Religious Orthodoxy in American Society: The Myth of a Monolithic Camp

Through an analysis of national survey data, we test several hypotheses regarding the extent to which the religiously orthodox constitute a monolithic conservative front. We find that the orthodox generally are conservative on social issues of sexuality, reproduction, and schooling of children, but are moderate or liberal on gender, racial, and economic issues. There is little tendency for the orthodox to cohere around a single ideological position or, as individuals, to take stances that are consistent across a broad range of issues. The religiously orthodox are also internally divided on many social and economic issues along the lines of race, sex, class, and age. We suggest that these factors may explain the weak support that the religiously orthodox historically have given to organized political movements of the Religious Right. WVith vivid imagery of a culture war, the mass media, political and religious leaders, and academics have portrayed American society as divided into hostile of religious conservatives and liberals. Each of these camps is depicted as a united front locked in battle with the other side over fundamental social concerns. In this paper we examine this imagery of monolithic camps at war through an analysis of the belief structure of one of the two sides - the religiously conservative, or orthodox. In a related paper, we have shown that the greater conservatism of this group relative to theological progressives on many issues, including sex education, abortion, birth control, nonmarital sex, homosexuality, pornography, school prayer and gender roles, does not extend to racial or economic issues (Davis and Robinson forthcoming). Here we examine in depth the orthodox pole of the religious spectrum in order to assess whether the religiously orthodox constitute the monolithic conservative camp that they have been portrayed as in the media, by leaders of quasireligious groups themselves, and, to some extent, in recent social science scholarship. Specifically, we test whether the religiously orthodox (1) hold views across a wide spectrum of issues which are conservative, inegalitarian, and opposed to government intervention in the economy, (2) exhibit the high degree of consensus on specific issues that the imagery of a moral camp implies; (3) hold internally consistent views on a range of sexuality/reproduction, gender, racial, and economic issues, and (4) are united in their stances on these issues across gender, racial and class categories.