Posted on 11/11/2008 2:37:01 PM PST by Alex Murphy
Nationally, 25% of white evangelicals voted for Obama. In certain key states, the numbers were higher. He saw a 14% increase in support from white evangelicals in Colorado, 8% in Indiana, 8% in North Carolina and 4% in Ohio.
Most important, he won 32% of young evangelicals (up from 16% for McCain).
Who are these Obamagelicals - and how do they compare with the larger group of evangelicals who voted for John McCain?
Beliefnet recently surveyed its readership about who they voted for and why. 1,135 people who described themselves as "evangelical or Born Again" filled out the survey. (Full survey here)
Let's start with the similarities between Obama's evangelicals and McCain's.
They're both comparably religiously active.
But there are some stark differences:
They Emphasize Completely Different Values Issues. Obama's evangelicals ranked their priorities like this:
McCain Evangelicals listed priorities in a very different order:
Obamagelicals are moderate (not liberal). McCain evangelicals are conservative (not moderate). Only 24.6% of Obamagelicals described themselves as liberals - half the amount that Obama voters on the Beliefnet survey -- 67% said they were moderate. 8.4% said they were conservative. Less surprisingly, 79% of McCain's evangelicals describe themselves as conservative, 19.% as moderate and only 1% as liberal.
They Interpret the Bible Differently. One of the most striking differences relates to their reading of Scriptures. 58.7% Obamagelicals say "the Bible is divinely inspired but not everything in it is the literal word of God," compared to 40% who said "The Bible is the literal word of God." For McCain evangelicals, the percentages were reversed: 74.7% said it was the Bible is the word of God and only 24.6% said the Bible was divinely inspired. (More here)
Many Obamagelicals are new to the Democratic side. While 71% of McCain's evangelicals said they were Republican, 54.3% of Obama evangelicals said they were Democrats. What's more, a quarter of Obama's evangelicals voted for George W. Bush last election and 10.3% didn't vote; only 61% had voted for Kerry. By contrast, 87.9% of McCain evangelicals had voted for Bush.
Obamagelicals didn't believe Obama is or was Muslim, McCain evangelicals did. 87% of Obamagelicals believe Obama "was never a Muslim and is a practicing Christian." Only 19.7% of McCain evangelicals agreed with that statement.
Sarah Palin. McCain evangelicals loved Sarah Palin. 71.4% said her faith and practices made it more inclined to vote for McCain (compared to 56.6% among McCain voters in general). Only 5.2% of Obamagelicals said her faith attracted them, and 48.5% said it outright made them less inclined to support the ticket.
Stark Differences on Abortion. Almost all McCain and Obama evangelicals believe that reducing the number of abortions is important. But they different dramatically on the right way to achieve that goal. 61% of McCain evangelicals believed that the best approach is through legal restrictions while only 8% of Obamagelicals believed that. Instead, 86.3% of Obama's supporters said the best way is "by preventing unintended pregnancy (through education and birth control), or providing financial assistance to pregnant mothers."
As a result of these different perspectives on how to reduce abortion, they also differed sharply in their expectations about the impact of the President. Among Obama's evangelicals, 50.4% believe the abortion rate is unlikely to be affected by an Obama or McCain presidency, while 27.2% believe it will likely fall more under Obama and only 4.2% that it would fall more under McCain. This seems to indicate that the argument of progressive pro-lifers - that abortion rates could go down more under Obama - has only been half persuasive. Obama evangelicals don't believe a McCain presidency would actually reduce abortion, but they're not that convinced that Obama would be much better.
McCain voters, of course, disagree. 57.6% believe abortion would be lower under McCain. (That actually struck me as quite low. Stated another way, 42.4% of evangelical or Born Again Christians who voted for McCain have no confidence that abortion would have actually declined under a McCain presidency). (More on evangelicals and abortion here).
Obamagelicals support gay civil unions, McCain evangelicals don't. Obamagelicals are far more supportive of gay marriage than McCain evangelicals, but on balance they don't support gay marriage either. Only 28.7% said they supported gay marriage. The big difference is that most McCain voters want neither marriage nor civil unions (66.4% of McCain voters wanted neither), whereas a substantial number of Obamagelicals support civil unions or domestic partnerships (53.4%).
Obamagelicals Believe McCain's Campaign Was "Unchristian". 59.7% of Obama evangelicals said "John McCain has run amore unchristian campaign than Barack Obama." Intriguingly, only 37.6% of McCain evangelicals said that about Obama. Of all of John McCain's possible "character issues" the one that bother Obamagelicals most was the "tone of his campaign," far more important than the Keating Five scandal, his cheating on his first wife or his gambling. McCain evangelicals thought Obama's biggest character problem was his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, though they were also deeply bothered by his association with Bill Ayers.
Praying About the Election. Most evangelicals surveyed did pray about the election but in subtly different ways. 75% of McCain evangelicals prayed for "God's will to be done" and 36.7% prayed for "wisdom to make the right decision in casting my vote." Only 57.9% of Obamagelicals prayed for "God's will to be done" while more of them (42%) prayed for wisdom.
The clergy role. Obama evangelicals seem more likely to attend churches where the pastors are either apolitical or politically moderate. 19% of Obamagelicals said their pastors preached against abortion or gay rights prior to the election, while 41.5% of McCain evangelicals said so.
Note, too, that in the Beliefnet sample, African Americans and Latinos sometimes self declared as born again or evangelical. Together, made up 20% of the Obamagelicals.
Basically, 0bamagelicals are fake Christians. Probably unitarians, liberal presbytarians and so on.
I’d like to see how this survey would break down if there were data on homeschooled vs. government schooled Christians.
From my research, a super-majority of government schooled Christians graduate from government schools with a socialist worldview.
All this “Obama-whatevering” is making me pine for the days when scandal was just “something-gate”.
My impression is that for the evangelicals who voted Obama, the main things were the war and the economy in the sense of wanting a greater safety net for the poor.
When you consider that most people get their news from the mainstream media, and they’ve been fed a non-stop diet of “Halliburton oil-war Bush lied” nonsense, its not surprising that a certain percentage are going to actually begin to believe it. So for them the choice is between a guy who promised more evil war versus a guy who promised to get us out.
If I believed anything the mainstream media had to say about the war, I’d probably vote Obama too. Evangelicals who vote Obama aren’t for abortion, they’re against war and Halliburton oil corruption. So Democrat control of the information media is killing us. If we don’t solve that we’d better get used to losing.
But, they are of the emergent church variety. They follow the Shane Claibornes, the Brian McLarens, the Doug Paggits, the Rob Bells, and etc.
These guys, and their ilk, have invaded Christian Colleges and Christian churches attacking biblical doctrine and historic orthodoxy at every turn.
McLaren, and other emergents, worked on behalf of the Obama campaign.
Obama was the emergents' gay rights, poverty fighting, social justice, usher in the kingdom candidate.
No, if you really want to understand what’s going on, you need to take a deep breath and look more carefully. I’ve been following some of the Emergent blogs for three years now and I predicted this at least 2 years ago—that they would abandon the pro-life Republicans.
What’s happening is that a generation after Catholic prolifers attracted Evangelicals to the cause and remade the Republican Party, two decades of liberal demonizing of the “Religious Right” is coming to fruition. This new generation of college-educated non-denominational Evangelicals don’t want to be identified with the “religious right.” They’ve bought the Jim Wallis nostrum that the “religious right” doesn’t care about the poor and suffering, that it cares only about religion and fetuses, hates minorities etc. etc. etc.
Of course, a lot of it is generational “pushback”—they simply don’t want to be associated with their fathers’ Evangelicalism, which was the evangelicalism of the “Church Growth” megachurches. But the fact that the “religious right” has been so demonized by the Left makes it easy to pushback, push off away from their fathers’ Evangelicalism. And so they discover—for the first time, they foolishly think—real concern about the poor instead of mere “obsession with doctrinal propositions” and so forth. They justify this with the claim that this is being “missional”—reaching out to the forgotten ones of society that their fathers’ Evangelicalism ignored.
They won’t admit it, but they are just as “church growth” and marketing-driven as the mega-churches of the previous two decades. The difference is that the “market” has shifted, the culture as a whole, fattened on the success of the Reagan revolution, wants “change” and has swallowed the Left’s lies about Republicans not caring about the poor. Most of these folks are too poorly educated in economics and the principles of the American founders to realize that both free-marketers have answers to how to help the poor, different answers—and that the question is not which of the two sides “cares about the poor” but how does one best help the poor. They have totally bought the lie that conservatives don’t care.
A lot of them are simply mad at their upbringing—they have earned graduate degrees, work as professionals, and when the Libs mock Sarah Palins as rubes and fools and naive yokels, they see their parents, their childhood churches, their former selves as the targets of that mocking and they want to run as fast as they can away from that. They want to be sophisticated. And sophisticated, educated people, dontcha know, understand that the Right hates the poor, cares nothing for social justice, while the Left is building the kingdom of God on earth.
In many ways it’s a replay of what happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the Social Gospel liberals poured scorn on the old evangelicals within the mainline denominations. The difference now is that these Emergents come out of what are now the “oldline” megachurch non-denominational Protestant world instead of the oldline Protestant denominations. Moreover, the substitute for faith that they are embracing is no longer the rationalism of the late 1800s but the pop psychologizing explanations for reality that dominate our culture today. These Obamagelicals love to talk about process and how civil they are—unlike those nasty Fundamentalists (their former selves, the churches they are emerging from) who always see things black and white and won’t “engage in process.”
They aren’t fake Christians, just very misguided, naive, foolish Christians. They would not be a force had the Democrats not deliberately set out and succeeded at combating the success of the “religious right” by demonizing it. The MSM carried the Dims’ water for them and voila, Evangelicals full of self-loathing eat up the Dim-MSM demonization of their own background world.
And it doesn’t help that conservative secular libertarians also mock and demonize religious conservatives. We need each other in the coming confrontation.
Obamagelicals = The kind of “evangelicals” to whom the Apostle Paul would write a blistering epistle of rebuke (under the direction of the Holy Spirit, of course).
Sounds to me like this is an attempt to co-opt the “Evangelical” label and in doing so, render it meaningless.....ping
“25% of white evangelicals voted for Obama.”
NFW
Scary stuff.
After looking at the latest Barna data, I think it is meaningless.
From now on you can call me a "FUNDAMENTALIST".
Evangelicalism is for theological sissies.
This is where Dem domination of the mainstream media is killing us.
If you are losing evangelicals, you've really lost control of your message.
I think I'm seeing the same thing you're seeing, but I'll describe what I'm seeing anyway.
I'm in a church that has over the years grown into a mega-church. There are large numbers of relatively recent converts; that almost by definition means you are converting Democrats. As people become Christians you will see very dramatic changes in their personal lives and in their families, but their traditional party loyalties change slowly, over time.
And if someone is told every day of his life that Bush is a corrupt oilman, and that Republicans are the party of the rich, that Bush lied about Iraq, becoming a Christian doesn't immediately change those opinions. Seeing the difference between media reality and real-reality comes over time.
As for the social safety net, if you're a Dem you've always believed in it. As a Christian you learn to look to God for your supply; but the belief in the safety net for others doesn't change quickly.
Dem control of the news-media and the entertainment media and the public schools and the universities is costing us. Its costing us big time. Christians learn to be suspicious of all of the above, but what we as GOP need to do is either build our own or take them back.
I notice the Obama evangelicals emphasized the economy as #1. Be wary of any man who tells you that money is the most important thing.
Satan is pleased.
Priorities for Obamagelicals demonstrate that they are not, in fact, Evangelicals. Casual churchgoers in some Protestant churches, probably, but genuinely Christian - not.
Greetings ABQHispConservative...encouraging to see more of us in the no-longer-swing-state-now-certifiably-blue state of NM.
Notice Obamagelicals disproportionately believe the Bible is NOT the literal Word of God.
But we do need to team with secular conservatives/libertarians...
When the Evangelical Theological Society won’t listen to Roger Nicole and expel the Open Theists from their midst they prove they no longer have spiritual balls. I agree the Evangelical label has lost its cachet. I prefer “Neener”. It has a mystery about it, a spiritual
“bloweth where it listeth” sort of thing. One has to be adventuresome to find its meaning and be transformed by the renewing of the mind by it daily.
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