As the country settles in for another four years of a born-again president, there are those on both sides of the aisle who wonder how long the religious vote will be a factor in the outcome of national elections. The good news – or bad news, depending on who you are – is that those "values voters" are here to stay. And the easiest way to tell is by looking at younger voters.
Among 18- to 24-year-olds who voted in November, 28 percent considered themselves born-again or evangelical Christians. This was slightly lower than for the general population but still high for a group we often think of as filled with rebels. Indeed, a third of these young voters attend church at least once a week. Twenty-three per said moral values mattered most in their decision about who should be president. And among those who attend religious services weekly, 57 percent went for President Bush.
But religious youth are not simply clones of their parents. Among 18-24-year-olds who attended religious services at least once a week, 42 percent believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases compared with only 22 percent of adults who attended religious services once a week. On the other hand, among religious youth, 19 percent favor legal marriage for homosexuals while only 15 percent among the religious adult population do.
Why are religious youth different from previous generations? One important reason is the rise of religious colleges. Colleges and universities with strong faith identities are becoming more popular, even while their academic standards have risen. Enrollment at the more than 100 member institutions of the evangelical Council for Christian Colleges and Universities jumped a remarkable 60 percent between 1990 and 2002, while the number of students at secular schools barely fluctuated. Similar increases can be seen at Mormon, Catholic and Jewish colleges across the country.
What distinguishes the graduates of these schools – this new "missionary generation"? First, they are more likely to place some distance between their religious beliefs and their political views than their parents and grandparents did. Though they tend to agree that faith should never be excluded from the public square, they don't generally find political directives from biblical texts. As one young man at Wheaton College told me, "Christianity should never be reduced to politics."
And so in the future, it may be increasingly difficult for leaders of either party to count on the religious vote in the same way. This is good news for evangelicals (or any group) who don't want to be taken for granted in American politics.
In future elections, it will also be harder to locate religious people geographically. The missionary generation is moving to Blue America. The initial signs of this shift are everywhere. The number of Brigham Young alumni living in New England has grown to about 3,000 from just 100 in 1994. And religious college graduates are making their way into top jobs and graduate schools.
Wheaton ranks 11th in the nation in the percentage of graduates who go on to receive Ph.Ds. Yeshiva University recently graduated its first Rhodes Scholar. The Ave Maria Law School had a higher percentage of its graduates pass the bar than any school in Michigan.
Unlike their parents, religious college graduates see themselves less as a force outside of American culture trying to fight it, than a force within trying to transform it. This is the psychological result of spending four years in an environment that supported rather than attacked their religious beliefs and asked them to make the intellectual connections between faith and politics, culture, philosophy and literature.
Which leads us to the final way in which religious college graduates will be different from older religious voters. It is true that they will continue to support the candidate who accepts religious belief as a legitimate factor in making political decisions – it will always be Mr. Bush over John Kerry.
But Mr. Bush might not be their ideal candidate, either. Four years spent considering faith in the classroom makes religious college grads uncomfortable with leaders who say their faith is found primarily in their gut. As they say at BYU, "The Glory of God is intelligence."
—Naomi Schaefer Riley is an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America, out this month from St. Martin's Press. Her e-mail address is nriley@eppc.org.
