The Mainline Political Divide: Does Education Change the Story?
(ANALYSIS) Back in November, I wrote a post that I knew was going to cause a stir because it answered one of the most burning questions in my mind: “How Big is the Political Divide Between Mainline Clergy and Laity?”
The Public Religion Research Institute had done a wonderful survey of pastors in the mainline Protestant tradition, and it allowed me to actually document, with as much accuracy as possible, the political differences between those who stand in the pulpit and those who sit in the pews of the local Episcopal or United Methodist church.
It became one of the most widely read posts on my newsletter, and I still get asked about it on a near-weekly basis. The findings are pretty much what most people guessed: mainline clergy are way more politically and ideologically left-wing than their congregants.
For instance, 45% of mainline clergy are liberal Democrats, compared to 24% of people sitting in the pews. And the laity are three times more likely to be conservative Republicans compared to their pastors.
There was some pushback, of course. Any time you write something that gets read tens of thousands of times, it’s going to happen. Some of it was actually really thoughtful, though, and I wanted to focus on one specific criticism that I hadn’t wrestled with too much: mainline clergy have a unique mix of demographic factors that make it difficult to compare them to the folks sitting in the pews.
Namely? Almost all mainline clergy have graduate degrees. In the PRRI sample, over 90% of them had an MA or more.
That’s a critique that I want to tackle head on in this post, but let me walk you through a bit of data exploration before we get there.
What I discovered by poking around the archives at ARDA was that PRRI had replicated some of the questions on the mainline clergy survey in other data collection efforts. For instance, they have often included this question: Is America a Christian Nation?
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.