How Important Is The Faith Of A US President?
(ANALYSIS) I can’t imagine I will ever teach a course on Research Methods again, but it’s something that I actually really did enjoy at EIU. I led our incoming graduate students on a tour of how political science tries to answer questions every fall for at least eight years. It was a difficult course, no doubt. But I think that many of my students left with a lot of really practical skills and a much better understanding of research design.
We usually spend an hour or two on a concept called operationalization, which is how we take our ideas about things and actually make them measurable. It may sound simple, but in my estimation, it is the most difficult aspect of social science.
You want to study the responsiveness of local government — then what metric are you going to use? I remember sitting through a paper presentation where the author tracked how long it took for the city to fill in potholes after they were called in to the public works department. I thought that was pretty great.
When it comes to religion, operationalization is especially tricky. It’s an incredibly amorphous concept to try to pin down in a series of survey questions. In recent years, the most widely discussed theory in my neck of the woods is Christian nationalism.
I get asked about it on a regular basis. I think that everyone who works in and around the CN literature acknowledges — we could also use some different (and potentially better) questions.
To that end, Tony Jones and I tried to take another angle on Christian nationalism by asking our respondents to the Making Meaning survey to respond to a number of statements about the personal faith of elected officials.
We like this set of questions because it comes at the concept of CN more directly. Instead of posing the statement, “The United States is a Christian nation,” we asked our respondents to engage with this one: “I prefer if the President is a person of faith.”
You notice what we didn’t say there? The word Christian.
We operationalized it that way on purpose. We wanted to see if the American public — religious or non-religious — was deeply concerned with electing a person of faith to the highest office in the land.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post on his Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.