Evangelical Strength and the Representation of Women and Gays By Jennifer Merolla, Jean Reith Schroedel and Scott Waller Claremont Graduate University Paper prepared for presentation at The Christian Conservative Movement and Democracy in America Conference, April 27-29, 2007 in New York at Russell Sage Foundation.2Evangelicals and the Representation of Women and Gays A woman’s femaleness is by definition the potential for motherhood---the experience and relationship in which a woman normally finds a joyous and unique fulfillment. But she has no capacity within herself alone to realize that possibility. She needs her male companion for that. The male by his very maleness has the potential for becoming a father. In that experience and relationship, a man finds fulfillment like nothing else he will experience. But he, like his companion, has no capacity in himself alone to find that fulfillment. He needs her. Each has the capacity to confer upon the other the fulfillment of his masculinity or of her femininity…The historical significance to all of this must not be ignored. The very future existence of the human race and the fulfillment of the divine purposes for God’s own creation hang on our sexual differentiation. (Kinlaw, 2005). In the two decades since the publication of The Restructuring of American Religion (1988), Robert Wuthnow’s argument that American society is sharply divided with religious traditionalists on one side and progressives (both secular and religious) on the other has been widely debated by academics.1 Within the popular media, the culture war framework has been largely accepted, along with the depiction of a nation split between socially tolerant and secular blue states in the Northeast and West coast and the crimson colored American heartland, where traditional values predominate. Although there are many areas of disagreement between religious traditionalists and those holding more progressive views, differences in gender ideology are the central demarcation.2 1 While a full examination of this debate is beyond the scope of this paper, the major point of contention between the two sides involves the extent to which the division is a mass or elite phenomenon. According to James Davidson Hunter (1991, 325), the most vigorous proponent of the “culture wars” thesis, there is a very real possibility of the two sides becoming so polarized that they will “kill each other over these differences.” In contrast, other sociologists (Smith, Emerson, Gallagher, Kennedy and Sikkink 1997, 192) downplay the significance of cultural issues in the everyday lives of most Americans and posit that even at the elite level discussions of a culture war are “overblown.” Political scientists, Fiorina with Abrams, and Pope (2006, 9), use election data to argue that the differences at the elite level are far greater than at the mass level and that “partisan polarization” should not be mistaken for “popular polarization.” 2 According to Duerst-Lahti and Kelly (1995, 16-17), people hold a coherent set of normative beliefs about what “constitutes masculine and feminine.” In this paper, we label that system of beliefs as “gender ideology.”3Although a full testing of the thesis that the major split in the United States is between religious traditionalists and progressives is beyond the scope of this paper, we will examine one important component of the debate. We test whether there is a relationship between the strength of politically mobilized socially conservative Protestants and the election of women and gays (two groups whose engagement in politics strongly violates traditional gender norms).3 If the difference in gender ideology is a central cleavage, we would expect areas of religious traditionalist strength to elect far fewer women and gays to political office than areas where they are weak. On the other hand, if gender ideology is not a major demarcation, we would not expect there to be a statistically significant difference between these areas. In this research, we focus on the political mobilization of socially conservative Protestants rather than Catholics for two reasons. First, there has been a tremendous upsurge over the past thirty-five years in the political involvement of socially conservative Protestants.4 Moreover, as Marsden (2006, 5) has noted “The issues of family and sexuality proved the key to unlocking evangelical potential to become overtly political.” Second, we were able to develop a good empirical measure of the strength of the politicization of socially conservative Protestants, but do not have a comparable 3 Although we expect to find an inverse relationship between the strength of religious traditionalists and the representation of women and gays in elected office, determining exactly how this occurs is beyond the scope of this paper. There are a number of possible reasons---both supply and demand side factors. On the supply side, women and gays may choose not to run for office because they think they cannot win in these areas. Also women holding religious traditionalist beliefs are less likely to put themselves forward as candidates because they believe it is not appropriate, thereby decreasing the potential pool of female candidates. Also party leaders may discourage female and gay candidates, as well as erect institutional barriers to entry. Finally, voters may be unwilling to vote for candidates that do not conform to religiously based gender norms. 4 The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) served as a catalyst, convincing many socially conservative Protestants that the nation was heading in the wrong direction and that protecting traditional morality and family values required political mobilization (Wilcox 1988, 668). Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election was a direct outgrowth of this mobilization (Masci 2004, 14). In the 2004 presidential election, evangelical voters comprised more than one-third of all Bush voters (Pew Research Center 2005).4measure for distinguishing traditionalistic Catholics from more moderate/liberal ones. However, we do include Catholicism as a control variable in our models. These issues will be discussed more fully in subsequent sections. Differences in Gender Ideology Oldmixon (2005, 2) argues that the predominant political division in the United States is between “those