Putting Religious Democrats And Secular Republicans Under The Microscope
(ANALYSIS) I swear I don’t try to write about abortion so much, but I always end up there. I just think it’s this issue that is like no other when it comes to social issues. What really spurred this post, was a previous one that I put together called, “Liberals Have Won the Cultural War.”
The top graph always goes viral when I post it on social media. I was just tracking the trajectory of a bunch of issues over the last fifty years. Same-sex marriage, legalizing marijuana, etc. The general sense you get from that data is the average American is much more permissive of all kinds of things today compared to the 1970s.
But, abortion is this weird outlier. It doesn’t track clearly in one direction. Here’s what I mean:
Those lines are trending upward in some places, but are pretty flat in other places. It’s not nearly the same when you look at views of same-sex marriage. All those lines move up and to the right. Abortion, for whatever reason, is just different. Some folks have become more permissive, others have become less.
I was ruminating on the now famous quote by Russ Douthat. He wrote, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”
Well, that got my empirical juices flowing. I had this itch in my brain that centered on a single question: Do secular Republicans look like religious Republicans on abortion? Do religious Democrats look like secular Democrats? More specifically — what does post-religious Right actually look like?
Let’s figure that out by looking through the lens of abortion.
It’s pretty important to start with broad look at the data. I divided the sample into religious folks (these are people who identify with any religious tradition from Protestantism to Hinduism) and secular folks (atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular). It’s a very crude classification, but I wanted to simplify this as much as I could.
Democrats are slowly shifting from being 2/3 religious to half religious and half not. The modern Democratic party is nearly evenly divided by religious voters and secular ones. It’s 52% vs 48% right now. But don’t be surprised when it flips the other way in the next five years. I think that’s just inevitable at this point.
The GOP is also shifting, but they started at a much higher baseline. In 2008, 87% of Republicans were religious voters and just 13% were secular. Every election season, those percentages have slowly shifted. By 2022, about 80% of the GOP is religious, while 20% are secular.
Put another way - for the Democrats there is one religious person for every secular person. For the Republicans there are four religious voters for every secular member of the GOP. Thus, it’s a long time before secular voters have significant sway over the Republicans. For Democrats, that time is now.
Okay, so let’s get right to abortion. The Cooperative Election Study asks a series of questions about the topic. I pulled out four of them. The top row is the black and white questions - should be completely illegal or should always be allowed as a matter of choice.
There are four subgroups — Democrats and Republicans, religious and secular.
There’s a clear pecking order here. The most permissive group when it comes to abortion are secular Democrats — only 6% want a total ban, for instance. The next most permissive group are religious Democrats. In 2022, 79% of religious Democrats favored abortion as a choice. Secular Republicans are next. It’s really interesting to me that about half of non-religious Republicans are in favor of abortion on demand. That means that the least permissive of abortion are religious Republicans — 25% of them favor abortion at any time, while 27% think it should be completely illegal.
Here’s a working theory — politics matters more than religion when it comes to abortion. I wrote about that in a lot more detail here.
What do I mean by that? Well, a religious Democrat is clearly to the left of a secular Republican on these issues. The bottom row illuminates that gap pretty clearly.
Look at the question about banning late term abortions. Among secular Republicans, 68% are in favor of a ban after 20 weeks. It’s just 41% of religious Democrats. That’s a twenty-seven point gap between these two groups. Only 26% of religious Democrats believe that federal funds should not be used for abortion services. It’s 58% of secular Republicans. Again - the gap on abortion opinion is not a religious one, it’s clearly a political one. Politics shapes views of abortion much more than theology does.
But here’s where things come in to much clearer focus for me — the longitudinal trends. I used the same four categories: Republicans and Democrats, religious and secular. But now I am tracking abortion opinion in the General Social Survey with questions that have been asked since the late 1970s. I am just going to show you two here, but trust me when I saw that none of the other questions buck the trend you are going to see.
The first question is the general purpose one — allow a woman to obtain a legal abortion if she would like one for any reason.
Notice a difference in these trend lines? You should. For Democrats the move is clearly in favor of permissiveness. But it doesn’t look the same for religious Democrats versus secular ones. Secular Democrats view of this question was relatively static between 1977 and 2010. About 70% were in favor. For religious Democrats, the early movement happened between 1977 and 1994. During this time period support for abortion on demand rose from 30% to 42%.
But something happened around 2008 for the Democrats. Both lines begin pointing skyward at this point. Among secular Democrats support for abortion rose from 70% to 87%. For religious Democrats, it went from 42% in 2010 to 78% in 2022. A religious Democrat is TWICE as likely to support abortion without restriction today compared to 2010.
What about the Republicans? The line is moving a lot less and when it does it’s almost always in the downward direction. In the 1980s, secular Republicans support for abortion began to decline from about 70% in 1977 to 50% in 2002. (To be fair, there weren’t a lot of secular Republicans in those days, FYI). But from that point forward, the line has flattened out, maybe rising just a bit in the last few election cycles. Now, about 55% of secular Republicans are in favor of abortion.
How about religious Republicans? This story is kind of boring. There was a pretty consistent level of support from 1977 to 1992 - around 37%. Then it dropped by 6-8 points and stuck right around 30% in 2000. From there it’s been absolutely no movement.
Let me give you one more look this. I chose what I would guess is the most marginal situation offered by the GSS - the woman wants to abort because she just doesn’t want any more children.
I feel like this is a scenario that some people who are generally pro-choice would balk at a little bit.
Look at those secular Democrats. For decades, support for abortion in this scenario was the same — around 75%. Then, around 2010, support shoots up. Now, 95% of secular Democrats would favor a woman obtaining abortion if she didn’t want more children. The line for religious Democrats had been slowly trending upward between 1973 and 2010 — from 40% to about 50%. But then, around 2010 the line shoots up. Now, in the most recent data, over 80% of religious Democrats support abortion if a woman doesn’t want more children.
Let’s look at the Republicans now. Pretty clear that they have moved in the opposite direction, but notice the time period where the movement occurred. For secular Republicans, 80% favored abortion in this circumstance in 1973. By 2000, that share was just 60% and it’s basically stayed there for the last two decades.
For religious Republicans, support has always been low. In the 1970s, the share in favor was about 47%. It slid downward until around 2004, when it got to 30% and has basically stuck there in the last decade.
Where’s the bigger God gap? It’s clearly among the Republicans. In 2022, the differences between the two types of Democrats was small - just about 10 percentage points. Among the Republicans, it’s thirty percentage points. It’s pretty evident to me that secular Republicans are a different animal entirely on abortion compared to religious Republicans. Among Democrats, the gap is relatively small.
What’s the upshot? Well, I think that abortion rights has become this type of litmus test for Democrats. That’s the only conclusion I can arrive at when looking at this data.
Who would be more ostracized in the modern political climate:
A Democrat who opposes abortion in most (if not all) scenarios
or
A Republican who would permit abortion in most (if not all) scenarios?
From this vantage point it has to be the pro-life Democrat. Consider the fact that over 80% of religious Democrats favor abortion when a woman doesn’t want any more children - to be that 20% is to be in a very lonely situation. This reminds me of one of Joe Biden’s biggest policy shifts in the last five years — the Hyde Amendment. In short, it banned the use of federal funds for most abortions. Biden had supported it for decades (as did most of Congress), until he ran in the Democratic primary in 2019. He came out in opposition to Hyde, arguing that Republican states are making it harder to get an abortion than ever before and federal funding is necessary to maintain access to abortion.
It seems likely that what really happened was that he was pressured by Democratic activist organizations to change his position in order to receive their support during a tumultuous time in his primary campaign.
Douthat warned us of a post-religious Right, but I’m not sure that this something of primary concern right now. Instead, what may be even more striking is how the post-religious left has managed to purify the Democratic party on issues in which there used to be a tremendous amount of diversity. Now, to be an orthodox Democrat is to be in favor of abortion on demand, regardless of the reason.
This piece is republished from Graphs About Religion on 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.