What About White Evangelicals Who Aren’t Conservative?
(ANALYSIS) Every once in a while I will get an email from someone who doesn’t really fit the mold. An atheist who has voted for Donald Trump numerous times. A Black Protestant who is increasingly becoming more aligned with conservative politics. And what feels like an increasing number of White evangelicals who are not so closely aligned with the Republican Party.
Let me be clear that the amount of communication I get from Bernie Sanders-supporting White evangelicals is not huge. The more common sentiment is a White evangelical who sees themselves as politically moderate or really pushed out by the modern MAGA Republican Party.
What’s nice about having large datasets is that I can explore these niche-y type of subgroups. Let me describe what I mean with actual numbers. The 2020 Cooperative Election Study has a total of 61,000 respondents. Of that, 11,067 are White self-identified evangelicals. If I subdivide that into five-point political ideology (very liberal to very conservative), here is the N size for each subgroup:
— Very Liberal: N = 386, .6% of the sample.
— Liberal: N = 749, 1.2% of the sample.
— Moderate: N = 3219, 5.3% of the sample.
— Conservative: N = 4324, 7.1% of the sample.
— Very Conservative: N = 4443, 7.3% of the sample.
Before we got into the era of “big survey data,” the largest publicly available surveys would be 3,000. That means that scholar may be lucky to get 50 liberal White evangelicals and another 150 moderate White evangelicals. Neither subgroup is large enough to do much with in terms of breaking it down by other demographic variables (gender, education, age, etc.).
But because we have huge sample sizes, this allows folks like me to get a much sharper picture of groups that aren’t necessarily that large in the general public.
So, let’s take advantage of this possibility by taking a look at not conservative White evangelicals.
Just to get a sense of the lay of the land here’s the ideological composition of White evangelicals over the last 15 years or so.
Yeah, there’s not a whole lot to write home about here. There are a bunch of conservative White evangelicals. In 2008, when Barack Obama won the White House, about two-thirds of White evangelicals described themselves as conservative or very conservative. Another quarter said that they were moderate. That leaves a bit less than 10% who were liberal.
The only thing that is really worth talking about in terms of shifting is the mix between conservative and very conservative.
For instance, in 2016, only 16% of White evangelicals said that they were very conservative and another 48% were just conservative. That changed in 2020, when the right wing of White evangelicalism was evenly divided between conservative (33%) and very conservative (34%). I don’t really know what to make of that, by the way. But it’s basically stayed that way for the last four surveys. So, it’s not just a blip.
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.