Anyone who has followed GetReligion for nearly two decades knows that we have — over, and over, and over — stressed that the safe middle ground in American life seems to be vanishing.
This is true in religion and it is certainly true in politics.
Now, journalists and news consumers can prepare to dig into two books related to these trends — both linked to the work of names that will be familiar to GetReligion readers.
The first, by GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge, is entitled, “The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.” It will hit the market March 9th. We will come back to Burge in a moment, with links to some of his omnipresent charts and commentary.
The second book is entitled, “Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics,” and it was written by David Campbell, Geoffrey C. Layman and (here’s the familiar name to most GetReligion readers) John C. Green.
Yes, that John C. Green, the man from the 2007 seminar at the Washington Journalism Center who told a circle of journalists from around the world about emerging research about “religiously unaffiliated” Americans and how this would impact politics and, in particular, the shape of the Democratic Party. The line-graph he sketched on our write-on-wall that day was a foretaste of the stunning 2012 Pew study on the rapid rise of the “nones.”
The key was that the “nones” were the natural political partners of secular voters and believers in the shrinking world of the Religious Left. At some point, however, he said there would be tensions with moderate and even conservative Democrats in the Black church and in Hispanic pews, both Catholic, evangelical and Pentecostal. As I wrote in an On Religion column:
The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the “Nones” skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
“It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. “If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties.”
