well, it doesn't work out so well. He runs into some problems with his home pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who is kind of a radical and not a fan of 9-11 response to 9-11. But, you know, a subject for another day. So, but nonetheless, this is a period, the first decade of the present century, where the Democrats feel like they've got to get up to speed on religion because of this God gap. However, and this is my next thing, what then begins to dawn on people, certainly on Democrats who look at the polling numbers, and certainly on students of religion in America, is a new development. And this is the rise of the nuns. And by that I do not mean the sisters of mercy. The people who, when you ask, what is your religion, if any, they say none. And those are the people who claim to have no religion. In 1990, the proportion of Americans who said that, maybe seven or eight percent, who asked them what their religion is, they say, I don't have a religion, fine. By the year 2001, that number had doubled. Today, it's almost 25%. And the population has increased. A quarter of the American population, and it's disproportionately people, young adults, we're talking adults, 18 years and older. A third of young adults say no religion. This is the biggest story in American religion of the past decade. And this little graphic sort of demonstrates this. This is from the 2012 election of people who actually voted. People who are nuns don't tend to participate that much, so their strength in voting is a little bit less. But you can see that the radical difference between younger voters and older voters, if you compare the percentage who are evangelicals and the percentage that are nuns, essentially they're almost inverse relationship. And this has very large implications because of the way people vote for American politics. This is one of the coolest graphics I know. This is from the 2012 election. And what it does is take the layout of voting in terms of religious identification for different age cohorts. So if you look at 18 to 29 year olds, 35 of the voters, 35% of them were what they call unaffiliated, these nuns. 12% were white evangelical Protestants, 9% white mainline Protestants, 5% white Catholics, not good news for Catholics. A lot of Hispanic and other Catholics, black Protestants, and so on. And you can see how the display works for other age cohorts. So when you get down to 65 plus, these antiquated people that are sitting in the front rows, you can see that they tend to be religiously affiliated and the layout is very different. All right, so that's that picture. But into that graphic then are inserted the actual voting coalitions for Obama and Romney. And Obama, the Obama coalition is nicely situated between young adults and middle-aged adults, well positioned, any political party would love to be there. The Romney coalition is essentially dead people. I mean, obviously they voted, but in terms of the age, they're aging out sort of unbelievably in terms of what looks like the evolution of religious identification in the American population. And this is a kind of dramatic demonstration of the challenge really to the Republican party, in contrast to the problem that the Democrats perceive themselves to have, which is a problem of people believing that they were not religious. The Republicans have a sort of godless gap problem. How do we appeal to people who have no religion and we want their votes, presumably Republicans should want to have their votes. So that really brings us up to this year and it's been a very interesting year in terms of this kind of layout because when you think about it, who are the last three candidates standing? One on the Republican side, Donald Trump, two on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Two of those three, not very religious. Donald Trump, yes, claims to be a Presbyterian, but I don't think there's anybody including the staunchest Trump supporter and I expect there's a Trump supporter or two here in the room today, think that he's a particularly devout person, they may be voting for him because of various claims that he's made about what he will do that conservative religious people want, but personally not so much. Likewise, Bernie Sanders of a Jewish background but not a synagogue attender, someone who didn't quite say that he didn't believe in God, but pretty close. So a couple of nuns more or less and then Hillary Clinton, a nice Methodist girl from the Midwest, not doing much with religion in a certain sense with a set of policies as a liberal, mainline Protestant indistinguishable from liberal secular politics. So in that sense, the current election campaign has in some ways reflected this rise of the nuns and in that sense, we find ourselves in a very interesting place. Now I wanna take a time out from this narrative to think because I'm here at Fairfield University, a little bit about this Catholic vote because religious cohorts still continue to matter and they matter in interesting ways. This is the Catholic vote for president 2004, 2008, 2012. And if you look closely, you will see that the Catholics are always right. They always get it right. If I ask someone, if somebody says, I'm on Mars, I don't know how the election turns out and I just say, tell me how the Catholics vote, I'll know who won the election. Why that is, is worth pondering. It is the case, however. So that's how the Catholic, now the issue with Catholics, one of the important things to say, and as anybody who's sort of addicted to looking at survey research and says, I don't wanna know just how Catholics feel about a particular presidential candidate. I wanna know how white Catholics feel and I wanna know how non-white Catholics feel about it because there is a strong bifurcation between the two. Non-white Catholics and by that we mostly mean Latino Catholics are very strong Democrats. But white Catholics, and I dare say there are a few in this room right now, white non-Hispanic Catholics are very divided. But other things being equal have trended over the past decade or so in a Republican direction. This is just party ID, it's not actual vote. If you ask white Catholics, non-Hispanic Catholics, what party they identify with, that's how it looks like. And by 2014 and 2013 there's a significant gap in favor of Republicans there. Here's the actual white Catholic vote for president and you'll see that it's gone over the last time always for the Republican and with the last election, pretty significantly for a Republican. That's not quite, but almost 20 point gaps. That's 60% to 40%. So that's the white Catholic vote. Now, if we look at polling data from this year, this is how it works for white Catholics. This is entirely taken from one set of polls. So that's pretty consistent. The Washington Post ABC polls and it's bounced around a fair amount. At one point in August, actually white Catholics were favoring Hillary. Then she had a bad month in September, big gap, almost as big as earlier in favor of Donald Trump. And at the moment things seem maybe are headed back in Hillary Clinton's direction. So really the question we have is what's up with white Catholics? Who are they like and who are they not like? They're not like Jews. They're not like African American Protestants. They're not like Latino Catholics. They're not like Mormons. Who are they like? They're actually most like white mainline Protestants. And that is to say they're a divided group for whom party identification is not so much part of their personal identity. That is they're prepared to vote different ways. Now I'm sure you can think of relatives who are white Catholics, who are died in the world Democrats and Republicans, and for whom that's absolutely part of their identity. But as a group, not so much. Unlike a lot of these other groups, they move around. That particular picture doesn't look so different from if I had a chart up there of just white voters, it would look kind of like that. Because if you take all white voters, you've got Jewish Democrats and you've got evangelical Republicans and you've got Mormons and you've got nuns who are very, very Democratic in their preference. But the Catholics are all over the place. A famous old line said, if you talk about American Catholics, you say here comes everybody. And there is an everybody sense about white Catholics. And what that means is they're hard to talk about because they're all over the place, but they're interesting. They're very interesting because they're a kind of bellwether of what's going on. All right, say a few more things and then we'll have time for questions and let you go out if you can, I don't know if anybody's preloaded for the debate. Not a bad idea, but. Give you a chance to do that before, whatever. All right, there are some really interesting things about the current election, which are different. And before I get quite to this, I guess I should say a couple of words about white evangelicals who have been the big story of this election only because despite even my good reporters have tried to see in white evangelicals a sort of distress at Donald Trump who doesn't seem to be personally in any way, shape or form like how they think a political candidate ought to behave, how can they be so supportive? There have been some prominent white evangelicals who have been very, very, very critical of Donald Trump, but the fact of the matter is if you look at the numbers and particularly understanding that there are minor party candidates out there, there's every indication that white evangelicals are gonna be as strongly supportive of the Republican Party candidate this year, maybe a few points lower, but if it was below 70%, I'd be surprised as they have been in the past. So, there they are, why have they done that? I think what they would say and the best case that can be made for that is, well, it's true we used to say that character mattered, but actually it's the Supreme Court that matters, it's policy matters, and if you say that Donald Trump is less likely to present, or less likely to nominate a Supreme Court justice who is on our side on the social issues than Hillary Clinton is, you're crazy. We're gonna put all our chips on Donald Trump to make some choices for judges and other appointments that are gonna serve our interests best. That's the case, the best case that can be made, and it's not an irrational one. It may be stupid, but it's not irrational. I have no position on this, I'm simply a scholar, but there they are, all right. You are all, I'm speaking to the undergraduates here, expecting I think to get college degrees, and one of the things that has been most striking about this election is that people with college degrees, white people with college degrees, and I'm looking out at quite a few white people, unlike in the past, are supporting the Democratic candidate this time around, which would suggest a relationship between higher education and supporting Hillary Clinton, just saying, and one of the interesting, this is a very interesting graphic from the famous website 538, which does all this kind of thing, and it shows the relationship between higher education and religious attendance, and what you'll see there, and so this isn't the gender and religious attendance interaction, but the higher education and religious attendance relation, and what you'll see is that if you are a degree carrying none, you are the very most likely to vote to prefer Hillary Clinton, and if you are a non-degree carrying highly religious person you are, or middling religious person, you are most likely to be supporting Donald Trump, so that's an interesting thing. Let me conclude this, so I can leave a few minutes for questions with one very interesting thing, which I just found actually this morning pouring over, as I do from time to time, the latest polling data. Despite the fact that white evangelicals who are pretty religious people are sticking with the Republican and so on, it turns out that more religious people that is measured by reported attendance are to some degree have turned away from Donald Trump, and in an interesting way, if you look at these God gap numbers, what you see when you compare party preferences on congressional voting versus party preferences on presidential voting is that more that there are the most frequent attending people are sticking with the Republican Party on congressional votes at that rate close to 60-40 but have pulled back from support of Donald Trump. They're making a choice, they feel that as religious people they can't go there. So I would expect them going forward once, we'll see what happens in the election, but if it should happen that Donald Trump does not become the next president, that this God gap will continue as it has in the past, assuming that the parties divide on these social issues the way they have over the past generation. On the other hand, there does seem to be a shift of women an increase in the gender gap which is not picked up by that differential between Trump and the congressional candidate that women are turning further away from the Republican Party as a whole. If that were to hold, then we would have going forward a God gap more like, I mean a gender gap more like the God gap. That doesn't bode well either for the Republican Party to lose a very important part of their constituency, namely church going women who tend to vote a lot and be good citizens. So I'll end on that and thank you very much. Questions? There's one over here and get her a microphone. Hi, so I was wondering in wake of recent events regarding Donald Trump and his accusations to women, why do you think that there is still such a tight race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton even especially women Republicans in wake of inappropriate Trump behavior? Well, you know, I'm tempted to say ask them. You know, people have important reasons for overlooking faults of politicians. You know, there is a very interesting difference and the survey data does show up. College educated women are really moving away from Trump. I would say, and I do this with some hesitation because I don't like claiming to say what women want. But I would say college educated women want to be treated better than that. And their preferences are expressed in that survey data. Less educated women don't seem to mind. Maybe they're just used to that kind of talk. Maybe that's what they live with every day. This is a kind of grotesque class prejudice that I'm expressing up here. And so I do it with some reluctance. But on the other hand, the survey data indicates that. Now maybe one would say working class women who didn't go to college are just a lot tougher and they say, that's just a bunch of bullshit. I'm used to hearing that stuff all the time. It means nothing and I'm gonna vote the way I wanna vote. But we'd have to look more carefully. Excuse my, well, I mean, I'm tempted to say so. I mean, there has been a gender gap. It can be traced to these differences on particular issues. But if you take an issue of some interest and concern to the large Catholic community, namely the contraception mandate, the provision of the Affordable Care Act, which says that if you're providing comprehensive healthcare coverage to your employees or anybody under your coverage, that you have to provide women with contraceptive care. That's an issue which has come to divide. I mean, just in recent years has come to divide the country, divide religious groups. Certainly the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has taken very strong positions on that. And that's known and the Republican Party has taken up a position on that side. So that's a new issue as of the past few years, really since the Obama administration passed that, which might persuade, might be part of the package of things or additional added to the package, which pushes women away saying, why should I not get that coverage? So I mean, I think there's a reasonable chance that this is a more long lasting phenomenon than just the Trump obscenities. Up here? Back there, please. Why focus so much research and time into this specific electorate when we see over the past elections that it's waning in overall support? So why focus on not more like a Latino Catholic? Is it because it's so predictable where they're going and is that so far democratic that we don't look at that so much? Well, one of the problems, religion is a very good indicator. In fact, 538, there was a piece just last week saying that once you get, that other than race, religion is the best indicator of how people are gonna vote. So you could well ask, how come every survey that's done at a state level, everything else, don't ask a bunch of a battery of religion questions, attendance, range of which community you are. But you can look in state poll after state poll after state poll and you will find no questions about religion. The one question that's persistent this time around is white evangelicals. And that's because I would say the surveyors know that there's been a lot of coverage of white evangelicals and so that's gonna generate some stories. But as for the rest of it, we don't know. Because we don't know, we can't talk about it. So Latino, is there strong movement among Latino Catholics towards Hillary Clinton? I don't know. Nobody's asked a question. Or if they've asked it, they haven't published it. And since I don't run these surveys, I can't tell you. But to some extent there's a kind of feedback loop where the questions that people ask are the questions that we write about. And so we look under the lamp post where the light is for the key and we don't see where there's no light. Professor Sill, thank you very much. A question that's come up to me is apart from correlating the frequency of religious participation and the way people vote, has there been any attempt to correlate the core values of a religious tradition and how those voters vote? Again, just from a far distance and without being fully educated in the area, it would appear that perhaps certain issues are driving different groups to vote, but that doesn't necessarily reflect the full core values of a particular tradition. The answer is most of the survey data is quick and dirty and not based on a fuller picture. There have been, including recent efforts with interestingly and sort of expectantly white evangelicals and people not doing it by frequency of attendance, but by a set of beliefs in evangelism and in the inerrancy of the Bible and so on, things like that. And actually the data, you know, the results are no different. I mean, you know, it doesn't show much difference. The main difference that I think is perhaps salient is if you look at, you know, you can divide more serious from less serious in various ways. And those do show some interesting things, but you know, it's, these are rather subtle differences and one of the things that makes it hard to do. And we had this just a few days ago in the Catholic community. So some of these emails showed some democratic politicians associated with Hillary sort of saying that, indicating that certain conservative Catholics who are strong believers in the free market and you know, all of this kind of stuff, that this was a quote unquote bastardization of the faith. This has been seized upon and may be discussed this evening as anti-Catholicism, you know, in the democratic party and in the Clinton campaign. Various people, including not only the usual suspects among liberals, but you know, Ross Dooth out of the New York Times said, that's ridiculous. What we have is a kind of civil conflict within the Catholic community in which you've got conservative Catholics for whom abortion is non-negotiable, who you know, there are certain issues, you know, so you tell me what the key issues for Catholicism are and we'll go from there, but it's not gonna solve the problem. I'll leave it at that. I promised you all that you would be able to get to the debate, so can you join me in thanking Professor Silt one more time? Thank you all. And in a couple of weeks, we're gonna have a Dominican sister here doing a Wanak performance on Catherine of Sienna. She won't tell you, this is Nancy Murray, she won't tell you she's Bill Murray's sister, but I've told you, come and hear her, she's great.