Belief And Belonging: Which US Racial Group Is The Most Religious?
(ANALYSIS) Every once in a while, an academic book gets published with a title that’s hard for me to forget. I mean, “Bowling Alone” is just an all-timer, right? What most people don’t know is that Putnam’s first book about Italy is assigned much more frequently in graduate schools. I know I read it in the Comparative Politics ProSeminar, but I couldn’t remember the name — it’s “Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.” Not nearly as catchy.
There are a couple of books in the sociology of religion that always stick in my head, too. “American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving” is one I will never forget. Another was released a few years ago that keeps coming back to mind: “Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century.” It’s an edited volume, and I bet you can guess the subject matter just from the title.
Religion in the United States “works” differently for Asian Americans compared to African Americans. The average white American doesn’t think about religion the same way, or practice their faith in the same patterns, as Hispanic Americans. Race is a central component of how religion operates in the American context.
But despite those varied expressions, I wanted to try to answer, with as much data as I can muster, a deceptively simple question: which racial group is the most religious?
To do that, I’m going to use the Pew Religious Landscape Study, because it has a huge sample size (~37,000) and asks a ton of questions about the various manifestations of religion, which are primarily along the dimensions of behavior, belief, and belonging.
For more on this, I will always link to this post: What Does it Mean to Be Religious?
Let’s start with the religious composition of each racial group.
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.