The Anti-Christian Fundamentalist Factor in Contemporary Politics

Abstract

Utilizing data from the 1988-96 American National Election Studies (ANES) and the 1997 ANES Pilot Study, we will show that voters have begun to orient their political attitudes and behaviors according to their feelings toward Christian fundamentalists. This is particularly the case with antifundamentalists, the roughly one-fifth of the white nonfundamentalist public who, significantly more so than other nonfundamentalists, intensely dislike fundamentalists and who perceive members of this religious group as militantly intolerant, ideologically extreme, inegalitarian with respect to women's rights, and monolithically Republican. These associations coincided with a marked shift in the proportion of antifundamentalists who became concerned about cultural and religious issues in national political life. Multivariate analyses show that feelings toward Christian fundamentalists are now a significant predictor of relative party assessments, adverse to the Republican party. Moreover, logistic regression analyses demonstrate that antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists has become a significant explanatory variable of vote choice in recent presidential elections. Antifundamentalism today has joined ideology as a predictor of presidential vote choice, and its impact surpasses the effects of traditional economic variables, such as attitudes toward government activism and retrospective assessments of the economy. Our findings lend support to scholars who contend that the 1992 presidential election quickened or heightened cultural and religious forces that to this day structure attitudes toward the two major parties. The data attest to the power of negative religious out-group affect in shaping political perceptions, attitudes, and behavior during periods of cultural ferment