GetReligion
Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Ryan Burge

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Do Christian 'conservatives' have different beliefs than secular 'conservatives'?

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Do Christian 'conservatives' have different beliefs than secular 'conservatives'?

I very much enjoy when other people share my work, especially when they have an audience as large as Rod Dreher’s over at the American Conservative.

Dreher recently picked up on a piece that I wrote laying out the most recent data that we have on the religiosity of Generation Z. In short, about 45% of them do not identify with a religious tradition. But, where a lot of that growth is coming from is through young people who identify as politically conservative.

Dreher writes:

“I would like to know what separates conservative Nones from political conservatives who are religious. That is, on what political points they differ. Are the Nones pro-choice, for example? I’m guessing they are probably fine with gay rights, though I don’t know what they think about trans; maybe they’re for it. What, exactly, makes them conservative?”

Well, I can make an attempt at documenting whether politically conservative Christians look like politically conservative nones using the same data sources that were included in my post.

Let’s start very broadly, by assessing just what percentage of Christians (regardless of age) identify as conservatives compared to those who are atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular.

Just a bit less than 50% of Christians (of all races) identify as politically conservative. That’s been basically true dating back to 2008. The share has never dropped below 45% and vacillates very little from year to year. It’s fair to say that 47-48% of Christians are conservatives. The share of nothing in particulars who are conservative is much lower. In 2008, it was just 21% but that slowly crept up to 27% by 2011, but has stuck around 25% in the last few years.

Political conservatives represent a very small portion of atheists and agnostics. In 2008, just one in 10 atheists and agnostics were conservative. By 2014, that had increased to 15% for agnostics, and maybe had jumped a single point for atheists. By 2020, 11% of agnostics were conservative and 9% of atheists.

But looked at holistically, it’s important to note that about three quarters of all conservatives identify as Christians, 17% are secular and the remainder come from smaller religious groups like Jews, Hindus, Muslims, etc.


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Thinking about white evangelicals, COVID-19 vaccines and VERY popular headlines

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Thinking about white evangelicals, COVID-19 vaccines and VERY popular headlines

As the Delta Variant has caused COVID-19 to surge again in the United States, there’s been a flurry of attention paid to the share of Americans who have chosen to forgo the vaccine against the coronavirus. Trying to understand the causal factors that would lead to one not getting the inoculation seems to be the first task when it comes to finding ways to reduce vaccine hesitancy coast to coast.

One of the primary dimensions that news outlets seem to be focusing on is religion. One kind of headline is especially popular and examples are published nearly weekly — stating that evangelical Christians are the ones who are the most reluctant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

Yet, when I review the data from a survey that was conducted on May 11 that was administered by Data for Progress, I don’t find a lot of evidence that evangelicals are the ones lagging behind. In fact, I find that those without any religious affiliation were the least likely to have received at least one dose of any COVID-19 vaccine.

The Data for Progress poll has been in the field for a total of 57 weeks. Dating back to the earliest days of the pandemic and beginning in January, respondents were asked if they had received a COVID vaccination. Obviously, in those early days when vaccine supply was an issue, small fractions of the population had gotten a shot. But that quickly ramped up as larger shares of the population became vaccine eligible.

By May, 70% of non-evangelical Protestants had gotten at least one dose. Sixty-two percent of both evangelical Protestants and Catholics reported the same. However, it was the “nones” (no religious affiliation) who were lagging farther behind.

By May 11, only 47% of nones had reported receiving at least one dose. However, what complicates data surrounding vaccination is that not everyone was eligible to get the shot at the same time. In all states, the oldest residents were eligible first and then the criteria widened as demand waned. However, by May 1, every American who was at least 16 years old was eligible to receive the vaccine.


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These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

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These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

Last November, I wrote a post for Religion in Public with the title, “The Data is Clear — Episcopalians are in Trouble.” In it, I used survey data to paint a portrait of a denomination that was on the brink of collapse.

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The median age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years. That’s problematic when membership has already been plummeting for decades.

But, I came across some data in the last few weeks that I just had to look at in more depth.

Before I get into the graphs I have to give some serious kudos to the data team that works for the denomination. I have looked at the websites of all kinds of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic traditions over the last few years. The Episcopalians blow them all out of the water in terms of accessibility and ease of use.

Don’t believe me? Well, they have an interactive dashboard of all their churches in the United States. You can sort based on a map, church size, or amount of offering. It’s incredible and can be accessed at this link.

Let’s get down to it, though. How many people actually attend an Episcopal church on an average Sunday? I grabbed a PDF of their membership reports from here and did some quick analysis of the national trends.

In 2009, 725,000 people attended an Episcopal church on an average weekend. According to their own data, the Episcopal Church has about 1.8 million baptized members. (The denomination’s membership peaked at 3.4 million in the 1960s.) Thus, about 40% of current members attend on a regular basis. That’s been declining steadily over the last decade. A typical year sees attendance dip by 25,000-35,000 people. That represents a 2-3% year-over-year decline.

By 2019, the weekly attendance was 547,000. In percentage terms, the Episcopalians have seen their attendance drop by a quarter in just the last decade.

But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians.


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Thinking about evangelicals and COVID-19 vaccines: Wait! The numbers show WHAT?!?!

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Thinking about evangelicals and COVID-19 vaccines: Wait! The numbers show WHAT?!?!

The last 14 months have given the world a series of public health challenges that it has never had to grapple with before.

Will people willingly disrupt their lives in order to contain the spread of a potentially lethal virus? Can drug manufacturers develop and test a vaccine in a very short period of time that is effective against COVID-19? Will those same pharmaceutical companies be able to ramp up manufacturing capabilities quickly enough to satisfy the demand for those vaccines?

In terms of vaccine creation and distribution, there’s no doubt that it’s been an unqualified success. Every estimate indicates that the United States will be awash in vaccines by May. However, the question that is looming on the very near horizon is the most important and difficult to answer: will the United States be able to vaccinate enough of the population to get to a state of herd immunity and finally put an end to this year long nightmare?

It’s not the hard sciences that are under the microscope, it’s the social sciences. To reach herd immunity, most experts believe that a country needs to get at least 75% of the population fully vaccinated as a minimum threshold. Will that even be possible? Are societal factors like religion actually making the goal of herd immunity even more difficult?

The organization Data for Progress has been putting a poll into the field since the very beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020 as a way to get a sense of what percentage of the public is engaging in risky behaviors and how they feel the government is handling the crisis. Since January they have begun to ask respondents questions about their receptiveness to the vaccine. What these results indicate is that there are some reasons for hope, but there is also ample evidence that getting shots into arms may prove to be a lot more difficult in the very near future.

The survey asked respondents if they had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. As can be quickly inferred, those shots were in short supply in January. Just about 6% of the entire sample indicated that they had gotten the vaccine at that point. However, things improved rapidly from there and the share of Americans who had been inoculated essentially doubled every month from January through early April, when 44% of the population had gotten a dose of the vaccine.

However, when the sample is broken down into the three of the largest religious groups: White evangelicals, White Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated, some disparities begin to emerge.


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Ryan Burge day: Black church believers and Black ‘nones’ show little Ideological divide

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Ryan Burge day: Black church believers and Black ‘nones’ show little Ideological divide

There are a number of narratives that have emerged from the 2020 election season, many of which will take years to fully unpack.

One of the most important actually began to take root in December 2017 when Alabama held a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions who became Attorney General in the Donald Trump administration. Alabama, one of the most conservative states in the nation, elected a Democrat — Doug Jones — to a statewide office for the first time in 25 years.

The reason for the victory was quickly attributed to the African-American community who turned out in large numbers for the Democrats. This same thread has run through coverage of the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden bested Trump in Georgia. Observers noted that the deep history of civil rights activism in the state energized the African-American base to repudiate the Trump presidency.

That bore out again on Jan. 5, 2021 when the Democrats won both Senate run-off elections in the state, defeating two Republican incumbents.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock’s win has garnered the most headlines. The pastor of one of America’s most historic churches — Ebeneezer Baptist — Warnock’s sermons featured prominently in the campaign. One of the results of this coverage is that it pulled back the curtain a bit on the Black church experience for many White Americans who have never had a lot of exposure to other religious traditions.

Yet, despite the fact that a lot of the chatter about the Black vote has centered on people of faith — it’s important to recognize that the Black community is not a religious monolith. While the largest share of African-Americans identify as Christian (63.5%), nearly a quarter indicate that they have no religious affiliation (22.1%) and another 15% identify as part of another faith group (Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.)

While these religious differences generate huge political divides among the White community, is the same true for Black Americans? The data indicates that race generates a unifying identity for Black Americans much more so than it does for White America, and religious differences at the ballot box are often small or non-existent when comparing Black Americans of different faith traditions.

In terms of political partisan and ideology — the differences between Black Christians, Black Nones and those of other faith traditions is relatively small. However, it’s worth pointing out that Black Christians are clearly the most likely to identify with the Democratic Party.


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Could Democrats win more Latter-day Saint Votes? Here's where they diverge from evangelicals

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I’ve long been fascinated by the dynamic between Mormons and white evangelicals.

On the surface, the two groups look remarkably similar. Both communities are religiously devout, remain focused on evangelizing while maintaining strong social ties within their faith community and tend to lean to the right in American politics.

Under that veneer there’s been a lot of turmoil. It’s been my impression that Mormons have always felt a bit ostracized from the general American public. To combat this, the LDS church (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) put together a media campaign called “I’m a Mormon” with the goal of normalizing their faith to the average American. I think, in some ways, that Mormons wanted to be seen as evangelicals.

But, many evangelicals want to ensure that doesn’t happen. Some of the leading voices in conservative American evangelicalism have labeled Mormonism a “cult.” Even the Billy Graham website once described Mormonism in cultish terms before the nomination of Mitt Romney in 2012. External similarities papers over the fact evangelicals and Mormons are some strange bedfellows, to be sure. But, do they really see politics in the same way? The data tells a pretty complicated story.

Let’s start broadly, with a look at partisanship and political ideology. In both cases, white evangelicals tend to be more apt to identify with the right side of the spectrum. For instance, 73.3% of white evangelicals identify as Republicans. It’s a bit lower for Mormons at 65.7%.


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