Evangelizing Congress: The Emergence of Evangelical Republicans and Party Polarization in Congress

• Date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12200
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Author: Nicole Asmussen Mathew

NICOLE ASMUSSEN MATHEW

Oakland University

Evangelizing Congress: The

Emergence of Evangelical

Republicans and Party

Polarization in Congress

The realignment of evangelical voters is well-documented, but religion’s impact

within Congress is less clear. New data on home churches of members of Congress

shows that the realignment of congressional evangelicals, combined with their growth

and distinctly conservative legislative behavior, has significantly contributed to party

polarization in Congress. Controlling for other factors, evangelicals are significantly

more conservative than members of other religious traditions. This conservatism also

has second-order effects on the polarization of the House, where their more partisan

proposals comprise a larger share of the roll-call agenda when Republicans are in the

majority. Moreover, evangelical Republicans in Congress differ significantly from evan-

gelical Democrats in terms their geography, denominations, and experiences prior to

Congress.

John Danforth, elected in 1976, served three terms as a Republican

senator from the state of Missouri. A Yale-trained Episcopal clergyman,

he also served as volunteer associate rector of St. Alban’s parish in

Washington, DC, and frequently off‌iciated funerals for Washington

notables (Rosin 2004). Widely considered to be a moderate, Danforth

was the 34th most conservative out of 100 senators at the time of his

retirement in 1995. His successor—like Danforth, a Republican, Yale

alum, and former state attorney general—also shared his passion for

piety, serving as an occasional lay preacher and writer of Gospel songs

(Ostling 1998). But John Ashcroft, the Pentecostal son of an Assemblies

of God preacher, did not share in his predecessor’s taste for ideological

moderation. Despite representing the same constituents and the same

party as Danforth, Ashcroft ranked as the seventh most conservative

senator in the initial two years of his term in the Senate.

1

The portraits of these two senators are not as much a peculiar

anomaly as they are perfectly exemplary of the religious remaking of

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DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12200

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Congress over the last six decades—the large inf‌lux of conservative

evangelical Republican members, replacing more moderate mainline

Protestants, and coinciding with the Democrats’ loss of their more mod-

erate evangelicals. While much attention has focused on the religious

realignment of evangelical voters within the electorate (Brooks and

Manza 2004; Fowler et al. 2010; Layman 1997, 2001; Schwadel 2017)

and its contribution toward mass party polarization (Abramowitz and

Saunders 2008), signif‌icantly less attention has been paid to the inf‌luence

of personal religious aff‌iliations of members of Congress and its effect

on party polarization in the institution of Congress.

2

The trend toward increasing party polarization in Congress is

much-studied and well-documented, but by and large, the proposed

explanations for this change have overlooked the religious realignment,

instead focusing on changes within the institution of Congress, such as

the role of party leaders in Congress (Rohde 1991) and, increasingly,

partisan legislative strategies (Lee 2009; Theriault 2013) or

constituency-driven changes, such as redistricting (Carson et al. 2007),

primary elections (Burden 2001; King 2003), and rising inequality

(McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006). Although the southern realign-

ment (Carmines and Stimson 1989) has been considered as a

contributing factor to party polarization, religion’s inf‌luence on the

realignment is largely seen as occurring indirectly, through changes in

the issues emphasized by the political parties (Knuckey 2006; Lublin

2004), which in turn affected mass voting behavior of evangelicals

(Green et al. 2013; Schwadel 2017), who make up a signif‌icant propor-

tion of the electorate in southern states.

While institutional- and constituency-level changes are certainly

factors in explaining the increasingly polarization between parties in

Congress, this research focuses on the personnel changes within

Congress itself—illuminating with new, more accurate data the near

disappearance of evangelical Democrats and the explosion of evangeli-

cal Republicans. Evangelicals are not merely a voting bloc that

Republicans have wooed away from Democrats and mobilized to elect

Republicans into off‌ice. Evangelicals are the off‌iceholders, now com-

prising the largest religious tradition among congressional Republicans.

Moreover, the emergence of evangelical Republicans in Congress

strongly correlates with the increased polarization of parties in both

chambers of Congress. In off‌ice, evangelicals behave in a distinctly con-

servative manner compared to their counterparts of other religious

traditions, voting signif‌icantly more conservatively across a broad range

of issues. This means that as Democrats shed their more moderate evan-

gelical members, the Democratic Party has become more cohesively

2 Nicole Asmussen Mathew

410

liberal, and as more conservative evangelicals have gained off‌ice as

Republicans, that party’s center of gravity has moved to the right. While

evangelicals’ voting behavior—combined with their increased propen-

sity to win seats as Republicans—has a direct impact on the growing

ideological divide between the parties, the inf‌lux of conservative evan-

gelical Republicans can also have second-order effects on polarization

through increasingly partisan behavior and through shaping the agenda.

This research provides limited evidence of the former and compelling

evidence of the latter.

In the next section, I review the literature on the inf‌luence of reli-

gion on members of Congress, and then I introduce a new data set that

improves upon previous measures of evangelicals in Congress and

reveals incredible and previously undocumented growth in the number

of evangelicals serving in Congress and a strong relationship between

this growth and party polarization. I then show that evangelicals are sig-

nif‌icantly more conservative than other members of Congress. Next, I

address some of the second-order effects that the emergence of conserva-

tive evangelical Republicans has had on party-unity voting and agenda

setting. Finally, I show that evangelical Republicans in Congress differ

in signif‌icant ways from the evangelical Democrats they replaced, which

suggests that evangelical Republicans are emerging out of a different

pool of candidates than evangelical Democrats. I conclude by consider-

ing the implications of this evangelizing of Congress on representation.

The f‌indings presented here are made possible by two major data-

collection projects: the f‌irst is an ambitious effort to collect, correct, clar-

ify, and amplify data on the home-church membership of all members of

Congress from 1955 to 2017 in order to more accurately classify mem-

bers by religious tradition; the second, a revamping of existing county-

level church-membership data to achieve congressional-district-level

measures of constituent religious demographics that are comparable

across time. These data allow for analyzing religion’s effect on voting

behavior over a much longer time frame than any previous research.

3

Furthermore, this is the f‌irst research of its kind that can control for

changes in House districts’ religious composition over time, and it is the

only study to date to consider the ideological and partisan character of

bills and amendments introduced by evangelicals.

Literature Review

The question of what factors inf‌luence the decision making of

members of Congress has concerned scholars from both a normative and

empirical perspective. Since Kingdon’s (1973) seminal study of how

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