Faith plays a role in voting

There’s little question that religion has played a role in recent presidential politics, perhaps even tipping the 2004 race in favor of President Bush’s re-election.

The role of religion and the church has appeared again in 2008, most notably as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama defended his relationship with his Chicago church while distancing himself from remarks made by its pastor.

Local ministers and religious organizations say they’re not comfortable with telling church members which candidate to vote for in the upcoming primary election. But, they say, faith should have a place when someone is deciding whose button to push on April 22.

CAMPAIGN IMPACT

After the 2004 presidential election, two professors at Notre Dame University and Brigham Young University set out to determine the impact that religion played in the campaign to re-elect President Bush.

“The Religion Card: Evangelicals, Catholics and Gay Marriage in the 2004 Presidential Election,” prepared in 2005 by David Campbell and J. Quin Monson, shows that the Republican National Committee made a strong pitch for conservative values in states, including Ohio, that had a gay-marriage ban on the ballot that year.

Bush narrowly won Ohio in 2004, with a margin of about 118,000 votes.

Among Ohio voters who agreed to participate in a separate study tracking political mailings, Campbell and Monson found that nine of the 10-most-common pieces of mail came from either the Republican National Committee or the Ohio Republican Party, and each at least mentioned upholding traditional marriage values as a campaign issue.

The result? The study found that the tendency to vote for Bush among evangelical Christians was 6.5 percent higher in states with gay-marriage-ban issues on the ballot than in states without; it also found that Catholics were 12 percent more likely to vote for Bush in gay-marriage-ban states.

“While it is overly simplistic to attribute Bush’s victory entirely to his social conservatism generally, and his position on gay marriage specifically, there is nonetheless reason to think that gay marriage helped the Bush campaign mobilize two especially important constituencies — white evangelical Christians and Catholics,” the Campbell/Monson study concluded.

“Analysis of the direct mail (that) voters received during the campaign season underscores that gay marriage was frequently invoked in Ohio, a critical battleground state that also had a gay-marriage ban on the ballot. In particular, social conservatives in Ohio received a high volume of mail highlighting Bush’s opposition to gay marriage.”

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Beaver County Times - Beaver,PA,USA