Which Identity Is More Important: Race, Gender or Religion?
(ANALYSIS) There’s this line from Walt Whitman that I think about a lot when I am doing survey work, it’s from “Song of Myself, 51”:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
There’s this inherent tension in doing survey research. We are trying to get people to explain their thinking about things. I don’t know if that’s always possible.
As many of you know, I worked on a book project called “The Great Dechurching” with two pastors, Michael Graham and Jim Davis. We asked folks a whole bunch of questions about why they stopped attending religious services and why they might come back.
In writing that book, we would always come back to the possibility that people themselves don’t fully understand why they do the things that they do. They contradict themselves. They contain multitudes.
I’ve described it like trying to put smoke in a box. Trying to create order from chaos. Trying to make sense out of randomness.
But maybe that’s all that we can do, really. The alternative is worse, in my estimation. It’s just a whole bunch of blind conjecture based on anecdotes and personal experiences.
I was thinking about that a bunch when I was poking around the Cooperative Election Study’s search tool in search of questions about religion. I found this nice little module that was fielded by the terrific Lilliana Mason at Johns Hopkins.
She asked people, “How important are each of the following to your identity and how you think of yourself?” Then they were given three options to respond to: your gender, your race and your views about religion.
It’s definitely an angle that I hadn’t really considered much — asking people to reflect on how they construct their worldview. Maybe that’s trying to quantify smoke in a box, but it’s definitely worth some exploration.
Here’s how the entire sample answered those questions.
I don’t know what I was expecting to see in these results before I generated the bar graph, but I was surprised to see how much gender really popped in these results. Half the sample said it was “very much” important to their identity.
For those wondering, there was a huge gender gap on this question. Among women, 58% said it was very important, compared to just 41% of men. (That’s probably why this result was so interesting to me: I’m a guy. I don’t think about that very much.)
About 30% of folks said that their race was very much important, but then 25% said it was not at all important. Of course, the respondent’s race is crucial here. For White folks, just 19% said their race was very much important, compared to 55% of non-White respondents.
I think we can see a pattern forming here: White males don’t see their race or gender being that central to their identity.
What about the religion question? What I like about this is how it’s phrased. It’s not “your religious faith,” it’s “your VIEWS about religion,” which means that this question is still helpful to understand the perspective of atheists, too. In the entire sample, 36% said it was very important.
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.