What Religious Groups See The United States As More Polarized?
(ANALYSIS) When I was in graduate school for American politics, there was one debate that absolutely dominated the discourse when it came to political behavior: Is the United States more polarized?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the debate kicked off, but a good starting place is James Davison Hunter’s “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.” It was published way back in 1992 and basically makes the argument that we are all deeply familiar with now — there are two factions in the United States: an orthodox camp and a progressive camp, and they just have completely different understandings of moral authority.
But in 2004 (about a year before I started graduate school), Morris Fiorina published “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America,” which as you can probably guess thinks that this entire debate has really no substance to it.
Fiorina actually has a pretty nuanced argument. He thinks that there is probably a growing amount of polarization among elites — but it’s not really trickled down to the average American. It’s a topic I tackle head on in my forthcoming book with Brazos that should publish in about a year. Chapter 7 is actually titled “Are We Really Polarized?”
Let me noodle around on that topic today in a way that I don’t in the book by using a nice question battery in the Cooperative Election Study. It asks folks to put themselves on an ideological scale that ranges from 1 (meaning very liberal) to 7 (meaning very conservative), while 4 is “middle of the road.”
Let me just start by showing you how each individual religious group places itself on this scale in the most recent data.
Just to give you all a baseline of understanding, in the entire sample, the average American puts themselves at 4.1/7. That means they are just barely to the right of dead center. It’s amazing how in all the noise and nonsense of the discourse, this is where the average person lands.
But I don’t think anyone will be surprised by the fact that White evangelicals are the group that places itself furthest to the right. Their mean is 5.4, which is significantly higher than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members in the sample, who have a mean of 4.9.
Then there’s a pretty big cluster of folks who range from White Catholics to Orthodox Christians to non-White evangelicals and the mainline. Their mean spans from 4.3 to 4.5.
Then a nice cascade forms for the rest of the groups. Non-White Catholics are slightly left of center at 3.9, but then each group is progressively more liberal. The average score for Hindus is 3.2. But without a doubt, the most left-leaning group is atheists at 2.5. From this angle, atheists are a bit further from the average American (1.6 points) compared to the average White evangelical (1.3 points).
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
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.