Political Identity Drove Americans Away From Christianity — And Why It’s No Longer True
(ANALYSIS) There’s an old saying that bounces around from time to time: “Change is hard. Not changing is harder.” It’s often invoked by counselors helping clients alter their behavior, particularly regarding substance abuse.
But outside that specific context, the opposite is often true. In fact, the strongest force in the world of social science is inertia. What’s the strongest predictor of where someone will live? It’s where they were born. The strongest predictor of one’s partisanship? The political affiliation of their parents.
And if one were to guess a random person’s current religion, the answer is almost always the same: whatever religion they were raised in. We stick with what we know.
The share of Americans who indicate that their current religious tradition is the one in which they were raised is 66%. Most people living in the United States will die with the same faith into which they were born, and that’s been true for decades. But how people switch and why they switch may be changing.
Let’s first tackle the first part of that question: what does religious switching look like in American religion? The alluvial diagram below maps the flow of Americans from their childhood faith to their current one, based on the 2023-24 Pew Religious Landscape Survey (hosted on the ARDA). The color of each band represents a person’s childhood tradition, and the thickness represents how many people travel a particular path.
The thickest bands tell the clearest story. The vast majority of folks who were raised Protestant stay in that same faith tradition throughout their lives, and the same is true for Catholics and smaller faith traditions. But notice the size of the blocks on the left compared to the right. More people were raised Protestant than are currently Protestant. Catholics show an even steeper drop.
The one group that clearly bucks this trend is the “nones.” Their bar on the right-hand side is over twice as large as the bar on the left. The non-religious have far more inflows than outflows, which is how they have grown to roughly a quarter to a third of the American population.
Switching happens, of course, but it’s certainly not the norm. In fact, about six in ten current nones came from Christian backgrounds — roughly a third from Protestant traditions and a quarter from Catholic ones.
Which groups are best at keeping their own, and which ones have a high rate of defection? It’s easier to get a handle on that by calculating retention rate, which is simply the share of each tradition whose childhood faith matches their current religious affiliation.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
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.