Interesting article in today’s The American Prospect online. A new study says the more secular residents there are in a neighborhood, the more conservative their religious neighbors become.

Let’s say you’re a progressive who isn’t religious, and you aren’t afraid to say so. You’ve long since cast off the beliefs your parents held, and you never find yourself in a house of worship unless someone you care about is getting married or getting buried. You move to a new town and find that, as in many places, most of your neighbors are churchgoing folk. When one of these neighbors asks you what church you and your family belong to, you say without hesitation, “We don’t belong to a church – we’re not believers.”

Before you know it, everyone on the block has heard about you and your brood of apostates. Just what effect are you and your family going to have on your neighbors? A new awakening, in which passionate but respectful discussion leads everyone to examine their own beliefs and find new shades of grey they didn’t think about before? When election day rolls around, will your neighbors give more consideration to those Democrats you keep talking about?

Maybe not. In an article published last year in the Journal of Politics entitled “Religious ‘Threat’ In Presidential Elections” (you can read a version here), political scientist David Campbell of Notre Dame describes how evangelical voters are affected by the demographic makeup of their environment — but not in the way you might think. Building on the “racial threat” hypothesis — which states that as the number of African-Americans in a community increases, the more likely white voters are to support conservative candidates and oppose policies that benefit African-Americans — Campbell set out to see whether he could identify a similar effect among evangelical voters. It turns out that, even when you control for factors like party identification, the more secular people there were within a county, the more likely that people from evangelical denominations living there would vote Republican.

Whoa. I guess it’s good that Travis Heights is full of non-believers by now. Otherwise, Molly Ivins, who lived and threw great parties at her house in the Austin neighborhood, must’ve nearly turned the district red.