Rural upstate also turning blue
Just to follow up on btp’s post about the suburbs turning blue, there is also a piece Daily Kos about rural upstate trending blue. Having grown up in rural upstate New York this doesn’t surprise me at all. Quite simply, rural upstaters are not George Bush Republicans. And they’re slowly figuring that out.
Here’s a big reason why: nationwide about 24% of voters identify as evangelical or born again Christians, but in New York State that number is only 9% — check out this table done by the Annenberg Policy Center. I’d like to calculate the correlation between percentage of evangelicals in a state and the voting index of the state when I have time. I’ll bet it is quite high.
Of course, if the evangelical Christians I know are any indication, they aren’t George Bush Repbublicans either. They care too much about issues like poverty and AIDS and too little for pointless and disastrous wars to fit into that tiny percentage of Americans who truly agree with the Bush White House on most issues. Let’s hope that they figure that out someday.
From experience, my first response is to be leery of evangelicals since they tend to push their religion on me or my country. But the more I see and read, my experience has been with the really pushy kind, not the quiet, faithful kind who, like you said, care about poverty and unjust war.
Regardless of our religious preferences in metro NY, I think its important for us to remember how important Christian church life is in rural America. Churches are often the central social hub for rural families.
This from a research article I was just reading. I happen to be interested in rural affairs.
“Despite the effect of other local clubs and organizations, churches appear to dominate as netowrks that formalize ongoing communication between members in a community. Church attendance continues its religious role for many in the community, although it has a fundamental social role as well.”
Oftentimes, famlies that move into rural areas (as rare as this may be, one example would be physicians) find they have to belong to a church in order to successfully integrate into their community. I’m not sure how big of a factor church life is in rural upstate NY, but I see a ton of churches with filled pews on Sunday in suburban NY. Instead of gay marriage, maybe rural upstate church attendees talk about ungodly taxes?
Sorry, forgot to reference the author of the quote. Malcolm Cutchin, 1997
In the rural northeast, these churches are usually non-evangelical. Non-evangelical church goers are not as conservative in general (it varies from denomination to denomination, of course).
My take is this: most long-established churches have had to come to grips with all sorts of political change and realize that is unhealthy for a religion to become too political. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
That is my understanding as well, at least socially. Perhaps, they are less conservative economically as well from what you were saying?
Interesting. Makes sense to me. Hadn’t thought about it this way.
That’s an interesting question. I don’t know what the answer is, but I would not expect that evangelical Christians or Christians from established churches are conservative economically. Jesus was certainly pretty far to the left economically (somewhere between socialist and communist, I’d say) and it’s pretty hard to dress the New Testament up as The Wealth of Nations.
Actually, funny you should mention this. I have a family member (in-law) who claims to be a Republican Communist. He’s very religious, although not evangelical. Somehow (and this may have changed), he says he can relate to McCain, Bush, and Arnold. I just put it down to him living in California.
Anyway, I think in the end what we see right now is genuinely religious, well-meaning people being duped into supporting a radical corporatist agenda. It’s shameful to me that religious leaders like Dobson and Haggard manipulate decent religious people the way that they do.
Ditto, or so I hope.
[...] Massa made gains in every county over Barend in 04. Some questions arise. What’s up with Yates Co.? I can’t attribute it entirely to the “rural voter” swing Exile posted on before, since Allegany and Catt counties both are equivalently rural to Yates. (More on that in a followup post.) [...]