Does Religious Affiliation Make Someone More Resistant to Societal Changes?

And a rant against nostalgia.

As some of you know, the church I pastored for 17 years held its last worship service last July. I wrote an essay for Deseret last year, which received a bit of attention. They asked me to reflect on that a year later, which was published over the weekend.

It’s titled, “The church I led closed a year ago. I’m still not over it.”

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One of my least favorite words in the English language is “nostalgia.” There are a number of translations for the term but my favorite is the most literal version from the Greek root words. “Nostos” meaning return and “algos” meaning ache. Or to put it simply, it’s an ache to return to a previous way of being. It’s something that I think is deeply embedded in the American psyche right now and you often see really compelling examples on social media. Posts like this from Jon Harris are pretty commonplace.

The commentary on these images is usually divided into two camps: “I wish we could go back to a simpler time” or “Stop trying to reimagine the past - it was racist, sexist, and xenophobic.” If you wanted to kick a hornet’s nest, it’s a fine way to do it. For my money we should just label this as “nostalgia bait” and move on. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t go back to another era. So, it’s a moot point.

But there is an underlying social force behind all this - the world is changing rapidly. The share of Americans who are white is declining by the year. The portion of Americans who claim no religious affiliation is up six fold from the early 1990s. The share of people in the United States who were immigrants was higher in 2023 than it had been for a century. Things are moving in another direction, no doubt. Some people embrace that change and look forward to a more diverse America, while others pine for a country that they think existed five or six decades ago.

But what portion is in each camp? New data from the Pew Religious Landscape Survey can help us answer that. The total sample is nearly 37,000 and the data was collected in 2023 and 2024. So this is an ideal dataset to do this type of analysis.

Pew asked people if a number of changes in the United States has made society better or worse. They were: greater acceptance of transgender individuals, a growing population of immigrants, and more women in the workforce. Here’s the top level finding for each.

When it comes to the question of changing views on transgender Americans, it’s pretty clear that the public is evenly divided. About 2 in 5 say it’s a good thing for society, another 2 in 5 think it’s made things worse while the remainder say it hasn’t made a difference. The question of immigration is almost equally divisive, too. 35% of folks say more immigrants has made society better while 38% said it’s made the United States worse. About a quarter of the population have no opinion either way.

There was one question where the responses were clearly one sided - a growing number of women in the workforce. Just 9% of Americans think that this has made society worse while 74% indicated that this was a move in the right direction. For every person who thinks that women working is a bad thing, about 8 think it’s a sign of progress. So, the voices you see on social media that talk about single earner incomes represent a small share of the general public.

Of course partisanship is going to play a big role here, right? Let me show you the prior three questions broken down into Democrats, Independents, and Republicans.

Yeah - partisanship plays an unmistakable role in all this. For instance, on the question of whether acceptance of transgender individuals is good for society, Democrats are +47 on this topic. For Republicans, it’s nearly the exact opposite at -49. That’s how divided the parties are in this area of the Culture War. Meanwhile, Independents are much more evenly split.

When it comes to the question of immigration, it’s a very similar situation to what was described in the first question. For Democrats, they were +36 on positive benefits from more immigrants to the United States. Meanwhile, the Republicans were -51. Two-thirds of Republicans think that more immigrants makes society worse, while just 15% believe it makes things better. Again, Independents are evenly divided on this one.

However, the question of more women working is one that meets a lot of approval by basically everyone in the sample. Just 3% of Democrats think society is worse because more women are working. It was 9% of Independents and 14% of Republicans. However, I think it’s fair to point out that a quarter of Republicans were non-committal on this question compared to only 10% of Democrats.

Time to add religion to the mix now! This is just the share of each religious tradition who said that each change made society worse.

On the topic of transgender individuals, you can clearly see that there is a single outlier on the top and the bottom of this graph. Two-thirds of evangelicals think accepting trans people has worsened society. Meanwhile, only 22% of the Nones share that viewpoint. In contrast, the other four groups are all clustered at around the same spot - 35% of them think that greater acceptance of transgenderism made society worse.

On the question of immigration, the same general pattern is evident but the distance of the outliers from the median is quite a bit smaller. I do want to point out here that evangelicals don’t differ that much from mainline Protestants or Catholics on this question. When asked if a growing population of immigrants made the country better or worse, 56% of evangelicals said it was a negative trend. This is compared to 47% of mainline Protestants and 41% of Catholics. The gap on the trans question was about thirty percentage points, for comparison.

The last question about women in the workforce doesn’t exhibit any huge differences based on religious tradition. About 16% of evangelicals believe it was a step in the wrong direction compared to 7% of the mainline and 8% of Catholics. There’s just not a whole lot of variation to be had on this one.

But, any astute observer of American society will know that the prior graph has a variable that’s hanging out behind the scenes that is probably driving a lot of the divergence between different religious traditions - political partisanship. So, I am going to restrict the sample to Republicans here. That way we can see how much difference there is between these groups based on religious tradition alone.

I think this graph provides a much clearer picture of what is actually happening in the United States right now. On the question about a greater acceptance of transgender individuals, there’s just one outlier now: evangelicals. Nearly 80% of them think that this has made society worse. That’s about twenty points higher than the rest of the Republican sample. But note that evangelicals are really the only one off by themselves. There is essentially no variation on this question between mainline Protestants, Catholics, and the Nones (I excluded Black Protestants because the sample size was really low.)

And the question about immigrants is even more revealing in my mind. Look at the results when comparing evangelicals and mainline Protestant Republicans - there is no statistically significant difference - 72% of each group say that the influx of immigrants has been a net negative for American society. And Republican Catholics aren’t that far behind either at 65%. Heck, even a majority of non-religious Republicans think the surge in immigrants has been bad for American society. If there’s an orthodoxy in the GOP - this is it.

One more bit of analysis now. I wanted to see if this varied that much by age. So this is Republicans only and I am going to show you just the three Christian groups (evangelicals, mainline, and Catholics). I broke this down by decade of birth (because this is the only age variable that Pew included in this version of the data).

What I was really in search of is the question of whether younger Christian Republicans had views that were that much different than their parents or grandparents. On the issue of transgender acceptance, evangelicals still stick out. Even when controlling for age and partisanship, it’s evident that they are much more likely to see acceptance of the trans community as a step in the wrong direction. But that view does soften a bit among the younger part of the sample. For instance, over 80% of Republican evangelicals born in the 1950s and 1960s think that trans acceptance is a bad thing. Only 69% of the youngest evangelicals share this view.

What about the question concerning an influx of immigrants? Among older populations of Republican Christians the differences between religious traditions is really small. Older Catholics tend to be a bit more accepting than evangelicals, but it’s only by a handful of percentage points. However, look at the sample that was born in the 1980s - a majority of Republican Christians think that more immigrants makes American society worse and that varies very little when comparing Protestants to Catholics. However, I think it’s fair to say that younger folks tend to be a bit less pessimistic about the issue of immigration.

This is what makes this kind of work hard, by the way. I just am not convinced that religion is doing the lion’s share of the work in driving anti-immigrant attitudes - it’s almost certainly little more than political partisanship. On an issue that has a clear religious angle like the trans issue, evangelicals stand apart. But on topics that aren’t linked to the Culture War, it’s just Republicans vs Democrats.

How people deal with cultural change may be one of the primary factors that sort people into one political affiliation or another. For what it’s worth, I don’t think I ever see progressive accounts on social media post pictures from the 1950s and 1960s of “idyllic America” - it’s just the Republicans doing that. Which, to me, speaks volumes about what Republicans think about the past compared to Democrats.

Code for this post can be found here.