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This weekend, the New York Times had an op-ed from two sociologists, Michael Hout and Andrew Greeley, attacking the idea that Evangelicals are the Republican Party’s base. “We are repeatedly told,” they write, “they form the president’s unshakeable electoral base. But in truth, this claim is vastly simplistic: the fashionable image of masses of white evangelical voters, stirred up by the tricks of Karl Rove and led by Bible-thumping clergymen, marching in lock step to deny rights to women and to gays, is hardly born out by the data. Rather, the real Republican base is the same as it was before Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” appealed to religious Protestants in 1968: the wealthy and the powerful.”

This class-not-religion argument was repeated by Kieran over at Crooked Timber (this post is an extension of a comment I left there), even if he does downgrade the claim a bit to “Religious and political conservatism don’t line up as closely as you might think.” Closer to home, Chris at Philocrates - who has done some good blogging throughout the gay marriage debate here in MA - approvingly cites the op-ed as showing the GOP’s real base.

The argument is appealing. It suggests, first, that Karl Rove is misguided and may be steering his candidate to sure electoral disaster. It is a powerful rhetorical rejoinder to the God monopoly that the GOP imagines itself having: if “real Christians” don’t all vote Republican, then you other Christians shouldn’t have to either. And it draws attention back to the class dynamic of party affiliation and policy - a connection we Democrats are always eager to make.

Only I’m not buying it. I grew up in a region of the country (East Tennessee) which in my teen years switched from Democrat to Republican for reasons that had everything to do with religion and the politicization of religion in the 1980s. And the class dynamic worked in the inverse to push a veteran Episcopal-banker Congressman out of office in favor of a born-again high school health teacher.

Beyond anecdote, though, just look at the evidence in the NYT piece:

In the last two presidential elections, about 62 percent of white evangelicals voted Republican - or about 7.5 percent more than among other American Protestants. A majority, clearly, but nowhere near unanimity. And in terms of the electorate as a whole, it’s hardly fair to say evangelicals are a dominant political force. If we measure their overall political influence as that 7.5 percent differential multiplied by their share of the electorate - they make up about 21 percent of voters- it comes to about 1.6 percentage points. Yes, as the 2000 election showed, even an edge that small can be decisive in a close race. But it hardly amounts to an overwhelming base.

I see why it makes since to talk of the marginal votes at stake in some contexts. Some groups are disproportionately powerful because they serve as swing votes and are recognized as such by political strategists. But it’s a surreal version of political science that would understand swing votes as the only lever of power or political influence on a political party, much less that would mistake these margins (who are not usually mobilized politically) for the base (which always are).

But that’s exactly what Hout and Greeley do. For the total share of Evangelical Republicans in the electorate is not .075 times 21 percent (the margin over other denominations), but .62 times 21 percent, which gives us 13% of the voting public. Or, assuming an evenly divided electorate, 26% of Republicans. Maybe pundits and particularly Blue-State Dems often act as if 95% of the GOP is born-again - and in that sense the anti-CW move is worthwhile - but a quarter of a political party is still a substantial force. What’s more, this subgroup is inclined to see itself as more than a statistical aggregation, but as a political mobilized group, whose interests are under attack from the Democrats, the national media and sometimes their own political party.

Now, I’d be willing to entertain an argument that class underlies some of the religious affiliation and cultural identity. But that needs to do more than correlate income brackets and say more than “wealthy people are the Republican base.” Some aren’t Republican, in fact, and since the Gingrich Revolution, the reigning ideology of the GOP has been petit bourgeois in nature, if anything. Of course, the long-standing class v. religion/ Marx v. Weber debate may wage on, but at least we can assert that religious groups are a mobilized, important part of the Republican Party.

TERMINOLOGICAL NOTE: I was going to be critical of the authors’ confusion of “evangelical” and “fundamentalist”, as some others have, but the more I thought about it, the less clearly I could draw the line between the two or adequate define them. In my understanding, it makes sense to call Evangelical denominations based on the epistemology of being born again. It really does form a handy demarcation between conservative, even fundamentalist, denominations and the more establishment Protestants (Episcopals, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc.). Feel free to point out problems in this assumption.