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Few religious groups have received more scrutiny from political analysts than evangelical Protestants. Some credit them with mounting a potent Christian Right movement, influencing national elections, and, in the process, transforming the Republican Party. These pundits often resort to military metaphors, such as Frances Fitzgerald's image of a "disciplined, charging army," presumably headed off to battle in James Davison Hunter's "culture wars." Certainly Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer would savor this interpretation.
Other observers scoff at such notions. Sociologist Andrew Greeley, for example, warns us to ignore the "noisy entrepre-neurial elites" who foster the myth of an evangelical political powerhouse. Pay close attention to ordinary evangelicals, Greeley says, and "you don't hear the clamor of a disciplined charging army." To clinch the argument, Greeley points to the traditional political passivity of the evangelical community, internal religious divisions, disagreement on political issues, and the demise of some Christian Right organizations. Evangelical leaders such as Ron Sider and Jim Wallis might draw solace from Greeley's assessment.
Of course, the truth may lie somewhere between such "maximalist" and "minimalist" stereotypes. The recent presidential election provides an ideal opportunity to evaluate these rival interpretations. In this article, we use the 2000 Survey of Religion and Politics, conducted by the University of Akron Survey Research Center for the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Unlike most national polls, this study contains a wealth of religious information, allowing us to delineate how faith influences evangelical politics.
A good place to begin is with the voting patterns of the major white Christian traditions, as measured by denominational affiliation. A quick look confirms one "maximalist" claim: in 2000, evangelical voters demonstrated an overwhelming Republican preference, giving George W. Bush 75 percent of their votes. By comparison, mainline Protestants, historically the dominant GOP religious constituency, gave Bush only 55 percent, and white Catholics, a vital "swing" group, only 49 percent. Perhaps the most striking fact about evangelicals' importance to the GOP is that they supplied 40 percent of Bush's total vote while constituting only about 25 percent of the adult population.
In contrast, Al Gore attracted only one-quarter of the evangelical vote, suffered a solid loss among mainline Protestants, and enjoyed only a slim majority among white Catholics. Nevertheless, he won a narrow national popular majority with overwhelming backing from most religious minorities: black Protestants (96 percent), Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and other non-Christians (80 percent), Jews (77 percent), Hispanic Catholics (76 percent), other Christians such as the Eastern Orthodox (72 percent), and Hispanic Protestants (67 percent). He also attracted the strong endorsement of the growing secular contingent (65 percent). Had Gore—a Southern Baptist—im-proved his dismal showing among "fellow" evangelicals, he would have carried several more states (Arkansas, Tennessee, and West Virginia, among others) and, as a result, the Electoral College.
To investigate the evangelical community's choices in 2000 in more detail, we divided evangelicals into Bush voters, Gore voters, and non-voters. The first important lesson provided by this exercise (reported in the accompanying Table) is that the "evangelical majority" is in fact not Republican but rather "non-participant." Considered this way, some cracks appear in evangelicals' monolithic Republicanism.
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