Religious Rhetoric and American Politics

The Endurance of Civil Religion in Electoral Campaigns

Bibliographic Data

ID19976517
AuthorsChristopher B Chapp (corresponding author)
Year2012
Pages173
Publication date2012-10-04
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueReligious rhetoric and American politics (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCornell University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.7591/cornell/9780801451263.001.0001
OpenAlexW2251744146
Open LibraryOL25307506M
ISBN9780801451263
LanguageEN
Citations received21

From Ronald Reagan's regular invocation of America as “a city on a hill” to Barack Obama's use of spiritual language in describing social policy, religious rhetoric is a regular part of how candidates communicate with voters. Although the Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test as a qualification to public office, many citizens base their decisions about candidates on their expressed religious beliefs and values. This book shows that Americans often make political choices because they identify with a “civil religion.” The book examines the role of religious political rhetoric in U.S. elections by analyzing both how political elites use religious language and how voters respond to different expressions of religion in the public sphere. The book evaluates how citizens respond to religious stumping. Effective religious rhetoric, the book finds, is characterized by two factors—emotive cues and invocations of collective identity—and these factors regularly shape the outcomes of American presidential elections and the dynamics of political representation. While we tend to think that certain issues (e.g., abortion) are invoked to appeal to specific religious constituencies who vote solely on such issues, the book shows that religious rhetoric is often more encompassing and less issue-specific. It concludes that voter identification with an American civic religion remains a driving force in U.S. elections, despite its potentially divisive undercurrents

Appeal · Constitution · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Religiosity · Religious identity · Rhetoric · Sociology · Voting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Religion and Society Interactions · Christianity · Civil religion · Identity politics · Political aspects · Political campaigns · Religion and politics · Religious aspects · united states

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