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It’s election night 2008, and President-elect Barack Obama is speaking before a celebrating crowd. In a flag-waving throng at Chicago‘s Grant Park, with the happy Democrats holding up the winner’s iconic “Hope” poster, some progressive devotees openly weep while others gaze up at the podium in elysian rapture.
Jump ahead to July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. Red hat-wearing loyalists who follow the presumptive Republican nominee from rally to rally stand in raging chants of “USA” as a gunshot whizzes by Donald Trump‘s ear. Their bleeding champion — at the time a former and future president — raises a defiant fist. Trump’s supporters have a permanent bond with him, and he suddenly seems immortal.
In both cases, devoted partisan followers hitched their identities and egos to men they would never meet and who had no idea they existed. Whether Democrat or Republican, those committed voters took up their tribal positions and fell in behind candidates they saw more as deities and saviors than candidates. In the swelling worshiping milieu, the transactional nature of politics is washed away in a hot potion of religious fervor.
Shanto Iyengar is a professor of political science and communication at Stanford University and a leading authority on the intersection of religion and politics. Iyengar finds religion in a striking decline, but he doesn’t believe the transition from there to politics is a conscious choice for many.
“We see elections and campaigns going on almost constantly now,” Iyengar said. “That can connect people to their sense of political community the way going to religious services once did. Whether it’s religion or politics, it’s a question of identity and the constant reinforcement of identity.”
Once settled into a political self-image, Iyengar warned that a lack of flexibility can settle into partisan views, even at great potential cost.
“Identity does not necessarily equate to self-interest,” he explained. “It often takes something massive to make a shift in that identity. I think it’s very ominous because what it means is people become robots who are ignoring obvious deficiencies in their own parties and voting for stock candidates.”
Iyengar added that today’s political believers are also willing to overlook any possible disagreements on public policy matters. They simply follow the party line because their identity dictates that it becomes paramount for them to keep the other side from winning.
Rob Hefner, a professor of anthropology and global affairs at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Affairs, doesn’t think politics is replacing religion. Rather, he said the former utilizes the latter to “coarsen rather than elevate” core values.
“Religion is still around and influential,” Hefner said, “But, in ‘instrumental-izing’ religion for political ends, religion’s higher values are subordinated to low political ends. ‘Displacements’ … are commonplace in faith traditions, as when radical Islamists claim to be acting in the name of Islam, while they’re actually subordinating Islam to crude political ends.”
Hefner said he feels religion’s “higher angels” will prevail in the long run but worries that, in the meantime, real damage is being done.
Nancy Ammerman, a professor emerita of the sociology of religion (also at Boston University), agreed with Hefner that politics is replacing religion. However, she said the two are becoming more difficult to separate.
“Most closely linked are the evangelicals who have been overwhelmingly Republican for the last decade or more,” Ammerman said. “That alignment has been steadily getting stronger since the early 1980s, following the post-civil-rights party realignment of the solid South, when conservative white political operatives began to mobilize around abortion.”
Ammerman said she sees Trump adding charisma and entertainment value to political events, bringing them further into the realm of religion.
“For at least some of his followers, there is an unconditional emotional attachment,” she added. “While I shy away from using the term ‘cult,’ the unconditional loyalty and rather total immersion in all things Trump may warrant that label.”
Ammerman said she also sees the growing segment of unaffiliated people as uniformly Democratic as the evangelicals are Republican.
“All of this works because people who are involved in religious communities talk there about things they care about, and that includes social and political issues,” she explained. “They don’t separate what they believe about God and about living a moral life from what they think about on political issues.”
Finally, Ken Wald, a distinguished professor emeritus of political science and of American Jewish society and culture at the University of Florida, agreed with Iyengar that personality identity drives the march toward partisanship.
“While we’re seeing growth in the number of people who don’t identify with a particular religious tradition, (religion) is a very strong predictor of a whole range of political attitudes and behavior,” Wald said. “There’s been this rather dramatic growth in the “religious-ness” of politics,”
But “it’s still the case that religion is a very powerful factor in influencing political choice,” he added.
Once partisans tie their identity to a candidate, Wald believes those people invest the qualities of their identities into a candidate until he or she becomes “almost unreal.”
“(The candidates) become so powerfully symbolic that the usual things you would say about a candidate don’t seem to apply,” he explained. “(Partisans) also put the most negative connotations on the opposition to a particular candidate. So, it’s why negativity is so powerful because (a partisan) wants the person who has the same traits and identity to be the winner.”
Wald credited much of the current decline of religion in the United States to age factors, with younger people failing to follow their elders’ path to religion once the latter dies. When that loss of religion causes a loss of identity, Wald said he sees politics filling the void — often in crisis.
“There is a really interesting argument about what’s called the hostility hypothesis,” Wald explained. “(Researchers) found that the stronger person’s partisan identification are, the more likely they were to have very negative feelings toward the other party. Partisanship and that kind of an emotional opposition to the other side is not new. But I think the level of the polarization is much stronger now due to factors such as a fading of religion and the rise of social media.
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Wald concluded that all too often, voting comes down to feelings over analysis, as in religion.
“We’ve discovered in political science over the years how much emotions control voting decisions,” he said. “We’ve drawn heavily on some of the work of cognitive psychology to help us realize how voting is more internalized than based on outside circumstances.”
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