What You Believe: Exploring The ‘God Gap’ In American Politics
Photo by Gilbert Mercier
(ANALYSIS) If there’s one catch phrase in my little corner of the social science world, it’s “the God gap.” It’s the simple idea that the Republicans have become the party of religious folks, while the Democrats are much less religiously inclined.
If you read a bunch of papers that use that term and try to trace it back to its origins, you get a lot of different answers. It certainly plays a significant role in Geoffrey Layman’s first book The Great Divide, which was published in 2001.
He had already noticed that there was a great divergence in the religiosity of Democrats and Republicans. He wrote on page 11:
Conservative Protestants abandoned their apolitical moorings in the late 1970s and early 1980s. With encouragement and assistance from organizations such as the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, the Christian Voice, and later the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council, religious conservatives became actively involved in battles over cultural issues such as abortion, the place of religion in the public schools, pornography, gender equality, and homosexual rights, and they infiltrated the ranks of the Republican party to fight these battles.
However, it also plays a prominent role in Putnam and Campbell’s seminal book “American Grace,” which was published in 2010 — especially in Chapter 4, in which they describe recent American religious history.
Their narrative is that the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to a backlash among people of faith. In other words, the rise of the religious rght was a direct result of the hippies of a decade or two earlier. They write, “Virtually every major theme in the Sixties’ controversies would divide Americans for the rest of the century, setting the fuse for the so-called culture wars.”1
How this happened, exactly, is still a matter of fierce debate among political scientists, sociologists and historians, but the upshot of all this is the same: The modern Republican party is a whole lot more religious than the modern Democratic party. That’s all I wanted to do today, is make that evidence clear — not really come up with my own explanation for why this is this the case.
As I have written elsewhere, religion is conceived to run on three dimensions:
— Belief: This is measured in a variety of ways, including view of the Bible, belief in angels, demons, God, heaven, hell, etc.
— Behavior: This is almost always measured by religious attendance
— Belonging: This is what group you identify with on a survey: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, no religion, etc.
So let me visualize how the two major parties have diverged on these metrics over the last couple of decades. Let’s start with belief in God, a question that has been included in the General Social Survey with regularity since the early 1990s.
As can be seen from the top row of bars, there was very little difference in the religious beliefs of the average Democrat and the average Republican in the 1990s. About two-thirds of Republicans had a certain belief, and it was just a few points lower for the Democrats.
Also, the share who didn’t believe in God was small for both groups. It’s not like there were a bunch of atheists on either side of the aisle in the 1990s. About 80% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans chose the two most certain responses on religious belief.
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.