I write a lot about religion and politics.

That’s led to some speaking engagements about my research to a wide variety of groups. I wish I could list all the audiences I have spoken to but it’s really run the gamut. I’ve given talks to some of the most liberal Protestants in the United States, but also to Southern Baptist church planters. I’ve spoken to non-religious groups in a variety of contexts including major corporations and members of Congress.

One thing that I try to do when I’m asked to give a talk is show up before my scheduled engagement and get a sense of the room. I want to see what type of people are gathered, if they have any reading materials handed out to participants and eavesdrop a little on conversations happening among attendees. I need to figure out the political and theological viewpoints of folks before I plow through my material — which can sometimes cause friction.

I mean, I talk about religion and politics. It may not go over well with every attendee in every room.

I would like to think that we all do things like that in our own lives when we are confronted with a new environment. We need to get a lay of the land before we strategize about how we fit in.

That’s certainly the case with the college experience. I think most students want to desperately fit in (it’s something we all do), and one way to make that easier is to make sure your politics aligns with the politics of your local environment.

That’s really the point of this post — trying to understand the political climate of college campuses right now and how individuals fit in to those larger environments. I am using the terrific dataset from The FIRE that I’ve been exploring in several posts this month. Like prior sets of analysis, I restricted my sample to just 18-25 year old folks who are attending a college or university in the United States.

Let’s start with a basic, yet important, question: what is the political partisanship of young folks based on their religious affiliation?

Pretty clearly there are two groups with a strong contingent of Republicans.

Forty-five percent of Latter-day Saints align with the GOP — that’s the highest of any religious group. They are followed by Protestants at 42%. Several other groups are next: Just Christians (33%), Orthodox (30%), and Catholics (also 30%). For comparison, about 22% of the full sample aligned with the Republicans.

The groups that favor the Democrats the most should come as no surprise. Eighty-one percent of atheists are Democrats, with 42% being Strong Democrats. They are followed closely by agnostics at 80% and Jews at 75%. The other type of none — nothing in particular — is 70% Democrats.

I think it’s pretty important to point out that there’s just no group that is anywhere close to as politically unified as atheists on the right side of the political spectrum among college students.

But there’s certainly an interplay between the personal politics of a young person entering college and the type of college that they choose to attend.

It doesn’t seem likely that a homeschooled evangelical is going to set their sights on attending Oberlin, while an atheist living in San Francisco is probably not deciding between Liberty and Hillsdale. You can see how that plays out with when looking at the overall religious composition of the 20 campuses that are furthest to the left and the 20 who are furthest to the right.

Among the campuses with the strongest contingent of Republicans, Christianity is clearly the dominant religious tradition. Protestants are 22%, Just Christians are 25% and Catholics are another 15%. Throw in the Orthodox and LDS and that makes up not quite three quarters of all the college students on those campuses. In comparison, the nones constitute just 23%. Basically a 3:1 ratio. In the entire sample the ratio is much closer to 1:1.

How about the most left leaning campuses?

Christians are a lot more scarce. Just 7% are Protestant, 14% are Catholic and 9% are Just Christian. That’s 30% compared to 62% among the most Republican campuses. However, the nones are ascendant in the Democratic leaning schools. Atheists are 15%, agnostics are 16% and nothing in particulars are 19%. That’s half of the entire sample in the 20 most Democratic heavy schools. Recall that it was just 23% among students in the most Republican campuses.

But do college students manage to pick a campus that is closer to their own political partisanship? Not really, according to this data. I calculated the mean partisanship score for every college campus in the dataset and then compared that to the personal political partisanship of every respondent at that college.

A positive number means that the individual is more to the right than their college campus. A negative number means the opposite.

The data indicates that the more right-leaning religious traditions tend to find college campuses that are to their left and the same is true of those at the other end of the political spectrum.

I do want to point out the LDS here, because they buck the trend a little bit. Recall that they are the most Republican religious group in the data, however, they are not as far from the mean on their college campus compared to Protestants and Christians. That’s largely a function of the fact that the LDS attend more conservative schools, like BYU.

Atheists and agnostics tend to be outliers on their campuses as well. The average atheist is .8 more to the left on a scale that runs from 1 to 7. That’s a bigger gap than Protestants feel on their campuses. When it comes to distance from the mainstream, atheists and agnostics are clearly leading on this metric.

However, there was a series of questions in the data that I really wanted to zero in on because I think they give us a pretty clear picture of what types of issues are driving self censorship and uncomfortable conversations. Here’s the setup:

Which of the following issues, if any, would you say are difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on your campus?

They are given a list of 13 topics (I excluded Ukraine because it wasn’t that interesting). These touched on all kinds of issues — social, racial, foreign policy, religion.

I plotted the mean political partisanship of each university in the data on the x-axis. (By the way, I excluded Hillsdale and Liberty because they were just such outliers.) Then I calculated the share who said that each issue was hard to talk about on campus on the y-axis. I color coded the school based on region and the size of the circles relate to the sample size of each college.

This was a “holy cow” graph for me because it tells such a clear story.

CONTINUE READING: “The Culture War is Alive and Well on College Campuses” by Ryan Burge on his Graphs About Religion newsletter on Substack.

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