There are many differnet tents within the Republican Party, as there are in the Democratic Party. The main reasons I'm a Democrat, though there are more, are highlighted in this dissertation. This is not a critique of Republicans but rather a view of the Republican and Democratic Party. With every bit of conviction I can muster, our Republican Party does not truly represent an America where more than 31 percent of the population considers itself to be either non-White or Hispanic and over 51 percent women - an America where race, gender, and ethnicity are reflected in and contribute to everything that divides us: culture, economics, politics, and most critically - religion. To state this as simply as I can - from a Republican Party perspective; the United States is a white, Christian man's country. The divisions along religious, ethnic, gender, and racial lines have always had political and economic implications. Since the founding of our country, or even further back with the colonial beginnings of slavery, those divisions have been a negative for both whites and minority groups. To this very day women and minority groups do not have equal access to the political power commensurate with their numbers and it is the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party that best represents the diverse, multiethnic and multicultural American people.

Ronald Takaki wrote that "white men of enterprise needed white women to be moral and delicate custodians of the home." This couldn’t be truer when we observe how the political exclusion of women in Republican States is reflected in indexes for employment and earnings, social and economic autonomy, reproductive rights, and political participation. Robert J. Vanderbei has produced maps showing that rural areas along with the Prairie, Mountain, Southern, and Southwestern states are the Republican Party power base, and whiteness and maleness is mirrored by those states’ elected lawmakers. Women in these states, through traditional conservative values surrounding them, remain the delicate custodians within their homes.

At the state and national levels, the whiteness and maleness of the Republican Party is contrasted sharply by the ethnic and gender composition of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, as referenced by the Republican National Committee, representing their affiliated lawmakers in the state legislatures, is almost 99 percent white, 82.2 percent male, and 1.1 percent minority. By contrast, the Democratic National Committee shows that Democratic state lawmakers are 79 percent white, 72.6 percent male, and 21.1 percent minority.

I submit to you that the Republican Party, statistically speaking, is overwhelmingly White and Protestant Christian, usually of an evangelical and often fundamentalist bent. In the Deep South, Blacks form a large percentage (often as high as 85 percent) of the population and have significant local political power. They are, however, culturally, religiously, economically, and politically segregated from White society and almost totally excluded from the now-dominant Republican Party. Much the same can be said of Texas and Hispanics, as researched by the University of Texas, who now represent almost 50 percent of that state's population. Like Blacks, they are largely segregated and mostly clustered in the cities and towns along the Mexican border and the Gulf Coast. U.S. Census data show that as we head north from Texas into Oklahoma and Kansas, the minority population dwindles; north and west of Kansas it drops to single digits. These are the Prairie and Mountain states, in which minorities have almost no political presence.

As of early 2007, the Republicans have no minority representation in 25 states, yet there are only 5 states in which the Democrats has no minority representation, and these five are states with small percentages (3.5 to 12.7 percent) of minorities. In no state does the percentage of Republicans in the legislature approach the percentage of minorities in the state, whereas on the Democratic side, there are 20 states in which the percentage of minority hovers near the state's minority percentage. The data on our current 110th U.S. House of Representatives show that the ranks of Republican lawmakers have nearly the same demographic profile at the state and the national levels: Whites hold a whopping 99 percent of Republican-held seats at both the state and national levels. On the Democratic side the percentages are considerably different: Whites hold 79 percent of Democratic legislative seats at the state level and 71 percent at the national level.

As the data show, the Democratic Party has successfully attracted a significant percentage of minorities at both the state and national levels. How do I explain the fact that the Republicans have not done likewise? I suppose I could argue that Republican ideology and policy simply lack appeal for minority populations and attempts to recruit minorities into the Party have simply not worked. However a more plausible explanation exists. Dean Kotlowski examines this phenomenon in his book, "Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy." He notes that on the heels of the civil-rights movement, when Southern and Northern Whites were leaving the Democratic Party in droves, the Republicans recruited them by mounting a rear-guard resistance to civil rights protections. As a consequence, the Republican base developed a solidly White, anti-civil rights core constituency that makes it nearly impossible for Republicans to elect a Black and almost never a non-Cuban Hispanic to political office. Given the tiny number of minority Republicans in either state legislatures or the Congress, I find it both amazing and amusing to listen to Republican Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics argue that Republicans believe in a color-blind society in which all ethnic / racial groups have equal opportunity. How this solidly White party, in both substance and belief, could possibly lead America into color blindness defies all logic.

Though race and gender do play a significant role, I've found that the religious divide is the most profound of all the major determinants of political affiliation. According to John Corrigan in his book, "Religion in America," on one side American religious life are the observant Christians, a majority of whom are members of conservative evangelical and often fundamentalist Protestant churches, together with conservative Catholics and Mormons. On the other side are members of moderate or progressive Catholic and Protestant churches, joined by Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, etc., by the less observant of all persuasions, and finally by the seculars. Members of this group tend to be Democrats, but many are moderate Republicans.

It quickly becomes clear the more rigorous a church's doctrine and the more demanding it is of its adherents, the faster it will grow. This is especially the case when a church demands that its members proselytize. According to the RAND Corporation, this is evidenced by the worldwide presence of Southern Baptist and Mormon missionaries. Conversely, the more progressive a church's doctrine and the less it demands of its adherents, the faster it will decline in relative terms. The once-dominant mainline Protestant denominations have all declined. For example, according to the American Religion Data Archive, following are the number of counties nationwide in which the leading Protestant churches predominate:

• Protestant Evangelical - Baptist (1,287), Lutheran (1,118), Methodist (243)
• Protestant Mainline - Episcopal (4), Presbyterian (4), Quaker (1)

There are, of course, millions of evangelicals who are not Republican, but those who are tend to be conservative and often fundamentalist. According to U.S. Census data and the American Religion Data Archive, the religious life of Republican States is dominated by evangelical Protestants: Southern Baptists, United Methodists, and Evangelical Lutherans. These denominations have a strong fundamentalist element that sees the Bible as inerrant and as a guide to both private and public life. Consequently, they reject the rational, scientific approach to the development of public policy that has characterized American politics since the nation's founding.

In place of the Enlightenment values of the founding fathers, many American Christian fundamentalists have now embraced irrationality and biblical prophecy as essential tenets of their belief. A 2004 ABC News poll reported by the Washington Times show that 60 percent of respondents believe the story of Noah's Ark is literally true. Sixty-one percent believe the world was created in six days, and 64 percent believe Moses parted the Red Sea. When similar questions were posed in a British poll, only 17 percent of the respondents supported this kind of belief in biblical inerrancy. This widespread acceptance of the irrational is perhaps best exemplified by the current reigning eschatology of fundamentalist America: The End Times. This arcane religious obsession is politically important, not only because it illustrates the irrationality in fundamentalist thought but also because it determines much of the substance and the tone of the fundamentalist political agenda.

By counting biblical generations, fundamentalists believe they can determine the age of the earth and the end of time; they have replaced archeology with genealogy and the Book of Revelations. In this reckoning, the earth is very young - 5,000 years, give or take a few hundred - and the End Times are near. Perhaps there would be fewer millennialists if they were to read less of the Old Testament and more of the New, especially Mark, which warns against "false prophets" who will mislead, and states quite categorically that no one knows that day or hour, not the angels, not the Son, but only the Father.

From this religious division emerges the cultural divide. On one side are those who, in response to their conservative religious beliefs, are pro-life and support prayer in the schools, the display of Christian symbols in public facilities, and publicly-funded religious social services. The Republicans who represent these conservatives in Congress vote for constitutional amendments to ban flag burning, declare the U.S. a Christian nation, allow tax-exempt religious organizations to engage in partisan politics, and favor limitations on the First Amendment to combat speech and symbols they perceive as pornographic or unpatriotic. These representatives are anti-women's rights, anti-gay and lesbian rights, anti-affirmative action, anti-welfare, anti-organized labor, and anti-tax; but they support subsidies to oil, mining, and agriculture.

Overlaying a U.S. map showing high concentrations of evangelical / fundamentalist churches with a map showing the states that score low in education and science will show a significant correlation - a belief in biblical inerrancy and creationism are basic to fundamentalists, and both beliefs militate against excellence in education and science. Conservative American religiosity, often magnified by a belief in Biblical inerrancy, has resulted in a dearth of scientists, inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and captains of industry - that is, all the people who build modern economies. Education and science are major artifacts of culture. By every measure of excellence in education, at every grade level, and in every subject - arts, science, and technology – the coastal, Democratic and multicultural states almost always excel. At the elementary and secondary levels, per pupil expenditures are much lower in Republican states: 19 Republican states are below the mean versus only 7 Democratic states. There is only one Republican state in the top quartile, but ten in the bottom quartile. Democratic states have, on average, four times as many Washington Post Challenge Index high schools as Republican states and twice as many per unit of population. The same pattern prevails in higher education. I used U.S. News and World Report's 2007 ratings of 110 liberal arts colleges and 126 research universities to study these patterns. Among research universities, the difference was greater - only two Democratic states lacked a rated research university versus nine conservative states. Bringing the difference between liberal and conservative science and technology into sharp focus is the 2003 list of the world's 50 top achievements in science, engineering, commerce, and public policy, compiled by a Scientific American advisory board made up of 35 of the world's leaders in science and technology. Of the 50 scientists, teams, and organizations chosen, 40 were American and all of these were from coastal, Democratic states.

Religious irrationality not only endangers our foundations but is also driving us ever further apart from the other nations in the developed world. These are the nations with which we are in increasingly intense competition in science and technology, the drivers of economic growth that produce high-paying jobs and our middle-class standard of living. In February 2004, more than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement asserting that our current Republican administration has systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research, and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad. In the same month, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report setting forth similar charges. Together, the two reports accused Republican leadership of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice, and refusing to seek independent scientific expertise. Unfortunately for the future of America, the rejection of science and the scientific method means that millions of our citizens will be denied an adequate understanding of biological science, which gives rise to retrograde attitudes toward the environment and the physical and medical sciences.

With increasing alarm, the scientific community is defending itself, drawing attention to the importance of new scientific knowledge and technical innovation as the crucial engines of future economic growth. Scientific innovation is behind almost all of the most dynamic aspects of the American economy: bioscience, computer science, alternative fuels development, and financial and communications services. Yet current conditions and future trends are both disturbing and challenging. According to the Council on Competitiveness, many other countries have realized that science and technology are crucial to economic growth and prosperity.

To understand the Evangelical Christian fundamentalist point of view, we must examine their views regarding our country. One of Christian fundamentalists' core political positions is the fact that America was founded as a Christian nation. A famous conservative critic and essayist, Irving Kristol, wrote an essay regarding our Revolution and our Founding Fathers called "The Most Successful Revolution." He argues in this and many of his other writings that our Founding Fathers were conservatives, and they were devoted in their Christian faith. He states that our Founding Fathers understood that republican self-government could not exist if humanity did not possess the traditional "republican virtues" of faith in God, self-control, self-reliance, and "a disinterested concern for the public good." This is a typical view from many leading conservative thinkers, including Sean Hannity and Irving Kristol's son, William Kristol. Thus I can conclude that in the minds of many Republicans, God's will is the supreme law of the land - not the Constitution. They hold these beliefs despite the fact that the Founding Fathers drew a bright line between church and state. The influence of these beliefs on Congress cannot be underestimated. The former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said that he went into politics to promote a biblical worldview, stating "we march forward with a biblical worldview, a worldview that says God is our Creator, that man is a sinner, and that we will save this country by changing the hearts and minds of Americans."

I do not know the extent to which evangelical officials share inerrant and millennial beliefs, but I do know, given the high scores they receive from the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition, that they are influenced by and act in response to beliefs held by their fundamentalist Republican base of voters. This presents a serious constitutional problem. Every extant discussion of our constitutional government assumes that policies are established on rational grounds; it is disturbing to realize that we are being governed by individuals with a shared irrationality - that is, a belief that the Bible is inerrant and can foretell the future. Praying for divine guidance is legitimate, but basing policy on a literal reading of scripture is not only intellectually bankrupt but, more importantly, unconstitutional; it is also, in the most profound sense, un-American.

We learn from the work of Clifford Grammich in "Many Faiths of Many Regions" that the fundamentalist Protestant denominations - Southern Baptists, United Methodists, and evangelical Lutherans - together with the fundamentalist Mormons are the fastest-growing religions in America and much of the rest of the world. They now dominate Republican States and are contesting domination of Democratic States with the Catholic and mainline Protestant religions. According to the American Religion Data Archive, the moderate Catholics and the mainline denominations that have relaxed rigidity have remained stable or declined in membership. It is this relaxation that the fundamentalists seek to exploit. Not only do the fundamentalist denominations grow by proselytizing, they also use abortion and gay marriage as wedges to undermine the moderates in the mainline denominations.

At the core of this religious war is the issue of the secular state. In all of Europe and among the American mainline denominations, churches have accepted the secular state. As John Corrigan observed, the main reason these churches have relaxed their rigidity is that the secular state has assumed many of the functions of religion by successfully providing opportunities for material gain, providing the structures for community, enforcing adherence to civil and criminal codes, and instilling a sense of patriotism and community in its citizens. The fundamentalist Christian denominations, on the other hand, are atavistic when seen in the context of the rest of the developed world. In a global sense, the fundamentalist religions, both Christian and Muslim, are more appropriate to the developing world, where they provide structures and services to societies where effective secular states have yet to emerge.

The assumption that a secular state has been successfully established in the United States is currently under challenge by the Christian fundamentalists. It is this challenge that lies at the heart of the culture war we are fighting. The fundamentalist Christian religions assert that they have not ceded the authority of their God to a secular state. They constantly seek to reinsert God into our secular Constitution, which puts them in conflict with those who seek to maintain the founding fathers' vision of a state separated from the church. Perhaps it is the failure of the United States as an effective secular state that has most encouraged the growth of the fundamentalist denominations and the emergence of the culture wars. Particularly among Republicans, but among Democrats as well, the dogmatic commitment to a market economy, coupled with a hostility to government, has served to increase economic insecurity among the mass of Americans who are ill-equipped by temperament, family background, and lack of education to compete effectively in a lightly regulated free-market system. Insecurity is especially high among those who have good reason to fear the loss of their jobs due to recession, or outsourcing to Asia.

That insecurity has been magnified by the erosion of the job market and by the steady decay of vital social services - child care, health care, income maintenance, job, and retirement security. The result of this mass insecurity has been a turning to the fundamentalist religions that seek to replace services provided by the secular state. For example, in the June 2004 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, a resolution urging all Southern Baptist parents to remove their children from public schools and either home-school them or send them to Baptist schools barely lost. It would seem that the leaders of the fundamentalist denominations are fully cognizant of the fact that the more successful they are in weakening the secular state, the faster their congregations will grow.

On the other side of the cultural divide are the religious moderates and seculars, Democrats and moderate Republicans who are committed to education and science; who want the arts to flourish; who are accepting of differences in ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation; and who want a clear division between church and state. Their congressional representatives support affirmative action, public education, childcare, and other services needed by working parents, as well as progressive taxation. They oppose tax cuts for the wealthy that undercut progressive taxation, and they oppose subsidies and tax shelters for corporations. Whereas Republican states represent "Old America," with a traditional economy, and political power firmly entrenched in the white community, multicultural, Democratic states represent "New America," with the New Economy, including biotechnology, and political power more equitably distributed among ethnic groups. In my opinion, in Republican states, the conservative values, economic organization, and distribution of political power do not represent what is best for America.

If America is ever to be truly 50 United States, it will be united with our Democratic values of inclusion, respect for science and rational discourse, and policies designed to provide physical, economic, and social security for all families; and that includes both the 20 percent that are "old traditional families" and the 80 percent of "new traditional families." These are the values that will underpin a United America that can provide for all its citizens. Today, however, it is the conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who are now the core constituency of dominate, radical-right Republican Party. Unfortunately, their path of God, Flag, and Family is leading all of America backward rather than forward.

If we Democrats hope to once again take the White House and build a majority, our leaders must accept the reality of this great political and religious divide. Presently, the Democratic states have 65 percent of the population. If Democrats are successful in transforming ourselves into a Democratic American party, it would give us overwhelming majorities in both presidential and congressional elections and more than offset the numbers game in the Senate. Furthermore, Democrats must reaffirm the separation of church and state. The separation of church and state is vitally important to both secular and religious interests. Many of the early settlers were dissenters from established religions, and that is a major reason the Constitution forbade an established church. Instead, the Founding Fathers drafted a secular Constitution that gave freedom to all religions and preference to none.

Once we Democrats establish ourselves as the majority party - the American party - we can set about binding the nation back together - a nation based on our better natures rather than our worst. Both liberal and conservative America's citizens deserve a modern economy and a society free from the dead weight of racism and religious obscurantism. We deserve a national security based on multilateralism and the rule of law, not on unilateralism and empire, with our rights and liberties constantly under siege. We deserve economic security and a level playing field where all citizens, regardless of class or ethnicity, have a chance to carve a slice of the American dream. We deserve an intact Bill of Rights - especially the right to religious freedom, a freedom possible only with a clear separation of church and state. This is President Ronald Reagan's "shining city upon a hill," and all of us, Republicans and Democrats, can join in achieving it.