Anyone who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same time, the media's obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts public attention from the changing role of religion in political life today. In particular, the media overlooks the remarkable erosion of denominational boundaries that until a quarter century ago defined the religious dimension of partisan conflict, with Catholics, Jews, and southern evangelicals aligned with the Democratic party and nonsouthern white, mostly mainline Protestants forming the religious base of the Republicans. Also, the media mistakenly frames cultural conflict since the 1970s as entirely the result of fundamentalist revanchism. In so doing, the media ignores the growing influence of secularists in the Democratic party and obfuscates how their worldview is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditionalist outlook.

....The survey results reported in this essay show that the public has been politically divided over religion since the 1980s. Moreover, this new religious cleavage occurs more often between secularists and traditionalists than between denominations. But despite the reams of data documenting the alignment of secularists with the Democratic party and the countermovement of religious traditionalists into the Republican party, the media, particularly network news, has tended to emphasize only the latter phenomenon.

The imbalance in their coverage has been strikingly apparent on election nights, during the segments devoted to analyses of exit-poll results. Since the 1980 election, viewers have heard about the born-again Christian or Christian fundamentalist vote. Beginning in 1992, "Religious Right" became a category for election-night analysis, along with such staples as gender, income, race, region, and age. What viewers do not hear about is the secularist vote, which has gone two to one in the Democratic direction in the past three presidential elections. Why this silence about an identifiable segment of the public that has become key to Democratic electoral competitiveness?

One explanation involves the difficulties journalists might have in taking notice of an outlook that is so close to their own. Survey research indicates that professionals who work in news organizations, compared to the larger public, are more highly educated and cosmopolitan, much more likely to vote Democratic, appreciably more liberal ideologically and culturally, and less likely to be religious. In their study The Media Elite, Robert Lichter and his associates found that one of the most distinctive characteristics of the media elite "is its secular outlook." Half of the journalists they surveyed claimed no religion and more than eight of ten never or seldom attended religious services. Taking secularist views for granted, journalists may not see secularism as a distinct ideology or think secularists are definable as a political category.

Yet "soccer moms" is a rather loosely defined political or sociological construct - certainly more so than "secularist" - but this did not stop the Times and Post from publishing over 50 articles during the 2000 election season about the potential electoral impact of this group of voters. Anyway, as we have seen, survey results show that secularism does embody a distinct moral and sociological outlook and that it influences voting preferences. Moreover, just because an organized group does not publicly identify itself as "secularist" does not mean that it lacks a secularist worldview on contentious cultural issues. People for the American Way, for example, is most often characterized in press accounts as a civil-liberties and civil-rights group, rarely as a secularist organization. But a visit to the organization's website shows that its cultural agenda is the mirror opposite of the Christian Coalition's.

A second possibility has less to do with how journalists perceive secularists than with their view of traditionalists. According to the Williamsburg Charter poll of mass and elite opinion on church-state issues, a majority of television news directors and newspaper editors polled in the survey felt that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians had "too much power and influence" and a third thought both religious groups were a "threat to democracy." In contrast, not one of the media elites sampled in this survey perceived secularists as threats, and only 4 percent thought nonbelievers and secularists had too much influence over public life. From such a perspective, political activism by religious conservatives no doubt appears to endanger the wall of separation between church and state, and therefore warrants intense scrutiny.

The party of irreligion?

Over the past few decades, political conflict rooted in religious values has been framed as a clash between religious conservatives and the rest of America. This paradigm has fit comfortably with the secular outlook of journalists and with a strain in American culture that historically has viewed moralistic religious movements with suspicion. To portray secularists as ideologically distinct and as aggressive political actors would be to shift the landscape dramatically. It might serve to legitimize the political involvement of religious traditionalists, and it might also have negative consequences for journalists' favored groups and causes.

Specifically, a public conversation about the overarching ideologies of each party could lead to connotations harmful to the Democrats. Just as the Republican party has labored under the charge of being "hijacked" by fundamentalists, so too could the Democrats in equal fairness be tagged as the party sympathetic to irreligionists, a group that historically has been viewed more negatively than moralistic evangelicals. As Tocqueville observed more than a century and a half ago, an unbeliever in America, particularly one in public life, would be wise to keep his unbelief silent, lest "everyone shuns him and he remains alone." Tocqueville wrote these comments when America was less secularized and a generalized Protestantism pervaded the public culture. Yet his admonitions are no less pertinent in contemporary America. In a national poll conducted in March 2002 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, more than half of the respondents expressed unfavorable feelings toward "nonbelievers," almost twice the number that felt unfavorably toward the "Christian conservative movement."

As the manifold displays of public piety in the aftermath of September 11 demonstrate, there is a reservoir of support for shared affirmations in the public square of America's historic relationship with God. Media elites are no doubt aware of American religiosity and implicitly understand the political ramifications of characterizing the Democrats as the partisan home of secularism. Perhaps it is for this reason more than any other that we do not hear in election-night analyses and postmortems that Democratic candidates have shorn up their base among the unchurched, atheists, and agnostics, in addition to the ritualistic accounts and warnings about how well Republicans are doing with evangelicals or the Christian Right.