religionnews | “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
sensibility. Only when they’re ready to settle down and have a family
does religion re-enter the picture.
“When it comes time to make religious decisions in adulthood, we have these formed partisan identities,” Margolis said.
Sharpening this political-religious split is the fact that many white
Americans who end up as Democrats don’t come back to church, while
Republicans tend to become more religious to better align with their
political convictions. (She concedes the theory does not apply to
African-Americans, who are highly religious and vote solidly for
Democrats.)
“It may seem counterintuitive, if not downright implausible, that
voting Democrat or Republican could change something as personal as our
relationship with God,” Margolis wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “But over the course of our lives, political choices tend to come first, religious choices second.”
