George W Bush and the Evangelicals

mentions among high-attendance evangelicals is not statistically different from that for lowattendance
evangelicals. As expected, moral and religious issues are more important for
evangelicals’ attachment to Bush and the Republican party. They constitute a greater percentage
of mentions among high-attendance evangelicals, but the difference is not statisticallysignificant.
Meanwhile, only one respondent (not an evangelical) mentioned Bush’s connection
to the Christian Right, and one other respondent (a low-attendance evangelical) mentioned the
Republican party’s connection to this group. Even more unexpectedly, with the exception of one
low-attendance evangelical, mentions of George W. Bush as a reason for liking the Republican
party were confined to non-evangelicals. No significant difference exists by church attendance in
evangelicals’ mentions of social welfare issues, but for low-attendance evangelicals, foreign
policy reasons constitute 27 percent of reasons for liking George W. Bush, about double the
figure for high-attendance evangelicals.
These results suggest that Bush’s religion and a shared sense of group identification did
not play notable roles in attracting support from evangelicals as a block, though Bush’s faith
certainly appealed to the most committed evangelicals. The observation that Bush himself was
more likely to attract non-evangelicals than evangelicals to the Republican party also suggests
that committed evangelicals’ support for the GOP has not been uniquely energized by Bush, but
is more likely to have been driven by the same factors that have supported their long-term
alignment with the party, especially cultural issues. Among evangelicals who do not attend
church services frequently, foreign policy and other concerns appear to have been most effective
in attracting support for Bush in 2004.
Summary
George W. Bush has received nearly overwhelming support from committed evangelical
Protestants in his two elections to the White House, and the already strong identification of this
group with the Republican party has continued to grow during the Bush years. However, because
the attraction of committed evangelicals to Bush is based substantially on his highly-conservative
stands on moral and cultural issues, and the long-term realignment of this group to the GOP also
has been driven by party positions on these issues, the level of Republican voting and
identification by devout members of the evangelical tradition has not been substantially higher
during the Bush years than it was in previous eras.
In contrast, Republican voting and identification among less-committed evangelicals has
reached substantially higher levels in the current decade than it did in earlier years. We argue
that the sharp upturn in low-commitment Republicanism has occurred because this group was
largely left out of the long-term evangelical realignment based on moral and cultural issues.
Their party ties and political behavior are based more on social welfare attitudes, defense and
foreign policy attitudes, and personal affect for political candidates, and Bush has been
successful in appealing to them on all of those fronts. In short, Bush’s election in 2000 and reelection
in 2004 do appear to have been assisted by a growth in Republican support from
evangelical Protestants. However, the gains did not come from the “moral values” voters in the
evangelical tradition, but from those evangelicals who do not base their political orientations on
moral values.
21