U.S. voters are split along religious lines

DES MOINES, Iowa — Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before.

If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will vote Republican by a 2-1 margin. If they never go, they likely will vote Democratic by a 2-1 margin.

This relatively new fault line in American life is a major reason the country is politically polarized. And the division is likely to continue or even grow in 2004.

A new poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center For The People & The Press this fall confirmed that the gap remains; voters who frequently attend religious services tilt 63-37 percent to Bush, and those who never attend lean 62-38 percent toward Democrats.

"We now have the widest gap we have ever had between Republicans and Democrats," said Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew survey.

"It's THE most powerful predictor of party ID and partisan voting intention," said Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington research center. "And in a society that values religion as much as (this one), when there are high levels of religious belief and commitment and practice, that's significant."

President Bush is a churchgoing Christian who often mixes theology with public policies ranging from the war on terrorism to a ban on a specific type of late-term abortion. By contrast, most leading Democratic candidates for president keep their campaigns secular, seldom mentioning God, religion or attending church, except for the occasional well-publicized visit to an African-American church.

The most notable exception among top-tier candidates is Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Jew who frequently invokes God, casts policy issues in moral terms and refuses to campaign on the Sabbath.

The Rev. Al Sharpton is religious too, of course, but polls show he's favored by fewer than 1 percent of likely Democratic voters in New Hampshire, the first primary state.

In contrast, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, said recently that he prayed privately but quit being an Episcopalian in a dispute with his parish over a bike path. He recently linked God with guns and gays in a list of issues that shouldn't influence voting. Dean doesn't regularly attend church, nor do most of his chief rivals.