Americans say religion is more central to their identity than politics

(ANALYSIS) When a human being goes to make a decision, what are the mechanisms that they use to do that? Trying to understand the decision-making process of individuals is one of the core questions of social science and thousands of academics make it their life’s work. For those of us who study political behavior, our careers are focused on a seemingly simple but incredibly complex calculation that goes on inside people’s heads when they step into a voting booth and decide who should govern them in the immediate future.

For all the tremendous work that has been done in political science over the last decade, concrete answers to these questions remain frustratingly elusive. For me, the scope of the inquiry is the interaction between politics and religion. Do people look to guidance from the Bible, Torah or Quran, or do they look to their pastor or priest before they formulate an opinion on a policy proposal? Or, do they figure out how their political party feels about that issue and then interpret the doctrines of their faith through a partisan lens?

The kind of answers to these questions live in the black box that exists between our ears. It’s hard to even try to explain our decision-making process at times. But, we continue to chip away at this problem and that black box becomes a bit smaller with each new discovery.

One way to bring some illumination to these questions is to simply ask people how important certain things are to their identity. That’s exactly what the Nationscape survey did in the last year. These provide a small peak behind the curtain - helping us understand just what matters the most: politics or religion. The results are not exactly what I would have anticipated.

A broad consensus emerges here: religion is more central to the identity of Americans than politics. At least, that’s how they respond to the survey questions. In most cases, the share of each religious group that says that politics is “very important” is around 25%. There are some exceptions to that, however. For instance, it’s much lower for the religiously unaffiliated. Just 14% of atheists and 11% of agnostics and nothing in particulars place a great deal of importance on politics. I’ve been suggesting that politics has become a unifying force for a lot of the nones, but this data runs counter to that narrative.

“A broad consensus emerges here: religion is more central to the identity of Americans than politics. ”

Religion ranks comparatively higher than politics for every theistic religious group. Over three quarters of evangelicals indicate that religion is “very important”, which is significantly higher than mainline Protestants or Catholics. Obviously, the nones don’t express a lot of importance on religion, but they also didn’t say that politics was that important either. In both cases just about one in ten respond that politics or religion were “very important.”

The operative question for a lot of observers of American religion and politics recently has centered around how White evangelicals have become so closely wed to the politics of the Republican party, especially in light of the Trump presidency. To that end, I calculated a cross-tabulation of how both White evangelicals and White Catholics (also a group that is trending more Republican) responded to the two questions about religion and politics on the survey.

Undoubtedly, White evangelicals are more likely to say that their religion is more important to them than their White Catholic counterparts: 75% of evangelicals are in the top row of the heat map, compared to just 41% of White Catholics. For instance, 18% of Catholics say that religion is “not too important” compared to only 4% of evangelicals. This is evidence of the idea that Catholicism is more cultural than theological compared to evangelicalism.

But, notice how large of a share of White evangelicals are in the top right of their heat map. Nearly half of the sample says that religion is very important and that politics is either very or somewhat important. For White Catholics, that’s just 26%.

However, just thinking that politics is very important doesn’t speak to the direction of that feeling. For instance, if those White evangelicals who felt that both religion and politics were very important were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, we could rightly assume that evangelical churches are hotbeds of democratic deliberation and policy arguments. Those are signs of a healthy democracy. But, the data indicates that for White evangelicalism, this is fairly asymmetric.

The sample was restricted to just those who said that religion was very important and divided into four groups based on how they responded to the importance of politics questions. Then, I calculated how these subgroups responded to a question about political partisanship.

Among the evangelicals who said that religion was very important and politics wasn’t important at all, there’s a very good amount of diversity in views. Just over half identified as Republicans, and the remaining portion is split between being independents and Democrats. However, moving up the scale of importance shifts this distribution significantly. 

Among White evangelicals who say that both religion and politics is very important, two-thirds of them identify as “strong Republicans” and 18% were “strong Democrats.” In total, nearly 85% of this group lies at the ends of the political spectrum, but Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly four to one. Thus, to care about politics among White evangelicals is to almost always be a Republican (and a strong one at that).

Obviously, these results won’t end the debate around how politics and religion interact in the minds of the average American. However, the results do provide some additional support for the strong fusion between American evangelicalism and Republicanism. In many ways, to be very religious is to be very politically conservative for White Americans. Thus, it stands to reason that lots of people of faith who have progressive views of American politics feel excluded, shunned, or isolated in 2020.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge.