Are Liberal Christians More Politically Engaged than Conservative One?
And what role does race play in political activity among Christians?
I like tweets like the one below, because I honestly don’t know if the statement is true or not. But I think I can try to bring some data to bear and that could be helpful.
The general sense I get from reading a lot of tweets by conservative Christians is that they want to do their best to create a clear distinction between themselves and those who are left of center.
I know that George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk published a book back in 2021 that touches on this point. In One Faith No Longer they make the case that liberal Christians have an entirely different framework for making political decisions compared to conservative ones. They go so far as to write, “Indeed, we argue that the ways in which these two groups deal with questions of meaning are so different that it is time to regard them as distinct religious groups rather than as subgroups under a single religious umbrella.”
But I wanted to test this liberal Christian versus conservative Christian in a much more narrow way - by looking at which group is more politically engaged. Conservative Christians seem convinced that progressive Christians are the ones who are going to marches and working for candidates. Meanwhile, a lot of left of center folks seem convinced that white evangelicals punch way above their weight in the political arena. So, who is right?
The Cooperative Election Study was conducted in October and November of 2020 - right before the general election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Folks were given a list of six political activities and asked if they participated in any of them over the previous month. They run the gamut from very high intensity (working for a candidate) to very low impact (putting up a political sign.) I restricted the sample to just Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Latter-day Saints. Then again by political ideology.
Clearly, the conclusion that emerges here is that liberal Christians are more politically active. In the case of attending political meetings, such as school board or city council meetings, and putting up political signs, the difference between liberal and conservative Christians wasn’t significant. But in the other four activities, the gaps tend to be fairly robust.
A liberal Christian was more than twice as likely to attend a protest or march (13% vs 5%), six points more likely to contact a public official, eleven points more likely to donate money to a candidate (38% vs 27%) and twice as likely to volunteer their time for a candidate or campaign. Pretty hard to say that conservative Christians are more active when looking at this first graph. It’s the liberal Christians that seem to be engaging in the most laborious type of political activity.
But maybe this is just an artifact of an election where there was a lot of ire against the incumbent, Donald Trump. The argument here is that people need a villian to get them fired up and, let’s be honest, Donald Trump loves to play that role. To examine this possibility, I created a summed index of the four political acts that show up consistently over time in the data. The maximum score is four and the minimum is zero. Here’s what I get when breaking Christians down into liberals, moderates and conservatives.
Okay, so the finding from 2020 is not an aberration. Liberal Christians have been more politically active than conservative Christians in every election cycle since 2012. Sometimes the gaps are small, sometimes they are a bit larger. For instance, in 2012 the mean for conservative Christians was .75. For liberal Christians it was .84.
The data suggests that the disparity in political engagement between liberals and conservatives has increased. Initially, in 2012, the gap was approximately 0.09, but by 2016, it had increased to 0.18. During President Trump's 2020 reelection campaign, political involvement surged among Christians across the board. The average level of activity for liberals reached 0.80, compared to 0.62 for conservatives. It's evident from the data that 2020 marked the peak of political participation among Christians since 2012.
But there’s another variable that is lingering in the background of this type of analysis: race. Any casual observer of American politics and religion knows that white Christians have a completely different pattern of voting than African-American Christians. So, it seems wise to take the 2020 data related to political activity and analyze it by both political ideology and race of the respondent.
Okay, now things are coming into much sharper focus. It’s readily apparent when looking at this data that white liberal Christians are on a totally different planet when it comes to their political engagement. On a scale from zero to six, the mean liberal white Christian scored a 1.51. That’s significantly higher than any other racial group or political ideology. But it’s also worth pointing out that white conservative Christians score relatively high on this metric, too at .93.
Among non-white Christians, there is some evidence that liberals tend to be more politically engaged than conservatives. That’s true for both Hispanic and Asian Christians. In fact, there’s no racial group where conservative Christians were more politically engaged compared to liberal Christians of the same racial group. Overall, African-American Christians scored the lowest on political engagement, regardless of their political leanings.
But, again, maybe 2020 was a weird outlier. So, let’s check these results by breaking the sample into white and non-white Christians and looking back over the last six election cycles.
The result about white liberal Christians is incredibly robust in this graph. In every single election cycle they are much more politically engaged compared to their conservative counterparts. Liberal Christians are more politically engaged than conservative ones and sometimes those gaps are fairly large. The religious left is small, but they are very loud.
Among Christians of color the evidence is not as clear. There are some election cycles when liberals have a higher political activity score than conservatives. That was true in 2016 and 2018 but even then the differences aren’t substantively large. Instead, the norm is that the political activity of liberals is not statistically distinct from that of conservatives. The political activity gap that exists is really only true among white Christians.
But what about religious attendance? Does going to church more often make Christians more inclined to participate in the political process and what role do things like political ideology and race play in this relationship? To test that, I specified a regression model using that 2020 data. I controlled for gender, income, education and age. I broke the sample down into white and non-white as well as by political ideology.
Among non-white Christians the story is not very dramatic. Increased religious attendance does drive up political activity, but not by that much. For instance, among non-white liberal Christians, the mean score for those attending church multiple times a week is about .3 more than those who never attend. For conservatives, the impact of church attendance is not statistically significant.
However, the result for white Christians is incredibly compelling. For conservatives, there’s a modest but positive relationship between attendance and political activity. Among never attenders, it’s about .6. For those who are attending more than once a week it’s 1 political act.
But check out that line for liberal white Christians. Even among never attenders, they are incredibly politically engaged at 1.2 political acts. A never attending white Christian is 20% more politically involved than a white conservative Christian who attends multiple times a week. But church attendance is jet fuel for liberal white Christians. Among those who attend more than once a week, they engage in nearly 1.9 political acts. That’s almost twice the rate of white conservatives in the same attendance bracket.
So, what does the data tell us about political activity among Christians? I think it’s empirically defensible to say that liberal Christians are more politically engaged than conservative ones. However, it’s even more helpful to narrow that by saying that this is especially the case when it comes to white Christians. Liberals are much more politically involved than conservatives. And that disparity only accelerates when you throw church attendance into the mix. It makes liberal white Christians into highly engaged political actors in a way that is not true for white conservative Christians.
Code for this post can be found here.
These are the graphs that break through any storyline and give us real metrics. Thanks for all your work looking into it.
If I might add one wrinkle it might be yo compare population size to shows political acts. I.e. conservatives are less per capital (as above article demonstrates) but have a greater overall effect because they simply have more people. I don't know the answer, but it might be an idea for a future article.
Again thanks for all your work. I use it all the time in my church to cut through emotions and show what's actually happening in the world, so real discussion can happen.
Putting aside the fact that Christian nationalism does not mean political activity by Christians as the tweet implies, I feel like this analysis is missing the most important political engagement statistic: voting. The white evangelical voting bloc is incredibly important to the Republican Party and votes very consistently.