The Missing Link: Political Activists and Support for School Prayer

Explanations for the wide gap between strong public support for school prayer and lack of support in Congress have focused on the attributes of the public. Here another important explicand is investigated: the characteristics of political activists. We find that activist opinion more nearly matches congressional behavior on school prayer than does public opinion. While many of the same demographic and religious variables explain support for school prayer among activists and the public, ideology appears to be more important among activists. One of the most resilient political controversies of the past decade has been over prayer in the public schools. Set off by Supreme Court rulings in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), this debate has elicited endless litigation and constant efforts to amend the Constitution, evade Supreme Court edicts, or circumvent the decisions through legislative action by Congress or the states. One reason for the persistent agitation is easy to discern: a majority of Americans favor religious exercises in public schools. Although various polls differ-in large part because of question wording (Feig and Wall, 1987) -they concur in finding impressive public support for school prayer, support which has declined only modestly over time. The 1974 General Social Survey found 67. 9% favoring required reading of the Lord's Prayer or Bible verses, a figure which dipped to 59. 7% in 1982 and 55. 6% in 1985. In a more voluntarist vein, 72. 1% of voters in the 1980 National Election Study favored allowing schools to start each day with prayer; four years later the figure remained at 71. 5% (Elifson and Hadaway, 1985; Feig, 1986). In 1983 Gallup found 81% of the aware public favoring a constitutional amendment allowing JOHN C. GREEN is Associate Professor of Political Science and Acting Director of the Ray Bliss Institute for Applied Politics at the University of Akron. JAMES L. GUTH iS Professor of Political Science and Chairman of the University Faculty at Furman University. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 53: 41-57? 1989 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/88/0053-01/2. 50 This content downloaded from 157. 55. 39. 152 on Sat, 26 Nov 2016 04: 20: 38 UTC All use subject to http: //about. jstor. org/terms 42 John C. Green and James L. Guth voluntary school prayer, with 48% backing the amendment very strongly. Despite this massive support, all school prayer amendments have failed in Congress. Although the 1980 and 1984 GOP platforms endorsed school prayer and President Reagan put it on the front burner in 1983-84, the Republican Senate mustered only 56 of the needed 67 votes. The Democratic House of Representatives refused to bring the measure to the floor, although a similar appropriations rider failed to win even a majority, 194-215 (Congressional Quarterly, 1984: 8-9S, 88-89H). Both houses split along party and ideological lines: in the Senate 67% of the Republicans but only 42% of the Democrats voted for the amendment, while in the House the comparable figures were 79% and 29%. Similarly, if members are divided into equal thirds by Americans for Democratic Action ratings, the most conservative members favored the amendment by 89% (Senate) and 83% (House), the moderates gave 41% and 31% of their votes, and the most liberal third provided only 15% and 5% support. Far from responding to public attitudes, many legislators apparently ignore them. Why the strong resistance? Earlier studies have contended that the characteristics of school prayer advocates, not their numbers, have been the crucial weakness of the restorationist movement. Elifson and Hadaway (1985) argue that this majority may be too silent to be heard by Congress: proponents have lower incomes, lower status jobs, and less education, while legislators have the opposite traits, which are associated with opposition to school prayer. In addition, school prayer may not be salient to many proponents, and thus they may not press the issue. Finally, Elifson and Hadaway suggest that religious leaders, an elite to which Congress may pay disproportionate attention on this issue, are themselves divided over school prayer. These explanations all have some validity, but they leave out other key elites, especially political activists. The partisan and ideological cleavages in Congress hint that legislators are responding not so much to the public as to their primary constituents, those who provide crucial campaign support: volunteer workers, financial backers, and party and issue activists (Fenno, 1978: 19). Indeed, many scholars hold that such activists provide the most effective linkage between the public and their representatives (Luttbeg, 1981). They play crucial roles in the two major paths of influence between legislators and their constituents: directly by means of electoral choice and indirectly through shared characteristics (Miller and Stokes, 1963). In these capacities, activists help make representative democracy possible on a large scale, allowing the public opportunities to check the behavior of elected officials, if not to provide instruction on their preferences (Dahl, 1982). And this process may work in reThis content downloaded from 157. 55. 39. 152 on Sat, 26 Nov 2016 04: 20: 38 UTC All use subject to http: //about. jstor. org/terms Political Activists and School Prayer 43 verse as well: activists inform and educate the public about the positions of officials (Fenno, 1978). By the same token, however, biases in the attitudes, behavior, and numbers of activists raise serious questions about the functioning of democratic institutions. While deviations from public opinion can sometimes support democratic procedural values (as in support for civil liberties), in general they must be regarded as suspect. In this article, we consider attitudes on school prayer among a large and important group of political activists: major contributors to parties and ideological political action committees (PACs). As we shall see, the division of opinion among these elites is much different than that in the mass public, but quite similar to that in Congress.