Commenting on Nate Silver's new electoral modeling which singles out Southern Baptists as responding distinctively to the economic crisis, Andrew Sullivan speculates that it doesn't matter to them:

...The reason the economy is playing differently among Southern Baptists may surely be that many are voting primarily on religious, cultural and theological grounds.

The economy is irrelevant compared with religious identity. What this campaign may be doing is stripping most secular Republicans and independents from the GOP coalition...

I don't think so. According to The Young and the Faithful, which we released yesterday, white evangelicals rated the economy and energy as more important issues than abortion and same-sex marriage, and only 35 percent said they would not vote for a candidate who disagreed with them on abortion. On the other hand, a strong majority of white evangelicals favored a smaller government providing fewer services to a larger government providing more services [despite a 20-point generation gap between younger evangelicals (18-35) and their elders].

It's fair to wonder what degree of overlap there is between Nate's Southern Baptists and our white evangelicals, but considering that Southern Baptists are by far the largest evangelical protestant denomination, and that no research suggests they are politically distinct minority subculture within white evangelicalism, we're probably dealing with similar bodies here.

I'm not saying that "religious identity" has nothing to do with Southern Baptists' distinct response to the economy, but another important factor to consider is bedrock economic assumptions among evangelicals 35 and over. At the 2007 Values Voters' Summit, Richard Land extolled the benefits of tax cuts for the rich and equated progressive taxation with socialism, and the mostly middle-aged crowd around me responded as though it was gospel truth. To say that economics is irrelevant misses the fact that many conservative evangelicals just believe "limited government" and supply-side economics work.

it's encouraging that this belief has less sway among the young.