A small rant in response to dopey punditry

Sometimes a piece of political punditry is just space-filler masquerading as analysis. The "researchers" who produced this foolishness should be ashamed of themselves. If the premise of a study is nonsense, it doesn't matter how many accurate tidbits of data you throw into it. It's still junk.

I'm referring here to More And More Americans Aren’t Religious. Why Are Democrats Ignoring These Voters? from FiveThirtyEight.

The premise, like the headline, is:

 "Democrats are mostly ignoring a massive group of voters who are becoming an increasingly crucial part of their base: people who don’t have any religion at all."

In most systems, click to enlarge.

 

When you look at the accompanying chart, it shows that citizens who don't have a religious affiliation tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats -- as do pretty much all identifiable religious groups, except white Christians. A glance at the numbers might suggest that it is some combination of Christianity and whiteness which predicts party affiliation.

Of course the Democratic Party speaks to religiously unaffiliated people all the time: its policy proposals emphasize non-sectarian, broadly neutral values such as freedom of conscience, community care for the weak and needy, and welcome to the stranger. Its answer to appeals to particular religious beliefs is broad tolerance and inclusiveness of difference. And, as this article's authors understand, lots of citizens find that "live and let live" while caring for the community is downright attractive.

What makes the religiously unaffiliated different from many others is that most don't self-identify as a distinct group. That's where the premise of this article is bonkers. Only where religious authorities have enough power to impose their particular values on people's daily lives -- say by refusing to provide contraception to women who think of it as just another medical intervention -- do the unaffiliated come to think of themselves as distinct from the whole.

The author of this research seems to think that "secular voters" -- the religiously unaffiliated who aren't militant atheists, itself sort of a faith -- should learn to see themselves "as a bloc." And that the Democrats should encourage them to adopt a distinct group identity.

“What you have on the right with white evangelical Protestants is a distinct group that can be courted and discussed. The left hasn’t figured out how to do that with nonreligious voters. But we could see more efforts in that direction going forward.”

I sure hope religiously unaffiliated people resist this call to mindless political polarization. I'm all for forthright competition between different values, also for peaceful, non-coercive argument -- and often in a democracy, simply an agreement to disagree. But we don't need more and better warring camps.

Insofar as most unaffiliated people don't identify themselves as yet another combative group, that's a good thing, not something to be "fixed."