Belonging Without Belonging: Utilizing Evangelical Self-Identification to Analyze Political Attitudes and Preferences

摘要

Research typically defines evangelical belonging as affiliation with an evangelical denomination, but this ap-proach excludes many self-identified evangelicals, even though previous studies of religious groups find thatself-identification is a powerful predictor of political preferences. Using data from the National Survey of Religionand Politics, we investigate the usefulness of self-identification for classifying evangelicals. The effects of threetypes of evangelical belonging (religious tradition-only, self-identification-only, and a combination of religioustradition and self identification) on respondents political attitudes, party identification, and vote choice suggestthat religious tradition is a good predictor of political attitudes while self-identification is a good predictorof party identification. We conclude that self-identification and tradition are both important to understandingevangelicalism and politics in America.