2024 Election Post-Mortem: Mainline Protestants

Can we stop calling them liberal, please?

I give a few talks here and there to a whole bunch of different audiences. Some of them are really knowledgeable about the world of religion. Think seminaries and religious studies departments. Others are given to groups of undergraduates or community groups. One of the things I have to figure out is what terms I need to explain and which ones I can just toss out and move along. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to spell “the Nones” during a presentation, I would be on track to retire before my youngest son would earn his high school diploma - for the record, he’s in fifth grade.

The other term that I toss out a little too casually is “mainline Protestants.” I am going to assume that you have chosen to subscribe to this newsletter because you have a decent interest in religion, generally speaking, and that you have a pretty good sense of what I mean when I use this term. But for those who don’t know here’s the one sentence description - the mainline is a Protestant tradition that is basically the less conservative version of evangelical Christianity. It used to dominate American religion - there is some evidence that half of all Americans were members of a mainline church back in the 1950s.

Those glory days are most assuredly over, my friends. Let me just show you the share of the Cooperative Election Study sample that identifies with a mainline tradition between 2008 and 2024.

These estimates are a bit noisier than I would like to see, but I do think that they tell a fairly consistent story about what’s happening with the mainline. It’s pretty fair to say that the mainline was right about 12-13% of the sample between 2008 and 2014. It would rise a little higher or maybe dip just a bit, the median was about 13% during this time period. Then, that percentage began to slide just a bit and was likely down to 12% by 2020 and then I think there’s pretty strong evidence that it’s closer to 11% now. (By the way, the estimate from 2023 is exactly why we can’t build a narrative out of a single data point - it’s just an outlier).

So, it’s definitely a smaller group - about half the size of evangelicals, for instance. Yet, there’s this perception of the mainline that you often read on social media about them, the stereotype is that mainline Protestants are politically liberal. For the record, this thought almost always emerges from the keyboard of an evangelical Protestant or a traditional Catholic. There are entire Twitter accounts that are dedicated to watching the livestreams of mainline church services to catch them saying or doing something that is far outside mainstream Christian orthodoxy.

However, I want to make this point exceedingly clear now - it’s demonstrably, empirically, objectively false to use the term “liberal mainline.” The only way that makes any kind of sense is if your definition of liberal is “less conservative than evangelicals.” Which, essentially means that every other religious tradition in the United States is liberal. Let me show you exactly what I mean by analyzing how the mainline have voted in the last five presidential elections.

In 2008, the mainline was evenly divided between Barack Obama and John McCain. It was truly a 50/50 election. But that was the last time that was true. When Mitt Romney ran in 2012, he earned 54% of the mainline vote. When Donald Trump ran in 2016, he earned 54% of the mainline vote. When he ran again in 2020 he got exactly the same share - 54%. The only thing interesting to note is that the mainline weren’t huge fans of Hillary Clinton, she only received 41% of ballots cast. That was (at that moment) a low point.

But look what happened in 2024 - Donald Trump actually managed to make some real in-roads with mainline Protestants and he upped his vote share to 58%. In contrast, Kamala Harris did even worse than Hillary Clinton, only receiving 40% of the votes from mainline Protestants. So, in the last five election cycles the mainline vote has been: D+1, R+9, R+13, R+9, and R+18. Remember the reputation that exists about the politics of the mainline is that they are left-wing Democrats. That claim does not stand up to empirical scrutiny.

Let me take this down one layer by showing you the voting patterns of each of the ‘Seven Sisters of the Mainline’ over the last five election cycles.

The largest mainline denomination, even after the schism, is the United Methodist Church. They still have nearly five million members (although that’s down by more than half from the late 1960s). The United Methodist vote has been a majority Republican vote since 2008. They favored McCain by ten points in his matchup with Obama. But from there, the GOP has only done better. I think the best way to think about the United Methodist vote is that it’s 60% Republican and slightly less than 40% Democrat. I also need to point out that even after the schism, the UMC vote did not become more left-leaning. All those Global Methodists leaving had no demonstrable impact on the percentages.

What about the other denominations? Well, I do need to direct your attention to the Episcopal Church because they are a true outlier in that they are clearly a majority Democratic denomination. While the percentages do bounce around a bit I think it’s fair to say that in an average election, TEC votes split 60/40 for the Democratic party. But also remember this - on an average Sunday in the United States about 450,000 Episcopalians attend worship. That’s about 1/10th the size of the Southern Baptist attendance.

What about the other denominations listed here? Many of them are incredibly politically divided. That’s true for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, certainly - they are 53/46. In the Presbyterian Church USA you did see a pretty big shift to the right in 2024, but before that they were certainly a nearly evenly split vote in presidential elections. Do you see the point here? A lot of the major mainline denominations are about as purple as it gets in modern American politics.

But remember that prior graph that showed Trump actually making gains with the mainline? Let me show you where he was finding more support in 2024 compared to the prior two election cycles.

There’s only one level of attendance where Trump clearly did worse in 2024 compared to 2016, that was among those mainline Protestants who never attended. Even there, he only lost three percentage points. You can see a steady stair step of gains for Trump among monthly attenders (gaining five points), weekly attenders (up seven points), and those who attend more than once a week (up five points since 2016). In other words, Trump managed to not suffer any losses among the mainline and really experienced some modest but key gains among the most religiously active in the tradition.

This is a point worth considering for a minute - Trump did better among mainline Protestants who went to church more often. If that whole trope that mainline church services are little more than DSA rallies, wouldn’t it be the case that the most active would be the most liberal? Maybe, just maybe, the average mainline Protestant who occupies a pew every Sunday morning is significantly more conservative than they are given credit for in the online discourse.

I can actually make that plain by showing you the results of a series of six questions that the CES added to the questionnaire this year that asked specifically about some hot button Culture War topics like abortion, transgender, and pornography. I am showing you how white evangelicals, white mainline Protestants, and white Catholics felt about each.

When it comes to a ban on gender transition for minors, 62% of the mainline are in favor, compared to 78% of evangelicals. Also, when asked if a school should seek out parental consent before calling a child a different set of pronouns, two-thirds of the mainline were in favor. That was just slightly below Catholics at 73% and evangelicals at 84%.

On abortion, about 70% of evangelicals favor a ban on shipping abortion pills through the mail - a sentiment that is shared by 52% of Catholics and 41% of mainline Protestants. So clearly some daylight there, but I wouldn’t describe that as a chasm. And only a third of evangelicals think that a woman should be punished for traveling out of state to seek an abortion. Which is higher than the mainline at about 14% and Catholics at 22%. But, again, it’s not like the mainline are just on the far left on this question.

When it comes to the possibility of a law making online porn sites verify age before letting a user view content, 85% of the mainline are in favor, which is essentially the same as evangelicals at 89%. And half of mainline Protestants support school vouchers, too. I just don’t know how one could look at these results and call the average mainline Protestant a social liberal.

Just for comparison, here’s how the mainline differs from all white Democrats on these questions -

• Ban gender transition for minors: 62% vs 32%

• Parental consent for pronoun change: 66% vs. 31%

• Ban abortion pills: 41% vs 12%

• Ban out of state abortions: 14% vs 5%

• Age checks for porn: 85% vs. 68%

• Support school vouchers: 50% vs 25%

Again, if liberal means “not as conservative as the most right leaning religious group in the United States” then the mainline is clearly liberal. If the measuring stick is comparing the average mainline Protestant to the average Democrat, then they are clearly right of center.

I think here’s what a lot of people miss in this discussion - the mainline is full of relatively well educated, middle class, rural old white people. That’s not what I would necessarily describe as the core of the Democratic party right now.

I mean, the average adult member of the Disciples of Christ is 60 years old, which is statistically the same as the average United Methodist. If I calculated the mean age of all of the Seven Sisters, it’s 57.7 years of age. That’s about five years older than the average American in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study. And it’s certainly older than a lot of evangelical groups like non-denominational Christians.

When you think of the average mainline Protestants, it’s just not accurate to conjure an image of a thirty something pastor wearing a rainbow stole and preaching a sermon about the non-binary nature of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it’s probably a retired school teacher living in a small town in the upper Midwest.

And, on average, that person voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

Code for this post can be found here.