According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 68 percent of Americans over 18 years of age were members of a church or synagogue, and 44 percent attended church or synagogue within the previous seven days-in 2000.

(Source: Source: The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ, ''Gallup Poll Releases-Easter Season Finds a Religious Nation''; published 13 April 2001; http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010413.asp; in U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002 [122nd edition], Washington, DC, 2003, p. 56.) 

"'Evangelicals today are more interested in making a difference than in making a statement,' said the Rev. Richard Cizik, the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 43,000 congregations. 'We made a lot of statements in the 1980's and got zip.'

Mr. Cizik said that evangelicals were now more willing to work with Jewish and feminist groups on certain foreign policy issues and that the failure of evangelicals in the 1980's to meet their goals was in part a failure to collaborate. 'Evangelicals have thought historically, 'Well, we'll do politics the way we do faith - we'll just convert the opposition,"' he said. 'But you can't do politics the same way you do religion.'"

(Source: Elisabeth Bumiller, "Evangelicals Sway White House on Human Rights Issues Abroad," The New York Times, October 26, 2003; http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/politics/26RELI.html?th.) 

 In recent years, a growing number of Americans have decided how to vote in presidential elections on the basis of fears about family decline in the United States. Indeed, in an article recently published in the American Sociological Review, researcher Clem Brooks of Indiana University, Bloomington, argues that rising levels of public concern over family decline have caused "the emergence of a new cleavage in U.S. politics."

Examining survey data collected by the Center for Political Studies between 1972 and 1976, Brooks limns a remarkable pattern of rising public concern over family decline. From 1976 through 1984, Brooks points out that less than two percent of prospective American voters regarded family decline as "the most important problem" facing the nation. However, "during the subsequent decade, public concern with family decline increased steadily and linearly, and by 1996, one out of ten adult Americans ranked family decline as the most important social problem." This concern, moreover, has demonstrably affected presidential voting. "All else being equal," Brooks remarks, "concern with family decline increasingly disposes voters to favor Republican over Democratic presidential candidates." Brooks finds, for instance, that "viewing family decline as the most important problem in the 1996 election is predicted as substantially lowering (by .48) the probability of a typical voter supporting the Democratic candidate (Bill Clinton)."

But who are the voters most likely to regard family decline as the nation's most serious problem? Brooke's statistical models show that "participation in any religious institution has a significant effect" in increasing the likelihood that a voter will regard family decline as the country's most serious problem. However, the same models show that this effect is particularly pronounced among evangelical Protestants. Brooks calculates that among all non-evangelicals, regular church attendance has the effect of increasing the likelihood of regarding family decline as America's most serious problem by a factor of five. Among evangelical Protestants, Brooks found that "regular church attenders [were] over 24 times more likely than nonattenders to consider family decline as the most important problem."

Because of "the disproportionate concentration of concern with family decline among the most observant evangelicals," Brooks concludes that the effect of such concern on presidential politics has been statistically significant but "relatively modest." He calculates, for example, that the six-percent increase in concern with family decline from 1988 to 1996 has lowered the percentage of voters supporting the Democratic candidate by only three percent. "For the family decline cleavage to have a larger effect on the outcome of elections," Brooks explains, "either the level of family decline concern or its association with vote choice would have to increase." Brooks considers it unlikely that concern over family decline will figure more prominently in America's presidential politics "in the absence of social networks that would extend [evangelicals'] communicative influence across denominational boundaries."