Which comes first, religion or politics?
On the one hand, political scientists have long held that people’s political choices are formed by their childhood faith, which, for the most part, sticks with them.
On the other, 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, a thrice-married adulterer who rarely attends church.
A new book by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Michele Margolis argues that it’s political science that has it backward.
As she lays out in “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity,” most Americans choose a political party before choosing the religion to follow in their adulthood, if they choose a religion at all.
“Political science sometimes assumes religiosity is a fixed and stable trait, like gender and race – things we think of for the most part as unchanging,” she said. “But there’s a whole literature out there that says it changes over time.”
The idea upends conventional thinking based on Americans’ lives of 100 years ago, when young people typically got married at age 18 and had their first child at 19. Today, young adults leave home for college. Then they take jobs. They marry later in life and have children even later.
During that transition, Margolis wrote, whatever religion they had fades into the background and they begin to form a political…
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