Religious influences on voting are still marked in France.

In the presidential election of 1981, Francois

Mitterrand, the candidate of the left, received the support of 88 per cent of the non-religious 61 per

cent of those who no longer attended church, 40 per cent of regular church-goers.

Malta provides an extreme example of the relationship between religion and politics in Catholic

countries. Before the 1930 election, the Catholic hierarchy issued a pastoral letter which stated: ‘You

may not, without committing a grave sin, vote for Lord Strickland (then prime minister) and his

candidates, or for all those, even of other parties, who in the past have helped and supported him’.

Religiously-mixed countries. In Europe, these countries include the Netherlands, Switzerland and West

Germany. Though not a separate state, Northern Island must also be included here. With the dramatic

exception of Northern Ireland, religion in these countries no longer provides a major focus of policy

differences. In the long run, this peaceful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants will no doubt be

reflected in a weakened association between religious affiliation and the vote. This has long een visible

in the Netherlands where declining support for denominational parties led to the emergence of a single

Christian Democratic Appeal in 1977. In West Germany, too,, the steady growth of the social

democratic SPD is widely attributed to the decline of traditionally conservative catholic milieu (Kuchler,

1978). Yet parties with a religious factor to outlast the issues which gave rise to it should never be

underestimated. Change is across generations rather than within individuals.

In the Anglo-American world, protestant countries with marked Catholic minorities include Australia

(where Catholics form 25 per cent of the population), Canada (43 per cent but about 88 per cent in

Quebec), and the United States (25 per cent). In contrast to their European counterparts, which can

generally trace the religious cleavage back to the reformation, these countries lack parties with an
explicitly religious rationale, and religious cleavages may not be about religion. Indeed, in contrast to

the pattern in continental Europe where Catholics support right-wing parties, Catholics in Canada,

Australia, the USA and Britain tend to support left-wing parties partly for social and ethnic reasons,

though, at least in Britain, this may also be partly because the left is associated with opposition to the

established Protestant church. None the less, the influence of religion on voting is clear enough. In

Australia, denomination and church attendance come second, albeit a poor second, to class in

accounting for electoral choice (Aitkin, 1974). In Canada, although the general relationship between

social structure and electoral choice is much weaker than in other democracies, a majority of Catholics

support the Liberal Party. In the United States the electoral significance of denomination has suffered a

long term decline apart from a short-term surge in 1960 when John Kennedy became the first Catholic

President. But the association of Protestants with Republicans, and Catholics with the Democrats,

persists. This is not just a consequence of Catholic concentration among lower-class groups. More

generally, moral and religious values still suffuse American political culture and despite the formal

separation of church and state America comes close to having protestant non-conformity as its

established religion. These values were expertly exploited by Ronald Reagan in the presidential

elections of 1980 and 1984.

Protestant countries. Religion no longer commands much influence over voting behavior in the

protestant countries of Britain and Scandinavia. The evolution of electoral choice in twentieth-century

Britain has been a story of the replacement of religion by class as the principal cleavage. At the start of

the century, the equations linking non-conformity with the Liberals, and the Anglicans with the

Conservatives, still worked well; ‘the Church of England’, it was said, ‘is the Conservative Party at

prayer’. As late as the 1960s, Butler and Stokes found a strong legacy of this religious tradition among

older voters. However, political differences by religion and religiosity had virtually disappeared among
younger cohorts. Catholics, non-conformists, Jews Hindus, Muslims and atheists remain, for a mixed

bag of reasons, more pro-Labour than one would expect from their class composition; but these

patterns lack the electoral punch which religion carried earlier in the century. Active state

discrimination against non-Anglicans continues until the late nineteenth century, and was followed by

positive discrimination in favour of Anglican schools, but the controversies provoked by these issues

died away in the early decades of this century.

In Scandinavia, where national Lutheran churches were established in the Reformation, religion has long

been even more marginal than in Britain. In 1977, 68 per cent of Swedes aged 18-25 said they had no

religious beliefs; this compared with 14 per cent among a comparable group of Britons. (But note that

British interviewers have been known to classify agnostics under Church of England!) Such electoral

influence as religion has had in Scandinavia comes from protestant fundamentalists asserting the

traditional values of the family, respect for authority and temperance. In Norway these values provide a

base of a significant Christian People’s Party but attempts to emulate this party of cultural protest have

met with little success elsewhere in Scandinavia.

Secularisation. By this we mean a change in the balance between the religious and the irreligious; a

decline in the ‘space’ occupies by religion whether in society at large or in individual belief systems.

Either religiosity itself, or simply its political relevance, may decline as secularization proceeds.

Secularisation has been an important trend in Catholic Europe since 1945. It has taken the form

of declining observance rather than declining adherence to religious belief. In Italy weekly church

attendance fell from 69 per cent in 1956 to 35 per cent in the 1980s. Over a similar period the

membership of Catholic Action, a leading Catholic organization, dropped by three-quarters. In France

the proportion of practicing Catholics declined from 36 per cent in the 1983. In both countries
generational turnover and the movement of people from the rural communities to urban areas have

been crucial factors in this process of secularization.

Secularisation might be expected to strengthen parties of the left as the Catholic working-class

becomes more susceptible to left-wing overtures. There is some indirect evidence for this. In Italy the

Communist scored uninterrupted electoral gains between 1946-76. In France, secularization was one

key which opened the gates of the Elysee Palace to Francois Mitterrand in 1981. But too simple a view

should not be taken of the electoral impact of declining religious observance. Declining class loyalties

have hindered left-wing parties as much as secularization has helped them. Moreover, Catholic parties

have not stood still: they have transformed themselves into broad catch-all parties of the centre-right.

This transformation has been helped by the church’s growing reluctance to enter the political arena

openly and explicitly. So the most important consequence of secularization has probably just been to

make centre-right politicians work harder for their votes, and campaign directly on broadly right-wing

rather than specifically religious themes.

Secularisation generates its own tensions and counter-movements. American history is littered

with extreme right-wing movements, such as the Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan, which have

attempted to reassert traditional moral values against the ‘threat’ from atheists, city dwellers, Jews,

immigrants and catholics. Right-wing Protestantism is one element in these movements of cultural

reaction (Lipset and Raab, 1971). The most recent revival of the Christian right in the United States is

indicated by the fact that white ‘born-again’ Protestants made up 17 per cent of the electorate in 1980.

Politically, this renaissance was spearheaded by Moral Majority Inc., an organization which issued a

Family Issues Voting Index (known to critics as the ‘moral hit-list’) summarizing the voting behaviour of

American congressmen on relevant moral issues. The religious revival contributed to the defeat of

several liberal senators in the 1980 elections. Elsewhere in the democratic world, the 1980s saw signs of

a religious renaissance among the ‘post-secular’, young, well-educated middle-classes. Even when not
couched in the religious terms the re-emergence of traditional moral views on issues such as abortion

and censorship may prove to be electorally significant. A secular society is not necessarily a permissive

society.