Ross adds an important point to the recent back and forth over prosperity and religion:

I would also add that you can usually tell when religion-infused political movements have emerged in response to economic frustrations, because such movements tend to include (unsurprisingly) a strong economic component – from the Thomas Muentzer-inspired peasants’ revolt of the 16th century down through the Christian populism of William Jennings Bryan to the variations on liberation theology that you hear from (ahem, Mr. Obama) many African-American churches today. And the fact that the agenda of post-1970s religious conservatism (what Andrew describes, frequently and inaccurately, as “fundamentalism”) does not include a strong economic component ought to suggest – at least to informed observers, a category that apparently doesn’t include the leading Democratic contender for the Presidency – that “economic frustration” has very little to do with its appeal.

This is right, but I would push this a bit more.  Even in the cases where a religiously-driven or infused political movement did adopt a certain kind of economic platform, be it corporatist, socialist, populist or what-have-you, the economic agenda was derived from and justified in terms of the religious mandates that the members of the movement believed they were obliged to observe.  Whether it was Bryan’s fundamentalist Populists (and here the label fundamentalist is perhaps somewhat more appropriate), Catholic and Christian Democratic parties in Europe, Social Gospel progressives in the early 20th century or, on a more idiosyncratic and individual level, Tolstoy’s support for the Social Democrats in Russia, their political and economic programs grew out of their already-existing faith and their conviction that charity and justice required a certain kind of social and economic order.  Attachment to religion did not emerge out of alienation and frustration, but provided the language and the concepts for responding to injustices or frustrations.  These are cases where people who already embraced their religion to one degree or another set about trying to apply their faith in the political sphere. 

It is also worth bearing in mind that religiously-inspired political movements that focus on economic questions are in many cases focused on economic policy as a way of talking about broader questions of distributions of power and status or as a way of expressing an aspect of religious identity, so that even when there are concrete complaints about the distribution of wealth, monetary policy, the power and influence of financial interests, regulation (or deregulation), labour rights, and so on, they may contain within them expressions of cultural norms and values derived from religion beyond the merely rhetorical.  For example, parties representing political Catholicism in Europe typically supported social welfare and pro-labour measures because of Catholic social teaching, but also as an expression of solidarity with fellow Catholics whose interests were served by such legislation and as part of a more general reaction against the entire agenda of liberal parties that were themselves usually steeped in fierce anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism.  Political Catholicism had an economic agenda, but that agenda was just one part of a much broader program of defending the interests of the Church and Catholic communities against the predominantly urban liberals of their day who held Catholic beliefs and institutions in the same contempt that Obama’s San Francisco audience probably holds the small town citizens of Middle America.  

Political mass mobilisation of Christian voters is above all an expression of confidence in the validity and relevance of their faith to contemporary political debate.  It is almost the exact opposite of the embittered coping mechanism that Obama’s remarks seem to describe.  It is often an effort to push back against intrusions on their way of life or the education of their children, and these intrusions are usually sponsored by those who favour an activist role for government; the effort is in many ways defensive, or it is understood as being defensive, a reaction against the kinds of cultural changes cheered and promoted by activists on the left.  The most glaring error in Obama’s remarks is what he failed to mention (understandable, I suppose, given where he was): the role that cultural liberals had in provoking the dissatisfaction and defection of conservative Democrats, and their contribution to creating the climate that made them regard the leaders of the Democratic Party as the enemies of so much that they valued deeply.  Of course, these voters regarded them this way because those leaders had made a point of acting that way.  The charge of “elitist” is probably overused, and it may be a mistake to treat every kind of elitism the same, but it didn’t come out of nowhere and it was not just something cooked up by party hacks and radio show hosts.  The populist language that conservatives have employed for the last 30 years, even though it seems and often is so starkly at odds with many GOP policies, resonated because urban liberals in media, academia and government did insult and condescend to Middle Americans.  What really bothers these urban liberals is not so much that they think small town Americans “cling” to religion or any of the rest of it, but that they resent that these people often “cling” to the GOP in election after election.  This seems inexplicable to such folks, who are convinced of the obvious rightness of their views.  At the core of their misunderstanding–which you can see expressed in the cries of bewilderment on the left over the attention that is being paid to these remarks–is the assumption that people must choose between their pocketbook and their culture.  You don’t have to be a cultural conservative (or at least I don’t think you have to be one) to see that forcing people to make that choice will lead them to choose culture every time, and if this isn’t obvious the gap between urban liberals and everyone else is even greater than I had imagined.  Even assuming it is true that Democratic policies are better for small town Americans (or anyone else for that matter), the Democrats will always be on the losing side of this fight if they insist that economics must always take priority over culture, and especially if they insist that cultural issues should preferably be excluded from the discussion all together.  A party that could take seriously both economic populism and cultural conservatism would be the majority party for a generation, but the respective elites of both parties are deeply threatened by such a prospect and will work to prevent it.  Because culture will trump economics, the party that gives priority to the former (even if it is only through symbolism and rhetoric!) is going to keep performing well at the polls despite a track record in government, particularly in recent years, that ought to reduce it to minority status for decades.   

None of this is to deny that there are real economic grievances and anxieties, especially in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but I would just point out once more that there is nothing in Obama’s proposals that seems particularly likely to remedy them.  Indeed, if you believe that one of the fundamental problems with the economies of many Midwestern and Rust Belt states is the high cost of doing business caused by state and local over-regulation, which has discouraged investment and employment, electing Obama might be quite detrimental to the economic interests of working and middle-class Americans in these states.