Faith and the Free Market: Evangelicals, the Tea Party, and Economic Attitudes

Abstract

We argue that concerted efforts by Tea Party leaders, Republican politicians, and leading Christian Right figures to establish and promote a connection between Christian faith and the free-market system has helped shift the economic attitudes of white evangelical Protestants in a more conservative direction. Our analysis of Public Religion Research Institute survey data finds that white evangelical Protestants express greater skepticism about an active role of government in society and believe economic growth is more likely to be spurred by a reduction in taxes rather than in public investments. Moreover, we find that identifying with the Tea Party has a conservatizing influence on their economic issue positions. While we find that partisanship, class, and in some cases, age, serve to modify the views of some evangelicals, by and large, evangelicals have come to embrace the conservative fiscal message promoted by both the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement.

Comparing Political Attitudes of Evangelicals with the Attitudes of Mainline Christians and Non-Church Members in The Netherlands

“…Our findings thus are in line with Swartz's (2012) (Bean 2014a;2014b) and it is also not present among the evangelicals we studied. Consequently, the growing conservatism among American evangelicals in both the cultural and especially the economic domain, that was recently documented by Deckman et al (2016), may be more typical for the United States and may indeed by the result of the growing polarization in American politics between the Democratic and the Republican Party and of the emergence of the Tea Party, as Deckman et al suggest. In contrast, in the politically plural context of the Netherlands, where such a strong polarization between two political parties does not exist and partisanship is traditionally low (Scheepers, Peters, and Felling 2000) and has persisted to be low also after the turn of the century (Linssen et al 2014), partisan leanings may be less influential on the political attitudes of the electorate and the conservatism of Dutch evangelicals may, therefore, be confined to those moral issues where religion traditionally matters most: i.e., pro-life and homosexuality.…”

“…However, this socio-economic inequality is considered to be an inevitable by-product of economic growth and thus a conservative position in the economic domain is also accompanied by a critical stance toward the provision of social services to alleviate poverty as well as by a critical view on the government's responsibility to reduce income differences (Felling and Peters 1986; cf. also, Deckman et al 2016). Within the cultural domain, in contrast, conservatism relates to moral conservatism and actually boils down to support for the restriction of individual freedom.…”

“…But with respect to a pro-life issue like abortion, Schmalzbauer indeed found that evangelicals with a higher socio-economic status were less conservative. More recently, Deckman et al (2016) also pointed at the influence of personal economic circumstances, which prompted lower class evangelicals to take a less conservative stance when it comes to government interference in the economy. Thus, it is plausible to propose that a higher socio-economic status mitigates the power of a religious subculture to shape political attitudes.…”

“…Attracted by the conservative agenda of the Republican Party, evangelicals are not only culturally conservative, especially in their opposition to abortion and homosexuality (cf., for instance, Hunter 1984; Schmalzbauer 1993; Putnam and Campbell 2010, 370–373, 384–388), but also increasingly hold conservative attitudes on economic issues. This kind of economic conservatism comes forward, for instance, in their growing opposition to government interference in the economy or their support for tax reduction (Deckman et al 2016). However, while evangelicals' conservative stances on cultural issues like abortion and homosexuality seem part and parcel of their distinctive religious identity, there is evidence that this is less the case for their conservative stance on economic issues.…”

Evangelizing Congress: The Emergence of Evangelical Republicans and Party Polarization in Congress

“…The literature on morality politics shows that members of Congress tend to treat these types of issues differently (Koopman ; Oldmixon ), but studies of the effect of religion on mass political attitudes has produced conflicting results. Layman and Green () find that the effect of religion on policy attitudes is mostly confined to narrow policy contexts, but other researchers have found that religious worldviews influence attitudes on economics (Barker and Carman ; Deckman et al ) and foreign policy (Barker, Hurwitz, and Nelson ). A multivariate analysis of ideological scores in the three different issue areas (social, economic, and foreign) shows that evangelicals are significantly more conservative than nonevangelicals on all three dimensions, but the effect of religion is greatest on the social dimension.…”