TRENDS IN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GROUPS
Next we compared groups that might be expected to differ in their views on social issues and asked: Have differences in opinion between these groups become larger over the past two decades? Even if the distributions of social attitudes among the general population had not polarized during the 1970s and 1980s, it is certainly possible that growing gulfs between the attitudes of African Americans and Euro-Americans or between evangelical Christians and people with liberal religious views might be responsible for widespread perception of social fragmentation.
Once again, our efforts to find polarization were disappointed. The generation gap that loomed so large in the 1960s and early 1970s had clearly waned by the 1990s. Of eighteen opinions on social issues that we examined, differences between people older than forty-five and those
We have heard so much about the gender gap in voting over the past decade that we expected differences between the social attitudes of men and women to have increased as well. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Between the 1970s and the 1990s women's and men's opinions on crime and sex education converged, and on no issues did they become more distinct.
As we analyzed our data, press accounts of reactions to O. J. Simpson's acquittal rendered tensions between black and white America especially apparent. But although blacks' and whites' attitudes on many social and political issues are far apart, such differences have actually diminished over the past twenty years. This convergence of opinion reflects two trends. First, white Americans have rejected crude forms of racism, so racial attitudes (as the surveys have measured them) have grown more similar. Second, with the emergence of a sizable black middle class, African-American opinion on many issues has grown more heterogeneous.
On many of the issues that the media has placed under the heading of "the culture war"—abortion, flag desecration, family values, the National Endowment for the Arts, and so on—conservative leadership has come from the Christian right. The 1970s and 1980s were periods of expansion for evangelical Christianity, providing a base for religious figures eager to influence public policy. Given the rise of the religious right, and opposition to the religious right from within mainline Protestant denominations, we expected to find a growing opinion gap between members of theologically conservative religious groups who attend church regularly, on the one hand, and members of liberal denominations and agnostics, on the other.
Remarkably, the opposite was the case: the religiously conservative and religiously liberal have become more similar in their attitudes toward abortion, gender roles, sexual morality, race, sex education, and divorce. Differences persist, but the religiously conservative are less monolithic than many believe, and on many issues large differences have diminished significantly. The reason is simple: whereas religiously conservative denominations used to draw disproportionately from southeasterners with modest levels of formal education, by the 1980s evangelical
We found only one major exception to the trend toward stable or declining polarization among groups: people who told pollsters they were "strong" Republicans and Democrats drew apart on many issues between the early 1970s and 1995. Differences increased in attitudes toward abortion, divorce law, crime, race, government assistance to minorities, and the poor. These developments appear to reflect a shift in the basis of party identification from economic issues and foreign policy in the early 1970s to social issues, especially race, in the 1990s.[14]
Taken as a whole, our results could not be more inconsistent with conventional wisdom. On every salient between-group dimension except party identification Americans have become either a little or a lot more unified. Men and women, blacks and whites, members of conservative faith communities and religious liberals—in each case social attitudes have either stayed the same or converged. Even on the wedge issues (race, abortion, school prayer, sex education) between-group differences have remained stable or have grown smaller.
What should we make of this? We have seen that journalists seem to believe that America has become more divided. Attacks on abortion clinics and government buildings and confrontations between federal agents and armed rightist groups provide vivid indications of the terrible toll that moral conflict can exact. And other evidence demonstrates that partisanship in Congress grew ever more strident and divisive over the period we reviewed.[15]
The question, then, is this: How is it that our public politics have become more polarized while our private attitudes and opinions have become more united?