Why Never-Attending Christians And Atheists Are Worlds Apart
(ANALYSIS) Sometimes a single question on a survey can unlock all kinds of interesting insights into the intersection of religion and politics.
For instance, the Public Religion Research Institute asked folks to agree or disagree with this statement: “An elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”
In 2011, just 30% of White evangelicals agreed. When they posed that same statement again in 2016, it had jumped to 72%. I mean — that tells a pretty compelling story, right?
But sometimes other variables can actually obscure what’s really going on in the American population. Let’s take the example of religious attendance. A pretty basic question that could be the centerpiece of a solid master's thesis would be, what impact does religious attendance have on partisanship in the United States?
It’s a great question because there’s a ton of theory that can be brought to bear that fills out a literature review pretty easily. And it’s super easy to test with basically any dataset that contains religion questions.
However, there’s a really big problem with just using religious attendance as a proxy for religiosity. It masks a way more interesting feature of American life — a never-attending person who identifies as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular is a completely different species compared to a never-attending person who still identifies with a religious tradition.
Let me show you what I mean in the graph below, which is just restricted to White respondents in the sample.
These two-line graphs do not look at all the same even though it’s the same general category — never-attending White people.
Among all never attenders, the Democrats have always dominated. In 2008, they were about 57% of respondents, but that’s eroded just a bit over time. Now it’s just about 52%. The Republican share has gone from 24% in 2008 to about 29% currently. But even today, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least 20 points.
But look at the graph on the right — that’s excluding anyone who is atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular. This is, by and large, never attending Christians. In 2008, the Democrats had the plurality, at just below 50%. The Republicans were around 35%.
But by 2015, those percentages were exactly the same at 42%. And the lines have kept moving in opposite directions since then. In the 2024 data, 47% of never-attending religious White people were Republican, and only 37% were Democrat.
In other words, a complete reversal from where things stood just 15 years ago.
You see what I mean when I say that attendance is just masking something bigger? Yes, the nones tend to be never attenders — but they also lean heavily towards the Democrats. A never-attending White Catholic is a completely different category than all never attenders.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, 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.