The liberty
principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the necessity of education and
religion working together to preserve and protect the Constitution. Most universities
and colleges have curriculums that lead to the destruction of liberty, and some
churches lean left.
I found a very interesting
article by Milo Beckman titled “Religion and Education Explain the White Vote.”
As Beckman says, most colored people
vote for Democrats, but the swing voters are “overwhelmingly white.” This is an
open secret, but it may not mean much during this campaign season.
White people have been assaulted
on too many levels for this election to be normal. The “race card” has been
played far too many times. White children are being taught that they are
terrible simply because they are white. There are open physical attacks on
white people, simply because they are white.
Beckman’s article is an answer
to this question: “Which demographic traits affect how white Americans vote?” A
detailed poll was conducted during the summer by Five Thirty Eight/Survey Monkey
contains a lot of interesting data to answer this question. The poll tracked
seven demographic variables.
The poll
discovered that income is “the least predictive
of white voter support among the seven demographic variables tracked by the
poll.” So if income plays such an insignificant part, what is important in
relationship to the white voter?
Beckman writes, “Instead, the
two most predictive variables are religious attendance and education.
Crucially, these two variables are still more explanatory when considered
together. Roughly speaking, a white voter will lean left if she is `more
college than church’ and will lean right if she is `more church than college.’
“More precisely, we can assign
an educational score (no college = 0, some college = 1, college degree = 2) and
religious attendance score (never attend = 0, sometimes attend = 1, attend
weekly = 2) to each white American. Those with a higher education score are
likely to support Clinton, those with a higher religious attendance score are
more likely to support Trump, and those with equal scores are more divided….
“One quick side note: The three
groups in the middle, with `equal influence’ from college and church – none/never,
some/sometimes and degree/weekly – can be further explained by the third-most
predictive variable, urban/suburban/rural residence. Urban voters lean left
while suburban and rural voters lean right.”
I found this article so interesting
that I shared it on Facebook. One of the reasons that I found it so interesting
is that I know many faithful members of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints who are highly educated. A friend posted that Mormons tend to
be “outliers in these sorts of studies” because members of the Church “are
highly educated and religious” and “our dedication to religion increases with
our educational attainment.”
My friend’s comments only
heightened my interest in this issue, and I asked why Mormons were different
than other religions. She answered that Mormons tend to become more religious
with age, while members of other religions lose their faith as they age.
I wanted to know more about this
issue and found an article by Michael Lipka at the Pew Research Center titled “U.S. Religious Groups and Their Political Leanings.” His article starts, “Mormons are the most heavily Republican-leaning religious group
in the U.S., while a pair of major historically black Protestant denominations –
the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the National Baptist
Convention – are two of the most reliably Democratic groups, according to data
from Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study.
“Seven-in-ten U.S. Mormons
identify with the Republican Party or say they lean toward the GOP, compared
with 19% who identify as or lean Democratic – a difference of 51 percentage
points. That’s the biggest gap in favor of the GOP out of 30 religious groups
we analyzed, which include Protestant denominations, other religious groups and
three categories of people who are religiously unaffiliated.
“At the other end of the
spectrum, an overwhelming majority of members of the AME Church (92%) identify
with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while just 4% say they favor the
Republican Party (an 88-point gap). Similarly, 87% of members of the National
Baptist Convention and 75% of members of the Church of God in Christ (another
historically black denomination) identify as Democrats.” Lipka did not divide
the information by race except to say that members of churches that are
predominately black vote for Democrats.
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