No One Participates in Politics More than Atheists

Even White Evangelicals

The last forty years of politics and religion has been focused squarely on the ascendancy of the Religious Right. I must admit that I’ve probably contributed my fair share to that discourse, as well.

A motley crew of white evangelicals and traditional Catholics locked arms on some social issues, started voting in large numbers for Republican candidates, and changed American politics forever.

But I think that era of religion and politics is rapidly coming to a close. The Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement - it’s one about cultural conservativism and nearly blind support for the GOP with few trappings of any real religiosity behind it.

Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics. Let me put it plainly: atheists are the most politically active group in American politics today and the Democrats (and some Republicans) ignore them at their own peril.

The data is clear and unequivocal on this point - no one gets involved in the political process to the level of the average atheist.

The Cooperative Election Study always asks a nice little battery of questions about political engagement. It’s phrased simply as: have you done any of the following activities in the previous month? Because the CES is fielded in the height of election season, if someone was going to get politically active, they would be doing so in October or November of an election year.

The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.

The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.

HALF of atheists report giving to a candidate or campaign in the 2020 presidential election cycle.

And while they don’t lead the pack when it comes to attending a local political meeting, they only trail Hindus by four percentage points.

For those curious, here’s a link to the 2022 results - they are bit muddier because it’s an off-year election. But the same general consensus is there: atheists do a lot of political stuff in an average year.

To simplify this analysis, I added all six activities into a single index. In this case, a six represents the highest level of engagement, while a zero represents someone who was not involved in politics at all surrounding the 2020 election.

Same conclusion as before: atheists take part in plenty of political actions - 1.52 to be exact. The overall average in the entire sample was .91 activities. The average atheist is about 65% more politically engaged than the average American.

Of course, political activity does not merely derive from religious affiliation (or lack thereof). There are myriad factors that make one more or less inclined to participate in the democratic process. For instance, giving to a candidate or campaign requires having some disposable income. Attending a local school board meeting is difficult for someone who works a night shift.

Atheists typically score very high on a number of SES factors including education and income, so maybe this is just a product of having lots of disposable income and free time. To test that I put together a simple regression model with a number of control variables that could potentially impact political participation. The dependent variable was total number of political activities over the previous month.

The results here are clear and unambiguous - atheists are more likely to engage in political activities at every level of education compared to Protestants, Catholics or Jews. For instance, an atheist with a high school diploma reports .7 activities, that’s at least .2 higher than any other religious group.

Political engagement is clearly related to education, though. The more educated one is, the more likely they are to be politically active. But at every step of the education scale, atheists lead the way. Sometimes those gaps are incredibly large. A college educated atheist engages in 1.7 activities, it’s only 1.05 activities for a college educated evangelical.

That’s the point I want to drive home in this post - people seem to believe that evangelicals are incredibly politically active. Their pastors are preaching sermons about which candidates to vote for, their churches have voter registration drives in the lobby, they encourage their members to attend pro-life protests and lobby legislators to pass anti-trans bills. And, they absolutely do that, but not nearly at the level that atheists are involved in the political process.

Just look at the gap in political donations in every election year between 2012 and 2022. There is no year in which the donation level of white evangelicals comes even close to that of the typical atheist. In fact, in an average election year, an atheist is twice as likely to donate money to a candidate or campaign compared to a white evangelical.

Of course, there’s something unspoken that may explain this discussion: white evangelicals are way more prevalent in the United States. According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, about 18% of adults in the United States are white evangelicals, while just over 6% identify as atheists. So, atheists would have to punch way above their weight to have the same impact in electoral politics.

But - here’s the thing: they clearly are. Here’s what I mean:

In the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, 4.7% of the entire sample were white evangelicals who reported donating to a candidate or campaign in the previous month. In comparison, 3.1% of the sample were atheists who made political donations. That gap is probably a lot smaller than many people would have guessed.

Assuming that atheists continue to give at a rate that is twice that of white evangelicals, here’s a very likely scenario going forward: atheists inch up by two or three percentage points, while white evangelical drop by two or three points. If that happens, then the number of atheists who give to candidates will be the same as the number of white evangelicals.

Of course, this doesn’t even consider agnostics, who also give at high rates and are at least six percent of the population, too. But it also leaves other conservative religious folks out of the conversation like White Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

The point remains however: atheists are a growing force in electoral politics. The days of white evangelical dominance are fading as the nones continue to rise. This shift will fundamentally change American religion and politics. And very few people seem to be paying attention.

Full code for the post can be found here.