(ANALYSIS) I've always been a bit fascinated by people who live with inherent tensions in their lives. For example, I reside in a small, rural town that will likely vote overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024 — probably by 40 points or more.

Yet, there are some hardcore liberals here. I know a few of them. They advocate strongly for their beliefs, aware that their efforts might not significantly sway the majority. Many spend considerable time in St. Louis, about an hour's drive away, seeking a cultural environment more aligned with their values.

I’ve written about this before — people who are just in a weird situation. Most notable, I put together a paper about people who both identify as lesbian/gay/bisexual but also say that they are evangelicals on surveys. It was published with the title “To be of one mind?: integrating an LGB orientation with evangelical beliefs” at Politics, Groups, and Identities. Long story short, these folks are more religious than other LGB people but not quite as active as non-LGBT evangelicals.

We have a term for this in political science; it’s called being cross pressured. I consider this piece by Diana Mutz to be one of the foundational works in understanding the concept.

The field of religion and politics presents me with a whole bunch of combinations of folks who would clearly fall into this cross pressured category. I wanted to focus on one today that may be the most incongruent — people who identify as atheist or agnostic on the religion question but then say that they are Republicans.

I don’t think I need to provide a huge theoretical justification for why this is a weird combination of factors. The Republican party is basically 85% Christians right now. So to be an atheist who also identifies with the GOP puts you in a really small subset of the population. Let me start by just showing you that — this is the share of Democrats and Republicans who identify as atheist/agnostic over the last several election cycles.

Even back in 2008, atheists and agnostics were much more at home in the Democratic coalition than with the GOP. Twelve percent of all Democrats were atheist/agnostic, compared to only 3% of Republicans. Over time, both numbers have increased, but the trajectory is completely different. For Democrats, that percentage has risen from 12% to 21% between 2008 and 2022. For Republicans, it’s much more modest — from 3% to 5%. Only 1 in 20 Republicans are atheists or agnostics. It’s 1 in 5 Democrats. There are four Democrat atheist/agnostics for every Republican.

I think part of the reason for this finding is not the fact that Republicans are just a whole lot more religious than Democrats; it’s that Republicans just don’t like that atheist/agnostic label that much. So, they may be functionally nonreligious, but they would never want to call themselves a term that they believe to be repugnant like atheist or agnostic.

The empirical evidence for that is pretty clear when you limit the sample to people who report their religious attendance as seldom or never and then calculate the religious composition of those low attenders.

To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.

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 X at @ryanburge.