How Big Is The Political Divide Between Mainline Clergy And Laity?
(ANALYSIS) I had to read the book “Moby-Dick” in high school. I was not a fan. I’m still not a fan. But there’s one idea from that book that has stuck with me for the last twenty-five years: the white whale.
In Melville’s book, Captain Ahab has a boat that is destroyed by a giant sperm whale. It changes the course of his life because he spends the rest of his days trying to track it down and kill it.
In modern parlance, it’s a problem that seems unsolvable.
I’m not going to list all of my white whales outright because some of you might actually steal the idea from me! But I am going to be able to answer one of my eternal questions today in a way I’ve never been able to before: How big is the political divide between the clergy and the laity in mainline Protestant Christianity?
It’s a question that gets posed to me all the time, especially when I do any kind of writing about the political leanings of the average mainline Protestants who sit in the pews of local United Methodist or Episcopal churches. That became especially acute when I was working through my post-mortem on the 2024 election and I wrote a post about the mainline.
Here’s the upshot of that post: A majority of mainline Protestant Christians voted for Donald Trump in 2024. They also supported him in 2020 and 2016. In fact, even during Barack Obama’s landslide election in 2008, the mainline was evenly divided at the ballot box.
There’s a common perception out there that mainline Protestants are a bunch of card-carrying leftists who love to post rainbow flags outside their churches. And while their theology may be to the left of Southern Baptists, their politics are decidedly conservative.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s 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.