Tag: presidential election

Faith Stats on the Election

Posted on November 10, 2008

George Barna reports some interesting statistics from the presidential election. Breaking the voting down into faith groups, Barna tells us what percentage of the poplulation voted for McCain, Obama, or Independent. here are few of the categories:

Evangelicals: Two-thirds of all evangelicals who were registered to vote (65%) were aligned with the Republican Party. One out of five (21%) was Democrats and just one out of ten (10%) was registered independent of a party.

Protestants: Protestant voters were evenly split between being registered as Democrats and Republicans. However, they sided with Sen. McCain by a 53% to 46% split.

Catholics: Nearly half of all registered Catholics were aligned with the Democratic Party (48%), compared to only about one-quarter associated with the Republicans (28%) and one-fifth who remained independent (20%).

Atheist/Agnostics: The second largest faith group in America is atheists and agnostics. These religious skeptics represent about one out of every ten adults. About four out of ten skeptics were registered as Democrats, four out of ten as independents and just two out of ten as Republicans.Three-fourths of atheists and agnostics (76%) gave their vote to Sen. Obama, while only 23% backed Sen. McCain.

Other Faiths: About 5% of America’s adult population associates with faiths other than Christianity (e.g., Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, etc.). Within this group, about half (47%) were registered as Democrats, 30% were independent, and one-quarter (23%) were Republicans.The ballots of this group were most often cast for Barack Obama (62%) rather than John McCain (36%).

Obama and the Closing of the American Dream

Posted on September 10, 2008

In this article, n+1 writer Aziz Rana discusses several variations of the American Dream including the promise of professionalism, the strength of the agrarian, and boom of the industrialist small business owner. He notes that all of these have failed. Regarding small business he writes: “The quantity of small businesses begun each year suggests that the aspiration of having one’s own shop persists. Yet for the past half-century bankruptcy has been more likely than success.” As for the promise of professionalism, “we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution.” What then is the solution to the American Dream? He closes the article by saying: “If Obama hopes to save his party and to address the interests and experiences of working-class citizens, he will have to challenge the hegemony of the professional and with it the closing of the American dream.”

Can our presidential candidates sufficiently address the closing of the American Dream?

What Determines your Vote?

Posted on January 21, 2008

According to research done by Barna group, Evangelical voting concerns are quite different than the rest of the American population. In fact, the numbers are disconcerting…

Evangelicals’ top concern – by a wide margin – was abortion (94%). This was followed by the personal debt of Americans (81%), the content of television and movies (79%), homosexual activists (75%), and gay and lesbian lifestyles (75%). Evangelicals were more likely than other adults to be concerned about illegal immigration, but they were less worried about HIV/AIDS than virtually any other segment of the population.

Though Abortion is an incredibly important issue, culture of life issues should extend into other areas such as HIV/AIDS, Poverty, and Global Warming. Apparently, these issues aren’t of great concern to most Evangelicals. Evangelicals would do well to follow some non-Christian voter concerns, which included poverty (78%) and HIV/AIDS (76%).