Churches as organizational resources

The 1952 Election and Michigan Proposal 3

Our dependent variables are specifically chosen to reveal the affect of religion on mainstream voting and on social-movement-like voting. We use voting for the Democratic Party candidate measured both as individual political behavior — the self-report of how survey respondents voted — and in aggregate — the precinct level election returns — to explore the connection between religion and conventional electoral behavior. Our consideration of votes for the Progressive Party and against Proposal 3 use only precinct-level returns to understand how religion is associated with support for social-movement related issues. This is a period in which McCarthyism was in full swing and political battles were fierce. While the Democratic Party supported the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, its basic stance was anti-Communist. The Progressive Party, on the other hand, which was endorsed by the Communist Party, supported the rights of the foreign born, racial minorities, and the poor (Smallwood 1983). Michigan Proposal 3, which sought to restrict the rights of political radicals, engaged in “seditious” behavior, was believed to target the political left and recent immigrants.⁴

Religion and Politics

How do religious experiences impact social life? While our impressions may suggest that churchgoing and the centrality of churches in American society has declined over time, membership in churches has actually remained relatively constant over the last 100 years (Wald 1989: 9; Putnam 2000:65-66; Manza and Brooks 1999). According to Hout and Greeley (1998:118, citing Hout and Greeley 1987) “We could find no evidence for religious secularization as measured by attendance at religious services in the United States over the past half century” although they did find a reduction in Catholic participation between 1968 and 1975. Religion and its institutions have been and continue to be an important component of American society.⁵

Sociologists of religion divide on how religion impacts politics. Greeley (1972:65) summarizes: “religion can hold society together, or it can tear it apart. It can substitute for political radicalism, or it can facilitate political radicalism of the wildest most demonic sort.” In effect, the role of religion is contingent; the nature and intensity of its impact varies across time and space. Our objective is to help to elaborate the conditions under which religious presence in neighborhoods acts as a politically conservative social integrator, or, alternatively, those under which it is conducive to more critical or left-leaning politics. Others have already elaborated the role of individual religious affiliation on individual political behavior. And some have investigated the role of concentrations of religious populations in neighborhoods on political behavior. But little is known about the role of the physical presence of the church on neighborhood politics. So, what are the relevant conditions?

Some conditions determine the direction of the effect. These include the general theological message of the religion (as represented by the major denominations) and the social class and family income of the communicants involved. Other conditions affect the intensity of the effect. Concentrations of communicants in neighborhoods are likely to intensify the impact. Religious theology is important to consider because different denominations convey different political messages to their members.

Previous work has shown that class locations and voting patterns are associated across spatial maps (XXXX 2003; XXXX 2002; Harvey 1985; Katznelson 1981; Manza, Hout and Brooks 1995; Massey and Meegan 1985; Urry 1981, 1985). The social class of communicants is of crucial importance to religious voting patterns since the religious experience in the U.S. tends to be segregated by class (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Allinsmith and Allinsmith 1948; Berelson et al. 1954; Glantz 1959). This is because, as Lenski notes (1963:79), “differences in the geographical location of groups in a community are usually linked to differences in their location in the class structure of the community.”

When congregants share a common class background, class is likely to reinforce their religious experiences. Black Protestants have been mainly working class, and hence, have been supporters of Democratic Party voting. Likewise, Black churches have been strongly Democratic. Members of certain white Protestant denominations, on the other hand, are mostly upper and middle class; these tend to enhance Republican Party voting.

Specific neighborhood constellations are relevant for voting behavior (Tingsten 1937; Katz and Eldersveld 1961; Foladare 1968; Petras and Zeitlin 1967; Huckfeldt 1986; XXXX 2003). Foldare’s study of Buffalo, New York neighborhoods found that “among white Protestants, living in neighborhoods with high concentrations of Catholics has the effect of significantly reducing their tendency to affiliate with the Republican Party and increasing the likelihood of non-affiliation with a political party” (1968:521). We extend this reasoning and suggest that concentrations of all religious denominations, as well as the presence of church buildings, potentially impact neighborhood-voting practices of all residents.

Churches as Political Resources

In political battles, partisans need resources and allies in order to deliver their messages to potential supporters and participants. For underdogs, the lack of resources and of powerful allies are pressing problems. Churches are in the position to offer assistance. “Churches enjoy a very positive image in American society — a level of prestige that can yield political credibility. In terms of access and communication, churches are powerful organizations with formal membership, headquarters, regularly scheduled group meetings, publications, and full-time professional leadership. Because of patterns of association in American society, the church is often the only such well-organized group to which a citizen is likely to belong. If a church wants to transmit political messages, it has the apparatus to do so with great efficiency” (Wald 1989:35).

Political action often requires a meeting place. Among the major social institutions, churches stand out in their potential to offer the use of buildings, which political activists might put to use. When community groups use church meeting space, attendees are exposed to internal bulletin boards that announce the current events and concerns of the home church. Churches are often prominently situated on busy streets, and have the ability to announce events to the surrounding community through outdoor signs, bulletins, and to make announcements at services. In these ways, religious institutions have the potential to provide political resources to their communities and to communicate political ideas.

Zald and McCarthy⁶ (1994:69) emphasize that “religious groups are fertile soil for social movement birth and growth because they are face-to-face groups that are constituted around some commonly held beliefs.” Churches’ political stances may become visible to neighbors through their actions (advertising, canvassing, projects, etc.) or through political (or countermovement) responses to their stances. Ed Rowe, a Methodist pastor in Detroit, recalls that during the late 1950s, “I moved to a house on Seven Mile and Morang that was a block away from the United Methodist Church. One day the John Birch Society was picketing the church. Another day, Donald Lobsinger [right-wing populist] was picketing the church and I said, ‘Hum, I don’t know what’s going on in that church, but it can’t be all bad.’ I went over and got to know this pacifist pastor…” (Mast 1994:233).

For the Catholic Church, the physical presence of the church is important in its own right. It is not uncommon for neighborhoods to become known by the name of the Catholic Church. Especially during earlier decades, Catholic clergy and parishioners moved out of the church and into the neighborhoods with parades and processions, carnivals, and other events. As summed up by McGreevy (1996:24): “Catholic practice depended upon Catholic theology, and more specifically a theological belief that the individual came to know God, and the community came to be church, within a particular, geographically defined space.”

We expect to find that the physical presence of churches impacted the politics of surrounding neighborhoods in different ways because different denominations were associated with different political views. The Catholic faith has, since the 1930s, been associated with support for the Democratic Party (and its anti-communism), while certain Protestant denominations have mainly been associated with support for the Republican Party. Other Protestant denominations, until the 1990s, tended to support more liberal politics, but recently, have moved to both the political left and the right, although the movement to the right has been more dramatic and has received more attention (Wald 1989). Black Protestants and Jews have tended to support Democratic Party candidates and progressive causes.

Religious Denominations

In assessing the role of religion in politics, it is crucial to appropriately classify members of different religious denominations. Improperly combining religious groups with contrasting political legacies tends to muddy religion’s impact. As Steensland et al. (2000) argue, breaking religious denominations into black Protestant, mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and “other” best captures the differences in religious experiences. We use this scheme here, with the exception of our omission of the “other” category, since it is very small in Detroit during this time period. In the following section, we describe each of the socio-religious groups, and explain how we expect each to impact electoral outcomes.

Black Protestant Churches

Morris argues that religious resources led to the success of the black civil rights movement. In effect, “the black church functioned as the institutional center of the modern civil rights movement. Churches provided the movement with an organized mass base; a leadership of clergymen largely economically independent of the larger white society and skilled in the art of managing people and resources; an institutionalized financial base through which protest was financed; and meeting places where the masses planned tactics and strategies and collectively committed themselves to the struggle” (Morris 1984:4).

In Detroit during the 1930s many of the black churches were not economically and institutionally independent. Henry Ford, who came to be the largest employer of black workers in Detroit, saw in the black churches the key to his potential to build a loyal workforce. Besides using blacks as strikebreakers (in order to keep black and white workers at odds with each other), he made contacts with pastors of Detroit’s leading black churches. He brokered a pact with them that exchanged hiring church members to work at the Ford Rouge plant in exchange for the pastors’ promise to keep union speakers out of the churches. Ford expected this deal to yield a docile labor force (Meier and Rudwick 1979: 9-22).

But as the tides began to change in Detroit in favor of the unions, the hold of the Ford Motor Company over the black churches and their resources waned. During the early 1940s, Reverend Charles Hill and Rector Malcolm Dade took leading pro-union roles within the black churches. They, and others like them, began to put the black church’s resources in the hands of union supporters (Meier and Rudwick 1979: 69).

Detroit politics was polarized along class lines, with industrialists dominating the Republican Party, and unions dominating the Democratic Party (Sarason and Sarason 1957:26). Hence, it is important to consider how the shift of the black church’s loyalty (from the industrialists to the unions) affected voting in black neighborhoods. Detroit’s black voters had already begun a mass migration toward the Democratic Party: partisans in black precincts constituted 20% of voters in 1930, 63.5% in 1936, and 88% in 1952 (Edlersveld 1957:61-62). Once the black church leadership abandoned the quid pro quo, it hastened the movement towards progressive politics and left-wing voting among its congregants.

Characteristics of churches and their bonds with communicants are implicated in their potential political impact. Lenski (1963:41) measures both associational (frequency of attendance at services) and communal (the extent to which interactions occur with members of the same religious group) bonds to assess the importance of the specific Detroit denominations.⁷ He found that black Protestants in Detroit had a medium level of church attendance, but strong communal ties compared to other religious denominations.

Lenski found that Detroit religious groups differed on their views of the pastor’s role in political matters. Black Protestants were the religious group most receptive to political leadership by their clergy: 42% of the laity and 86% of the clergy thought clergy should take a stand on political candidates; 76% of the laity and 95% of clergy thought the clergy should take a stand on controversial matters (Lenski 1963:315). The popular Rev. Charles Hill exemplified such an active stance on political issues. According to a minister who worked under him, “[a]lmost any kind of oppressed group that you could name found a resting place under his umbrella. He was very cosmopolitan and universalistic in his view. The meat of his sermons did not seem to me to be tilted in the direction of his ideological commitment. I didn’t get that much difference in his preaching than any other Baptist preacher. But he would comment before the sermon about the political issues and after the sermon he would give political directions to the congregation concerning whom they should support and whom they should avoid. He also would encourage them to be politically active…” (Mast 1994:248).

White Protestant Churches

Greeley (1989) argues that the differences in the orientations of Protestants and Catholics remain. Catholics continue to subscribe to a Catholic ethic or “analogical imagination,” and Protestants to the Protestant ethic, or what Greeley calls the “dialectical imagination.” Catholics tend to value social relationships and community, and therefore “stress those values and behaviors which contribute to the building up and strengthening of those networks” (e.g. equality, diversity). Protestants, on the other hand, value individual freedom and emphasize “those values and behaviors that contribute to the strengthening of personal freedom and independence from group control” (Greeley 1989: 487). This view suggests that Catholic influence is manifested in stronger communities and support for progressive politics, while the Protestant emphasis is more conducive to conservative politics.

Social class differences between religious groups tended to exacerbate these differences. “The Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, [both mainline Protestant churches] and the Jews represent the upper social classes; the Lutherans, the Catholics, and the Methodists, the middle classes; and the Baptists [evangelical Protestant], the lower classes” (Greeley 1972:92-3). If we break white Protestant churches into mainline and evangelical components,⁸ the mainline serviced the more politically conservative upper and middle classes; the evangelical, the middle and working classes.

In contrast to Catholic churches, Protestant churches did not have geographical parishes. Protestant churches, especially evangelical Protestant churches, were not dedicated to geographic regions or neighborhoods by design; instead they aspired to spread the “Good News” to all comers. According to McGreevy (1996:19) “Studies of white Protestant churches… repeatedly found over half of the parishioners living outside the immediate neighborhood.” Still, in line with the reasoning above, the presence of a church in a neighborhood even without high concentrations of its members in the neighborhood may have an impact in its own right.

Lenski (1963:41) found a medium level of church attendance and a medium degree of communal bonds among white Protestants in Detroit. He also found that in the late 1950s, white Protestants were fairly open to their clergy taking a stand on controversial matters (42% of the laity and 74% of the clergy thought it appropriate), but for the most part, they were closed to their clergy taking a stand on candidates (only 11% of the laity and 46% of the clergy thought it appropriate) (Lenski 1963:315).

Mainline Protestant Churches

Mainline Protestants, as a group, come from more privileged backgrounds; they are more highly educated, have higher incomes, and are more prevalent in professional, managerial and entrepreneurial occupations. Historically, they have staffed the American political elite. Consequently, “they have tended to support the social system from which they have derived substantial benefits” (Wald 1989:304). Although they have tended to drift towards the political center since the 1950s (Manza and Brooks 2002:160), during our time period, mainline Protestants were strongly associated with Republican voting.

Interestingly, the theology of the mainline Protestant churches tends to be more liberal in orientation. Theologically, mainline Protestants are committed to social action,

“[s]tressing Jesus’ role as a prophet of social justice, the mainline tradition sanctifies altruism and regards selfishness as the cardinal sin… understands religious duty in terms of sharing abundance, the Bible is treated as a book with deep truths that have to be discerned amidst myth and archaic stories” (Wald 1989:76). Hence, while the messages of the churches themselves may have served to modify mainline conservatism somewhat, we predict that the compound effects of their heavy concentrations in certain neighborhoods and the presence of a mainline church both reinforced conservative community and enhanced Republican voting in neighborhoods.

Evangelical Protestant Churches

Although Evangelical Protestants have been the basis of the religious right and strong supporters of Republican candidates in recent elections, this is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1950s, Evangelical Protestants were small in number. They tended to have lower class standing than mainline Protestants, and therefore, had less of a class-based rationale for Republican voting. Due to the overwhelmingly Democratic orientation of Southern Baptists, the largest evangelical denomination, they tended to be more supportive of the Democratic Party than were mainline Protestants. Yet evangelical Protestants have a more conservative theology, which can be translated into either liberal or conservative politics. Communicants of evangelical churches share these core beliefs: “unique authority of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus, and the relevance of his life, death, and resurrection to salvation of the soul” (Hunter, quoted in Wald 1989:76). We expect that their more mixed class composition and their small numbers (which prevented strong neighborhood concentrations) led to a weaker political convergence among communicants. We therefore expect concentrations of evangelical Protestants and the presence of evangelical Protestant churches to have a smaller negative, or no impact on neighborhood left-wing voting.

The Catholic Church

The Catholic Church was relatively small in America until the massive influx beginning in 1820 of first Irish and German immigrants, and later of southern and eastern European immigrants, who were mostly Catholic. Despite the tradition of support for the Democratic Party, Greeley (1972: 189) describes American Catholicism as not liberal, but “based on the premise that the Catholic Church in the United States must defend itself in a hostile society which would if it could destroy the faith of its people.” Yet because the southern and eastern European immigrants were largely working class, defense of their rights implied an alliance with the Democratic Party.

In the urban north, Catholic immigrant groups, unlike Protestant groups, “all placed enormous financial, social, and cultural weight on the parish church as an organizer of local life” (McGreevy 1996:13). Further, “the Catholic world supervised by… priests was disciplined and local…. Most parishes also contained a large number of formal organizations — including youth groups, mothers’ clubs, parish choirs, and fraternal organizations — each with a priest-moderator, the requisite fundraisers, and group masses” (1996:15). What is unique about Catholics is that they paid close attention to social space: “Catholics used the parish to map out — both physically and culturally — space within all of the northern cities. Experts encouraged priests in newly established parishes to turn to precinct voting records for their initial mailing list, and to conduct parish censuses in order to discover ‘unchurched’ Catholics” (1996:16-17). This means that the parish was immobile. As whites moved to the suburbs in the postwar period, Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues sold their buildings and followed their members, while Catholic churches, and many of their parishioners remained in the cities (1996:19).⁹

Catholic churches in ethnic neighborhoods tended to adopt the concerns of their parishioners. Osvaldo Rivera noted that at Holy Trinity Catholic church “ministered to the poor. Skid Row used to be located close to Holy Trinity, and Father Kern and his people ministered to those folks.” And “under Father Kern’s guidance, the Puerto Rican Club was formed in the early ‘50s in response to police brutality against Puerto Ricans in Detroit”(Mast 1994:144).

Due to its predominately working class constituency, the Catholic Church developed several important working-class organizations: the Catholic Worker, which had independently run houses of hospitality (which provided shelter and assistance to the homeless and poor), and the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), which worked as a religious and political caucus within the trade unions. According to the former president of Ford Motor Company’s United Automobile Workers Local 600, Walter Dorosh, the Detroit Catholic Church’s leadership on non-religious matters was not supreme. In particular, with regard to trade union issues, the Catholic Churches struggled to capture the hearts and minds of their parishioners. Not all Catholics held to the more conservative ACTU line.¹⁰ Dorosh (1984) (a Catholic himself) noted: “ Not all of them [followed the ACTU line], I know a number of Catholics who wouldn't listen to our church and said, well look, if you want to preach you go on and preach, but you won't vote [in the union election]. I had a big fight with my minister. I just told him, you just go jump in the lake. I happen to know who is organizing the plants. I told him I'm an organizer.” ¹¹

Despite the fact that the church did not provide political leadership to all Catholics, its numerous social and religious activities had an important presence in local neighborhoods. “Its pastor was the unquestioned lord spiritual of the neighborhood and, together with the precinct captain, also the lord temporal” (McGreevy 1996:189-90).

According to Lenski, (1963:41) Detroit Catholics had high levels of church attendance, but only moderate communal bonds during the late 1950s.¹² They were relatively open to the clergy’s views on controversial political matters (46% of the laity and 65% of the clergy thought it appropriate for clergy to take a stand), but the Detroit Archdiocese prohibited individual priests from taking stands on political candidates (Lenski 1963:315). Nevertheless, Lenski found that Catholics’ church involvement served to strengthen the appeal of the Republican Party, while Catholic communal bonds tended to strengthen the appeal of the Democratic Party (1963:182). Ironically, in the decades since then, the Catholic hierarchy has moved left as the laity has moved right (Reichley 2002:280).

Jewish Congregations

Like Catholics, most Jews were relative latecomers to America, arriving around the beginning of the 20th century. “While the Jews came to the United States as poor and frequently uneducated, they did not come as peasants but rather as an alert and intelligent people whose survival in the past had frequently depended on diligence, wit, and the ability to take risks” (Greeley, 1972:195). By the 1950s, Jews in general were successful in the economy. Yet politically, Jews were more left-wing than other religious groups. Jewish immigrants that arrived from Poland and Russia were mostly “religiously Orthodox; many others were socialists, anarchists, Zionists, or devotees of other radical secular movements” (Greeley 1972:197). These waves of newcomers contributed to the leftist character of the Jewish group, which has waned somewhat throughout subsequent decades.

In his “Sociology of Religion” Weber called the Jews ein Pariavolk (a pariah people) — a guest people living among others and yet remaining separate (Weber 1978:492-93). As a result, secular/cultural Jews and religious Jews tend to live in the same neighborhoods, especially during the 1950s. Judaism and Jewishness were not necessarily coincident. As described by Glazer (1957:116-7): “The Jewish migration out of the areas of second settlement was a migration of just those elements in the past most immune to Jewish religion, the second and third generation of the East European group. The areas of second settlement, we have seen, were the strongholds of Jewish irreligion and of Jewishness. It was in these almost totally Jewish areas, paradoxically, that Jews could live lives almost completely unaffected by Jewish religion and that the proportion of synagogue members was always lowest.”

In Detroit Lenski (1963:41) found weak attendance at synagogue, but strong communal bonds in the Jewish community during the late 1950s. While Temple Beth El, a reform synagogue, was very large and the oldest synagogue in Michigan (Detroit Free Press 3/18/1950: 15), the overwhelming majority of Jewish synagogues in Detroit during this period were orthodox. This was a period of transition, with movement in space (northward) as well as away from orthodox and toward more conservative and reform congregations.

The Jewish vote was strongly Democratic. Still, like that of most other groups, moved slightly toward the Republican candidate by 1952. Unlike the other groups, however, its Democratic Party bias did not follow from class interests, since Jews were collectively more affluent, nor was it linked to Jewish theology, as the most religiously observant Jews tended to be the most politically conservative (Wald 1989:322). Most scholars attribute it to “the community’s sense of itself as a potential target of hostility from the non-Jewish majority” (Wald 1989:322).

For the Jewish case, we propose that synagogues influenced politics in a slightly different way. The buildings were not likely to have been lent to groups for political meetings, but due to the nature of the Jewish service, they tended to offer more opportunities for members to discuss politics. So synagogues served as gathering places, and to enhance the Democratic political community.