Getting closer to God

Dan Gilgoff on how Barack Obama has narrowed the ‘God gap’

Virtually no political experts saw it coming, but religion was one of the biggest factors in George W. Bush’s 2004 election victory. Bush, who had used evangelical Christian language and championed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage — a cause pushed by the Christian Right — won 78 per cent of the evangelical vote, a group comprising almost a quarter of the American electorate. Republican presidential candidates had won the evangelical vote ever since Jerry Falwell launched his Moral Majority in the late 1970s, but no presidential candidate on record had ever achieved this level of support.

John Kerry, the first Catholic nominee for president since John F. Kennedy — who won upwards of three quarters of Catholic voters in 1960 — managed to lose the traditionally Democratic Catholic vote to Bush after a handful of American bishops attacked Kerry’s pro-abortion rights stance.