How Big Is The Phenomenon Of Secular Jews And Is It Unique To Judaism?
An Orthodox Jewish man walks in the streets of Jerusalem, near the Mahne Yehuda Shuk, Jerusalem Market. (Photo by Laura Siegal)
(ANALYSIS) Just a quick note for anyone looking for some data analysis about what’s happening in the Middle East right now — you aren’t going to get it from me. For a bunch of reasons.
One is that the situation is so recent that I wouldn’t have access to any survey data about this specific conflict. Another reason is that I just don’t trust polling about this topic. It’s incredibly complicated even for highly politically engaged folks — let alone the average American who consumes almost no news. That means that any survey results are really sensitive to question wording and response option choices.
Natalie Jackson wrote a nice piece for the National Journal entitled, “Most Americans don’t know what to think about the Israel-Palestine conflict” about this, by the way. I strongly recommend reading it.
But I can take a larger step back from the immediate conflict and talk about Judaism in the United States in a broader way. This is what reporters call “talking on background.” I do these kinds of calls with the media on a regular basis. Just trying to help them get a lay of the land. They aren’t looking for a pithy quote, they are just seeking to understand the topic in a more nuanced and empirically accurate way.
So, the post today actually arose from a conversation I had with a journalist who asked me about the concept of secular Judaism. I’m sure most of the readers of this website understand the concept, but here’s just a brief primer.
Judaism is both an ethnic identity and a religious tradition. People who are ethnically Jewish trace their ancestry back to the Israelites from the First Testament. This genealogy flows through the mother — not the father. In other words, if your mother is Jewish, then you are a Jewish, regardless of the ethnicity of your father. Wikipedia has a nice discussion of how that happened, for those seeking more information.
Then, there is Judaism as a religion. These are people who attend religious gatherings at synagogue. They read the Torah. They observe Sabbath. They participate in religious festivals like Passover and Yom Kippur. Some keep kosher, but not all.
Thus, secular Judaism is understood to be a group of people who can trace their ethnicity back to Jews from the Bible, but they do not practice the religion of Judaism in any meaningful way. They may have gone through a bar/bat mitzvah, but that was done more for familial reasons than any strong theological attachment to the religion of Judaism.
Before we get into trying to figure out how many secular Jews there are in the United States, let’s ask the broader question: How many people in the United States self-identify as Jewish?
I have two surveys that help us arrive at an answer: the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study. Both ask folks the same general question — what is your present religion, if any? Jewish is offered as a response option in both cases.
In the early waves of the GSS in the 1970s, nearly 3% of the sample was Jewish, but that quickly declined to just about 2%. From that point forward it slowly declined over time. In the most recent waves of the GSS, the share of Americans who identify as Jewish dropped to about 1.5%.
The CES reports an interesting upward trend from the 2008 data through around 2014. In the earliest waves of the CES, Judaism was slightly less than 2% of the population. It has risen just slightly in the most recent surveys. Now, about 2.25% of the CES is Jewish, and that’s been pretty consistent.
So, I think it’s fair to say that around 2% of American adults are Jewish, but obviously that’s not a definitive answer. Imagine someone who is theologically atheist but ethnically Jewish being presented with this type of survey question. Some of them may pick Jewish and some may say that they are atheist. I have no way of knowing for certain how often that is happening and what guides folks choices in this scenario. So, it’s 2% with a big asterisk beside it.
But let’s dig into the Jewish sample a bit more now to try and figure out if we can get a sense of what share of Jews are not particularly religious. The CES asks a nice question about how important religion is your life. I think when I’m trying to parse secular Judaism, this is a good place to start.
Lots of Protestants say that religion is very important to them — 64%. It’s 41% of Catholics, but only 23% of Jews. There’s evidence already that Judaism runs on a different track than Christian traditions. Only 2% of all Protestants say that religion is not at all important to them and 6% of Catholics (that’s some good evidence that cultural Catholicism isn’t that big.) But 17% of Jews chose this option, and another quarter said that religion is not too important in their lives.
So, the share saying religion is not at all or not too important by tradition:
Protestant: 10%
Catholic: 21%
Jewish: 42%
Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a sizeable population of nonreligious Jews in the United States. But let’s pivot to a different metric — religious attendance.
I ordered these bars from lowest attendance at the top to highest attendance at the bottom. Again, Jews score very low on this measure of religiosity. It’s important to point out that Hindus are the least likely to report regular attendance, but Jews are solidly in second place.
Half of Jews describe their synagogue attendance as seldom or never. Just 16% say that they attend services once a week or more. Outside of Hindus, Jews score lower on these metrics than any other religious tradition in the United States.
For instance, only 41% of Catholics are in the seldom/never bucket. It’s 32% of Protestants and 20% of Latter-day Saints. Remember, it was half of Jews. Sixty-five percent of Mormons are attending services weekly, along with 40% of Muslims and 44% of Protestants. It’s just 16% of Jews.
From this perspective, there’s pretty strong evidence here that Judaism has a much higher preponderance of secularity compared to other religious traditions in the United States. But just how prevalent is it? I created a measure of secularity — the share who never or seldom attend religious services and who say that religion is “not too” or “not at all” important in their lives. There’s obviously no objective definition, but I think this is a pretty good way to measure the concept.
Using this typology, 44% of Buddhists are secular — that’s easily the highest of any religious group in the United States. The group in second place is Jews at 34%. I think that’s my best guess at the share of Jews who are secular, by the way: about a third. In comparison, it’s 17% of Catholics, 8% of Protestants and Latter-day Saints, and Muslims are around 7%.
But has that share been growing over time? Here’s my best attempt at trying to answer that question.
For a few traditions, these trends lines are pretty flat. The share of secular Protestants is statistically the same in 2022 as it was in 2008. That’s also the case for Muslims. Right about 8% are secular. Orthodox Christians are an interesting outlier, by the way. The trend line is pointing downward from nearly 20% in 2008 to just below 15% in 2022.
But the line is pointing upward for several groups. Secular Catholicism has risen about two-three percentage points over the last 14 years. It’s up maybe five percentage points for Hindus, but that’s a small sample. So, grain of salt there.
It does look like secular Judaism has crept up over the last decade or so, though. In 2008 it was just above 30%. Today that mark is probably right above 35%. A percentage point increase every three years seems to be the trend since 2008. It’s interesting to me that the point estimates seem to follow this clear wave pattern above and below the trend line.
Are secular Jews politically different than religious ones, though? Through the lens of the 2020 presidential election, the answer is yes.
Among secular Jews (those who attend seldom/never and say religion is not very important), the share who voted for Biden was 81%. Trump only got 18%. However, Trump did a lot better among religious Jews — he got double the share at 37%. Biden only earned 62% of religious voters. So, there’s some pretty unmistakable evidence that secular Jews tend to be quite a bit bluer than more religious Jews.
But, vote choice is a pretty blunt measurement. It’s essentially dichotomous. Let’s get into a bit more nuance. I broke secular and religious Jews down into three types of partisanship (Democrat, Independent, Republican) and ideology (liberal, moderate, conservative).
The divergence really comes to the fore when looking at these heatmaps. Fifty-five percent of all secular Jews describe themselves as liberal Democrats — it’s just 38% of religious Jews. The other big divergence is the top right corner of the heatmap — conservative Republicans. Twenty-three percent of religious Jews say that they are conservative Republicans. It’s only 13% of secular Jews.
In total, 41% of religious Jews are liberals. It’s 56% of secular Jews. Among religious Jews, 59% are Democrats. It’s 73% of secular Jews. One-third of religious Jews are Republicans; it’s 20% of secular Jews.
I think you get the picture — Jews tend to be left of center politically. They favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 election. However, there is a clear difference in the political composition of secular Jews and religious Jews. Secular Jews tend to be dark blue — a majority of liberal Democrats. Religious Jews are a medium blue. Still clearly part of the Democratic coalition, but more toward the middle.
Obviously what is most relevant to actual politics is raw numbers. Remember that under this typology, about 1/3 of Jews are secular and 2/3 are religious. That doesn’t consider those ethnic Jews who chose atheist or agnostic on the religion question of the CES. They aren’t even part of this analysis because they are impossible to identify using current instruments.
Both secular and religious Jews tend to help the Democrats on election day, but Biden would benefit from winning a bigger chunk of religious Jews, as they are the larger share of the Jewish community. As I wrote here, there’s no evidence that Jews as a whole are defecting from the Democratic party, but it’s worth considering how increasing secularization in the Jewish community could provide a lift to Democrats. I could see a scenario where secular Jews could play a role in a close House race in a place with high concentrations of Jews like the NYC area.
This piece was originally published in Ryan Burge’s “Graphs About Religion” Substack.
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.