Evangelicals and Working-Class Politics 

Mike Boyle

July 12, 2010 

Working Class Perspectives

http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/


According to the popular stereotype, evangelical
Christians want little to do with working-class
politics.  Instead, we tend to imagine evangelicals as
people who are either uninterested in politics or
focused entirely on fighting the culture wars, rather
than as people who care about issues like unemployment,
inequality, and poverty.  If the stereotype were
accurate, that would be bad news for people hoping for
policy changes that would benefit working-class
Americans.  Such changes only come about when the
public puts pressure on governmental leaders, and
evangelicals make up about one-third of the American
public.

There are, however, good reasons to believe that this
stereotype oversimplifies what is in fact a complicated
topic.  I'd like to review a few of those reasons here,
including a survey of evangelical clergy that I
conducted last year in Stark County, Ohio.  Stark
County, which is located near Cleveland, Akron, and
Youngstown in Northeastern Ohio, is home to about
380,000 people who are spread across a diverse
collection of cities, suburbs, and rural hamlets.  For
the better part of the 20th century, the three
principal cities of Stark County--Canton, Massillon,
and Alliance--were important manufacturing centers,
particularly in steel and related heavy industries. 
Over the course of the past several decades, however,
Stark County has conformed to the postindustrial
storyline of manufacturing job loss and deepening
economic insecurity for the working class.  By 2008,
27.9 percent of families in Canton were living below
the poverty line, a rate that is nearly three times the
national average and also the highest among Ohio's big
cities.  In March of 2009, the Stark County job market
drew national and even international attention when a
whopping 835 people applied to fill a vacant custodial
position at the Edison Junior High School in Perry
Township.

Because Stark County voting patterns have resembled
national ones for a long time, Stark has also earned a
reputation as "a bellwether county in a bellwether
state," making it a magnet to campaigning politicians,
as well as a better-than-average spot to check the
pulse of American opinion with a survey.  Two hundred
thirty-one clergy from the 553 congregations in Stark
County filled out, at least in part, the questionnaire
sent to them last year.  Along with conventional
questions about theology, membership, and so on, the
survey gave respondents an open-ended opportunity to
identify what they considered to be "the most serious
issue facing residents of Stark County today."  The
responses to that question don't quite fit the
stereotype.

Evangelical ministers are far more concerned with
economic issues than prevailing stereotypes suggest. 
Ninety of the Protestant churches that answered this
final question self-identified as 'born-again'
congregations--a very good indicator of evangelical
belief.  Eighty-two of these churches were
predominantly white, while eight were predominantly
African-American.  Forty-two of the 90 'born-again'
churches listed an economic problem of some sort as the
most serious issue facing Stark County residents. 
Thirty out of these 42 identified the need for jobs as
Stark County's number one issue.  The remaining 12
churches identified poverty, food security, and child
care, among other things.

Only 22 of the 90 born-again churches, however,
identified a religious problem such as "absence of
faith" or "spiritual complacency" as the most serious
issue facing the county.  Six more identified
traditional "culture wars" issues such as family
breakdown and declining morality.  Together, these 28
answers accounted for only 31 percent of the total,
which is far less than what stereotypes about
evangelicals would predict.  In contrast, nearly 50
percent of the born-again churches--42 out of
90--placed an economic issue at the top of their list
of concerns.  Others identified crime-related issues,
such as drugs and violence, or miscellaneous public
issues such as racial prejudice and highway repair.  A
few responses were too ambiguous to categorize.

Examining these returns even more closely suggests
important differences within the broad evangelical
community, especially between fundamentalist and
non-fundamentalist clergy.  Though both embrace the
core evangelical doctrines, fundamentalists tend to be
more separatist, literalist, and less tolerant of
doctrinal differences, even on secondary issues such as
dress codes and alcohol consumption.  Of the 64 clergy
that self-identified as 'born-again' but not
'fundamentalist,' 53 percent identified an economic
issue as Stark County's number one concern.  Meanwhile,
only 31 percent of clergy that identified as both
'born-again' and 'fundamentalist' did so.  It is common
for opinion surveys to uncover a divide of this sort
between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist
evangelical believers.  This divide is rooted in the
complex history of American Protestantism, rather than
in the core religious doctrines that all evangelical
traditions share.

The Stark County data are illuminating for what they
tell us about evangelical clergy, but they may not
reflect the views of the ordinary believer in the pew. 
For several decades, however, scholars have been
tracking the opinions of ordinary evangelicals through
surveys and polls.  Although these studies have added a
lot to our knowledge of evangelical opinion, they have
not demonstrated a clear link between evangelical
belief and economic attitudes.  In fact, these studies
are often inconsistent with one another.  Many of
them--perhaps even a small majority--do indicate that
evangelicals tend to be slightly more conservative on
economic issues than non-evangelicals.  Others,
however, find no significant difference between
evangelical and non-evangelical attitudes toward the
economy.  Some very good studies even show that
evangelicals tend to be more liberal on economic issues
than non-evangelical Americans.  And to complicate the
picture even more, some studies show that evangelicals
in other countries are more liberal than their fellow
believers in America.

In any event, data from Stark County and elsewhere
indicate that many evangelicals are alive to the
importance of economic issues in contemporary America. 
This fact is not enough to demonstrate that
evangelicals will support specific policy proposals. 
What these results do suggest, however, is that support
may exist among evangelicals for economic ideas that
depart from the conservative to moderately conservative
American mainstream.  Making the most of these openings
and building support for economic strategies that
benefit working-class communities will, however, take
political work.  Both evangelical and non-evangelical
conservatives undertook this kind of work for more than
a generation, and it turned out to be pivotal in
delivering electoral victories to Republicans from
Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush and in driving the
Democratic Party to the right.

Today, however, more and more evangelicals are working
to convince their fellow believers that struggling on
behalf of decent living standards for all people is
part of what it means to be a faithful Christian.  They
are reinvigorating currents of evangelical protest that
were once prominent in American life, as in the early
labor movement and during the agrarian populist
upsurge.  These evangelicals--many of them young
people--have been inspired by prominent believers such
as John Perkins, Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony
Campolo, as well as the Scriptures themselves.  Already
it is becoming evident that young evangelicals are more
liberal on economic issues and less preoccupied with
the culture wars than their parents and grandparents. 
Because evangelicals account for such a large segment
of the public, we should be encouraged by these
developments.  They have the potential to affect the
course of future economic policy in ways that benefit
all working-class Americans, regardless of their
religious background.

Mike Boyle

Mike Boyle is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology
at the City University of New York whose research
interests include political economy, class, and
religion.

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