State and Federal Elections Spotlight America's Diversity and 'Religious Nones'

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(OPINION) The mayhem at the U.S. Capitol last week did not prevent Congress's ceremonial tally of the Electoral College victories of the nation's second Catholic president, Joseph Biden, and of Kamala Harris, the first African-American, first Asian-American and first female vice president.

Simultaneously, diversity was also demonstrated in the two Georgia runoff wins that give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Jon Ossoff is this heavily Protestant state's first Jewish senator. Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock makes history as only the South's second African-American senator elected since the Reconstruction era. The first is Republican Tim Scott in neighboring South Carolina.

OK. The press has reported all that.

Less noticed are some diverse Democrats newly elected to state legislatures, as featured in the "mainline" Protestant magazine Christian Century. Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Wisconsin and Oklahoma all elected their first-ever Muslim lawmakers, and the Oklahoman, Mauree Turner, is also America's first legislator to identify as non-binary. Episcopal priest Kim Jackson becomes the first openly lesbian member of Georgia's Senate. Kirk White, founder of the Wiccan Church of Vermont, joins that state's Assembly.

Journalists should also be reflecting on the societal change reflected in the religious makeup of the new U.S. Congress, documented in Pew Research Center's latest biennial report, drawn from CQ Roll Call data. Pew's report page is here and for future reference note you can click on "Detailed Table" for a listing of each member's religious identity.

Religious affiliations do not necessarily define members' policies and voting records. Consider all those Democrats who call themselves Catholic but are pro-choice on abortion – churchgoer Biden among them. But the numbers tell the media something about society's broad religious trends.

Diversity rundown: Way back when, Congress was exclusively Christian and heavily Protestant. The new House and Senate have 33 Jews, three Muslims, three Hindus and two Buddhists. Like Jews, Unitarian Universalists are over-represented relative to the U.S. population with three members, while Pentecostalists are under-represented, with only two members.

Several organizations have compiled religious censuses of Congress over the years. Pew Research issued its first after the 2008 election. That year there were 31 Jews, two Buddhists, two Muslims, and no Hindus. More significant for our purposes, five called themselves "nondenominational Protestant," 39 said merely "Protestant" without specifying a church body, three were "Christian" but not Protestant or Catholic, and five declined to list an affiliation or identity.

Compare that with the incoming 117th Congress, where 96 members call themselves generically "Protestant" or "Christian" without naming any specific religious group, while 18 provide no religious listing. However, only Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a bisexual pioneer, specifies that she has no religious affiliation (though she does not identify as an atheist, either).

This gets complicated. The pioneering Scott, for instance, is "Protestant unspecified." Instead of a traditional name-brand denomination, he belongs to Seacoast Church, a young multi-campus evangelical congregation. It belongs to the Association of Related Churches, a semi-denomination headed by his own pastor that reports it has planted 911 churches internationally in 20 years of existence. Scott, then, is not some blandly nominal "Christian" but a devout evangelical whose home church does not fit into old boxes.

So new-fangled evangelical outreach is one factor. But over-all, it is fair to assume the jump in generic "Protestant" and "Christian" labels since 2008 mostly reflects the much-mulled rise of "nones" with no religious affiliation, now 26% of Americans by Pew's count. The House's 13-member Freethought Caucus is another indicator of change.

Most nones are not atheists or agnostics but "nothing in particular" types with no active affiliation but maybe some childhood or fuzzy adult identity. Boyhood Presbyterian Donald Trump now calls himself a "non-denominational Christian," one who rarely attends church and belongs to none.

Politicians may calculate that it's valuable to claim some faith affinity lest voters think they're anti-religious or outright atheists, a political handicap that I examined in this previous post.

Writing just before the desecration of the U.S. Capitol, Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, saw this Pew Research cup as half-full. He observed that the U.S. population now counts as 65% Christian while 88% of those in Congress call themselves "some kind of Christian"

This means, he said, that Americans "elect political leaders who are identified as more religious than themselves." By contrast, back in 1961, when Biden's Catholic predecessor John F. Kennedy took office, the population was 93% Christian, matched by a Congress that was 95% Christian.

Like many evangelicals, he doesn't suppose everyone who accepts a "Christian" label is what he understands to be an actual Christian believer. But Mohler (a reluctant Trump endorser who grieves over the Capitol assault) proposed that "identifying as a Christian of one sort or another is indicative of a larger worldview." In his view, voters intuitively look for "moral seriousness" and "an understanding of right and wrong," and vote for candidates "as if it's still 1961."

Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for the Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.