There Is Almost No ‘Liberalizing Religion’ In The United States
(ANALYSIS) All credit to the tremendous Landon Schnabel for a great paper that was published at the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The title tells the story: “A Search for Liberalizing Religion: Political Asymmetry in the American Religious Landscape.”
The conceit is pretty simple — there are lots of examples of highly religious people being really conservative. Schnabel wants to conduct a search for any evidence that being highly engaged in a certain religion pushes someone to the left side of the political spectrum.
Let me summarize the conclusion by just quoting from Schnabel’s last paragraph:
“Even ‘liberal’ religion is typically conservatizing and the fact that we can call it ‘liberal’ at all appears to be a function of selection.”
This is something that I have seen threads of in other work that I have put out there. For instance, I wrote a post using data that focused on measuring beliefs about the social gospel for Religion News Service a couple of years ago.
It’s no shocker that evangelicals are less likely to subscribe to the tenets of the social gospel, but this last regression was really surprising to me. It’s the likelihood of someone saying that “God is more concerned about individual morality than social inequalities.” I estimated a regression for Democrats, Independents and Republicans based on religious attendance.
What is really stunning is the fact that even among Democrats, going to church more makes them more likely to believe that individual morality is more important to God than societal problems.
In other words, the more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans. I wanted to pull on that thread just a bit more.
This is the political ideology of the sample, but it’s broken down by frequency of religious attendance.
You can see that trademark cascade pattern. The top row (which is never attenders) has a whole lot of blue and not much red. Just 21% of never attenders are conservative, while 46% identify as liberal. As church attendance goes up, those ratios begin to shift from left to right.
Among yearly attenders, the conservatives start to take over compared to liberals (36% vs 25%). Among weekly attenders, 52% are conservative, while just 16% are liberal. It’s even more extreme among the most frequent attenders.
For folks who are attending religious services multiple times a week, about 60% are conservative and 10% are liberal.
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.