Whether they rally behind Fox News’ Glenn Beck to restore honor or Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart to restore sanity, Americans agree on one thing: Our political system has a civility problem.
Four out of five Americans, regardless of party or religious affiliation, think the lack of respectful discourse in our political system is a serious problem, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)/Religion News Service (RNS) Religion News Poll released Nov. 11.
The findings echo sentiments expressed by a range of religious leaders, including Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and author of “Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World,” and Rabbi Steve Gutow, president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
Alarmed by the 2010 campaign season, which four in 10 Americans consider more negative than past elections, Mouw, Gutow and others are calling for a kinder, gentler tone — even on hot-button topics like Islamophobia, homosexuality or abortion.
“We’ve had heated public debates before, but the level of discourse in this campaign and even following the campaign has been atrocious,” Mouw said, citing as an example Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pledge to prevent President Obama’s reelection, as opposed to advocating for policy shifts.
“There’s a real hostility now, and Christians with very strong and more conservative convictions really don’t seem to be contributing much to a civil discourse and a calming of the heated discussions in the larger culture,” Mouw said.
In fact, white evangelicals and Republicans are less likely than other Americans to say the 2010 election’s tone was more negative than past campaigns, which PRRI research director Daniel Cox said may reflect their satisfaction with the outcome.
Mouw has another theory: evangelicals are more accustomed to inflammatory rhetoric from the pulpit, and therefore don’t see it as a problem in politics.
Richard Land, president of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, agreed with Cox that the outcome of the election more than likely affected evangelicals’ view about the civility of the election.
“Winners usually have more pleasant memories than losers,” he said. “I would think that [evangelicals] would be less concerned about the negative tone because they won.”
However, unlike Mouw, Land does not think that the lack of civility in this campaign is any different than every other past election.
“I certainly deplore the negative level of the political debate but alas this is nothing new. This has been going on our entire history,” he said.
Land cited examples such as the 2008 election in which Bush was called a war criminal, the violence related to the 1968 election and the bitter smear campaigns of 1800.
“I’m all for civility and for serious discourse but the negativity isn’t any worse than it is in the past. Anyone who thinks so has a short memory,” he said.
Other findings from the poll, conducted by PPRI in partnership with RNS, include:
• One-third of white evangelicals report that the election was more positive than past elections, a figure that’s significantly higher than among white mainline Protestants (17 percent), the unaffiliated (17 percent) or Catholics (23 percent).
• Two-thirds of Americans say that people in their local community work well to overcome differences, and more than eight in 10 Americans who attend religious services say people in their congregation work well to overcome differences.
• Nearly six in 10 Americans think the country is more divided over politics today than in the past; more than four in 10 Americans said the country is more divided over religion than in the past.
• About half of white evangelicals and black Protestants think the country is more divided over religion than it was in the past, compared to less than 40 percent of Catholics and white mainline Protestants.
• Young adults (50 percent) are less likely than seniors (61 percent) to say Americans are more divided over politics, but more likely to say Americans are divided over religion (42 percent of young adults and 33 percent of older adults, respectively).
Americans are justifiably afraid and upset about the stagnant economy and terrorism, Gutow said, but he agreed with Mouw that 24/7 cable news channels and the blogosphere have encouraged and magnified negative, fear-based rhetoric. (RNS, TAB)
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