Written by Ryan P. Burge, Eastern Illinois University

It’s become almost a trope at this point among people who study and write about American religion and politics – evangelicals punch way above their weight. Their voter turnout has stayed relatively steady despite their drop in population share. But, I was working through some data today and noticed something that I don’t think that I’ve seen reported on much – atheists are incredibly politically active – more so than any other religious group.

The Cooperative Congressional Election Survey asks a series of questions about political activity in the last 12 months. Respondents simply answer yes or no to each of the six. Here are the results from the 2018 data.

In all six scenarios, atheists are right near the top in likelihood to participate. A quarter attended a march or protest compared to just 4.4% of white evangelicals. Four in ten atheists have contacted a public official or donated money to a candidate. That’s tied with Jews, but is much higher than most Christian groups in the sample. Agnostics are not far behind, either. They usually trail atheists but just a few percentage points for each of the political actions.

I know that atheists have high levels of income and about 45% have a four-year college degree, so SES might explain one of the reasons that they are so politically active. So I put together a simple model with a few controls for race, gender, and age.

At every level on the education spectrum, atheists and agnostics are more politically active than Protestants or Catholics. More education leads to higher levels of political activity among all religious groups, but the relationship is even stronger for atheists than other groups. An atheist with a graduate degree participated in 2.1 political activities in the last year. It was 1.8 activities for agnostics. For Catholics and Protestants it’s between 1.3 and 1.4 activities. That’s not a small difference.

But, are atheists just generally more politically engaged – or is it a function of the fact that many of them align with the Democratic Party? To test that I ran another model that divided each of the four religious groups up into Democrats and Republicans. Clearly partisanship accelerates political activity much more for Democrats than those who affiliate with the GOP. This conjures a bevy of questions: has the Republican Party become anathema to educated voters? Have the GOP failed to target educated voters in a meaningful way? Is this a function of the geographic polarization that is happening across the country? These questions are of tremendous importance to electoral politics.

If you look at just those with high school diplomas in each of the four traditions, Democrats are more likely to engage in political acts than Republicans. Sometimes, much more so. For instance, an atheist with a graduate degree who is a Democrat engages in twice as many political activities in a year compared to a Republican atheist. For Protestants, it’s just half a political activity. However, an atheist who affiliates with the Republican Party is no more likely to engage in politicking than any other religious tradition. So, while being a Democrat does prove as a spur for political activity, having high levels of education has a multiplicative effect.

So, why did Democrats engage in politics at much higher rates than Republicans in 2018? Well, when your party is in the minority in both the House and the Senate and does not hold the White House, that can serve as good motivation to get out there and try to win one chamber back. And, you can see that in the data, too. I calculated the total number of political activities for the four religious groups going back to 2010 – and something fascinating happened in 2018.

In 2016, an atheist engaged in 1.45 activities compared to 1.4 for an agnostic. Christians were slightly lower at 1.28. But, by 2018 the landscape had changed. Both Protestants and Catholics saw a tremendous decline down to .90 or .95 actions. For agnostics, there was no statistically significant change. But for atheists, there was a noticeable uptick to 1.58. The gap between Christians and atheists is huge now, with atheists about ten percent more politically engaged in 2018.

This could be one of the reasons that the Blue Wave happened in 2018 – a very agitated base of atheists who got politically involved. But, here’s a bit of caution I would urge – while atheists are often identified with the Democratic party, they have a fair amount of political homogeneity. In 2018, 77.3% identified as Democrats, 11.7% were independents, and 10.9% were Republicans. That’s a solid core, but there is some diversity there. For comparison, 73% of white evangelicals are Republicans. White evangelicals make up 15.6% of the population, atheists and agnostics combined are 11.4%. With that level of political activity, it’s fair to say that these nones might be a bigger political force in the next presidential election than we give them credit for – they just have to stay angry and stay engaged.

Ryan P. Burge teaches at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He can be contacted via Twitter or his personal website. The syntax for this post can be found here.

This article originally posted at ReligionInPublic.blog

Written by Richard Ostling

Suddenly transgender rights is the hot “culture wars” topic. Religious folks with traditional convictions about such matters have been largely silent, or else many newswriters haven’t yet figured how to locate them in order to report the other side of this crucial debate.

Thus, there’s useful sourcing in the strongly-worded “Transgender Identification Ethics Statement” issued by the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.

This group is made up of 16,000-plus professionals who affirm “the divine inspiration and final authority of the Bible as the Word of God.” CMDA had Big 10 origins at the University of Illinois and Northwestern and went national in 1941. It’s one of many such U.S. fellowships for vocational and academic specialists. Most of these were launched by Evangelical-type Protestants but have long since welcomed Catholic and Orthodox participants.

The transgender statement, approved at a CMDA conference April 21 but publicized only recently, urges doctors to treat these patients with understanding and grace. On the other hand, CMDA champions professionals’ right to freedom of conscience, asserting that it is not “unjust discrimination” if a physician in conscience declines treatment that is considered “harmful or is not medically indicated.”

On the religious aspect, CMDA contrasts the Old and New Testament belief that “God created humanity as male and female” with current “confusion of gender identity.” “Gender complementarity and fixity are both good and a part of the natural order,” it says. The “objective biological fact” is that sex “is determined genetically at conception” and is “not a social construct arbitrarily assigned at birth or changed at will.”

The statement focuses on transgender persons whose psychological “gender identity” is the opposite of biology and genetic makeup – the current public issue – and distinguishes this syndrome from medical treatment of rare abnormalities in which the sexual phenotype and chromosomes conflict (e.g. ambiguous genitalia, androgen insensitivity syndrome, congenital adrenal hyperplasia).

That is, “the purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not to collaborate with psychosocial disorders. Whereas treatment of anatomically anomalous sexual phenotypes is restorative, interventions to alter normal sexual anatomy to conform to transgender desires are disruptive to health.”

CMDA leaders think physicians should be aware of evidence that persons who identify as transgender, use cross-sex hormones, or undergo sex reassignment surgery, generally suffer more depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and risky sexual behaviors. The organization is especially critical of doctors who prescribe hormones for a biologically healthy child in order to block normal growth and fertility. On sex-change surgery, CMDA says the medical evidence on outcomes is incomplete but there are potential dangers there as well. In addition, “transgender designations may conceal biological sex differences relevant to medical risk factors.”

Such professional concerns, which have received little media notice thus far, provide good fodder for interviews with transgender advocates, physicians included.

Meanwhile, CMDA is involved in another developing story, the federal lawsuit filed July 19 by the Alliance Defending Freedom against Vermont’s Board of Medical Practice and its Office of Professional Regulation. The suit charges that these agencies interpret “Act 39,” the state’s 2013 suicide law, to require death-by-doctor counseling, in violation of medical ethics and conscience rights.

Resources:

– CMDA media office in Bristol, Tenn.: 423-844-1000.

– Transgender affirmation from the Human Rights Campaign.

– The former chief of psychiatry (and a Catholic) explains why the Johns Hopkins University hospital halted sex-change surgery.

This article was originally posted at GetReligion.org

One year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, this much is clear: Justice Antonin Scalia is a prophet.

Back in 2003, when the court handed down the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down all criminal statutes against homosexual acts, Scalia declared that the stage was set for the legalization of same-sex unions. That was 2003.

“Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as a formal recognition in marriage is concerned,” wrote Scalia.

He was proved to be absolutely prophetic when, just ten years later, the court ruled in United States v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional — thus striking down the federal statute defining marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman.

Once again, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, while Scalia handed down a fiery dissent. As before, Scalia was prophetic.

Even though the Court did not rule that same-sex marriage must be legal in all states, it set the stage for that to happen. As Scalia wrote: “As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.”

One year later, it is abundantly evident that we did not have to wait or listen for long.  Almost immediately, challenges to state laws and constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriages erupted.

In a staggering series of decisions at the federal and state levels, judges explicitly cited the nullification of DOMA and the central arguments of the Windsor decision in striking down those laws and constitutional amendments.

A year after the death of DOMA, not one major decision has defended any of these statutes or amendments. Kennedy’s opinion has been cited as authoritative in virtually every one of these judicial actions.

This has meant that in a single year, the legalization of same sex marriage has become a reality or received a positive judicial action in states including Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon and a host of other states far from where such unions had previously been recognized.

A year later, it is clear that the Supreme Court remains the central political institution of moral transformation in America.

A year later, it is also clear that the court was riding a vast change in public opinion.

We must also see that the time is almost at hand for that transformation to be made complete, at least in terms of the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

What was not clear a year ago was the velocity of this transformation. Even the architects of the revolution are expressing surprise at the speed of these judicial actions.

By the end of this summer, the Supreme Court will likely need to revisit the question once again, this time responding to the cavalcade of lower court decisions the high court spawned.

There is very good reason to expect a decision mandating same-sex marriage coast-to-coast in the Court’s next term, with a decision to be handed down just a year from now, almost to the day.

Furthermore, the Obama administration has been pushing the agenda vigorously, with the federal government now aligning all agency policies in line with the Windsor decision – even extending to areas the decision was never intended to reach.

Where does that leave committed Christians?

Those of us who believe that human flourishing depends upon the recognition and honoring of marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman see this transformation of marriage into something radically different as a grave threat to human society and human happiness.

We do not argue that these damaging effects on society and its individuals will be immediately apparent, but we are sadly confident that the subversion of marriage will bring devastating effects over time.

In retrospect, we can also see that previous subversions of marriage set the stage for the radical redefinition of marriage in our times.

Our failure to answer the challenge of rising divorce rates was, eventually, fatal to our effort to defend marriage against its redefinition in terms of gender. Some of us saw this danger at the time, but there was no adequate effort to oppose the devastating impact of divorce.

The larger sexual revolution also plays an incalculable role in this transformation. The moral separation of sex and marriage among millions of Americans removed any hope of establishing a lasting consensus on the central importance of marriage and its essence as a monogamous man-woman union.

A year after the death of DOMA, it is also clear that very real threats to religious liberty now loom before us. This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of a moral revolution of this scale.

Will the government now coerce the consciences of churches, religious institutions, schools, colleges, social service agencies, and the like? There is now strong evidence that government at every level will attempt such coercion. Will America abandon religious liberty for the sake of erotic freedom?

Those of us who believe same-sex marriage to be a moral impossibility now face a very daunting challenge — how to live in a society that is moving so rapidly against our moral worldview, even as the society shared that worldview for over 2,000 years.

We face the challenge of finding how to relate to our neighbors and contribute to the common good when we see that very society undermining human flourishing in the name of sexual liberty.

A year after the death of DOMA the listening and the waiting are almost over. The revolution is almost complete. The shoe is dropping fast.

One thing is clear to all – no one was exaggerating when the Windsor decision was declared by both sides to be revolutionary.

We can all agree on that much, just one year after the revolution was declared.

This article was first published on the CNN Belief Blog.