How Pro-Life Are White Evangelicals?

Reginald Thompson: White Evangelicals talk a good game when it comes to being Pro-Life, which is here defined as words or actions that cause more children to have life, and less unborn children to be annihilated in the womb.

But are they just putting on a show to make themselves look righteous, with the possible motive of improving their own self-regard?

To find out I looked at the 2008 Presidential Exit Polls to determine the percentage of voters in the 39 states with the relevant data who described themselves as White Evangelicals.

Then I looked up the Abortion and White Total Fertility Rates for these 39 States.

Now hopefully there’s a positive correlation between White Evangelicals and White Babies, and a Negative Correlation between White Evangelicals and Abortions. For one thing, I really don’t want to be made more cynical than I already am.

Abortion         White TFR
White Evangelical              -.692              +.553

Churched                               -.517               +.399

As can be seen above, both the arrows of correlation are strong and in the predicted direction.

Moreover, we can see that though White Evangelicals are greatly outnumbered by the Churched (here defined as people who report visiting Church at least once a week), they nonetheless have a stronger influence on the Abortion and White Fertility Rates of a State.

And remarkably, even though the positive correlation between percent White Evangelical and the White Total Fertility Rate is smaller than the negative correlation found with Abortion, we find 31% of the State to State variation in White TFR is explained by the Percentage of White Evangelicals in a State.

And this is being accomplished by a group that was only 26% of the voters in the 2008 Election!

Recently on My Blog I reported the correlation I found between White Ethnocentrism, as measured by the capacity to elect Senators against giving Amnesty to Illegal Immigrants, and White Fertility.

Given this finding, I find it extremely notable in this context that Evangelical Protestants were found by a recent poll to have the most Ethnocentric Attitudes toward Immigration of any major American Religious Group:

% Supporting Enforcement over Amnesty

Evangelicals                                    +64%
Other Protestant.                         +41%
Catholics                                          +41%
Jews                                                    +3%

Like I said in my post about ethnocentrism and fertility: Love for one’s family and love for one’s race spring forth from the same roots.  And I think this is the best explanation for my finding that members of the most ethnocentric Major White Religious Group cause the White Birth Rate to go up simply by virtue of there being more of them in a state.

Reginald Thompson is the Pen Name of an Advisor to an International Software Company. He lives on the American East Coast and is proprietor/manager of a recently created Blog called Statsaholic.