The Coming Extinction of the White Christian Democrat
Once a force in American politics has become little more than an afterthought
There are, despite some reports to the contrary, a significant number of Christians in the United States. In fact, Christianity will remain the most prevalent religion in the United States for decades to come. That’s something that Pew Research Center made clear in a report that they published in 2022. They estimated four scenarios for the decline of Christianity and the rise of the nones over the last several decades.
In two of these scenarios, Christians would outnumber the nones even through 2070. In the other two, there would be more Christians than nones for at least the next 25 years. However, what could be easily overlooked in that Pew report is the third trend line, which represented every non-Christian faith tradition. In each of those four scenarios, the numbers of adherents to other religions rise, actually doubling. But that still puts this group at around 12% of Americans in 2070. Even in the worst-case scenario, there will still be three times as many Christians as there will be individuals from non-Christian faiths in fifty years.
Thus, it behooves any serious scholar of religion and politics in the United States to spend a considerable amount of time tracking the political partisanship and voting behavior of Christians, especially white Christians. That’s my aim here - to show with clear evidence that, while white Christian Democrats used to be ubiquitous across the American political landscape, they are quickly becoming an endangered species.
I imported the General Social Survey and created a simple graph showing the political composition of white Catholics and Protestants over the last fifty years. It tells a fascinating story of just how much the interplay between religion and politics has shifted since the early 1970s.
Back in November, I wrote an extensive piece about the political shifts occurring among white Catholics, so I won't dwell on this point too much here. However, it's worth mentioning that there has been a radical shift in the political stance of the average white Catholic since Richard Nixon's presidency. In the 1970s, about two-thirds were Democrats and 20% were Republicans. Today, the divide is even.
For Protestants, the political shift occurred much earlier. In the early 1970s, Democrats slightly outnumbered Republicans, but the gap was narrow—less than five percentage points. For white Protestants, it's helpful to describe the shift to the right in two distinct phases.
The first phase spanned from the early 1970s through to around 1990. During this period, the proportion of Republicans increased from approximately 40% to 50%. This was followed by a noticeable plateau between 1990 and 2006, during which a slim majority of white Protestants identified as Republicans. However, the election of Barack Obama coincided with another shift to the right that is still ongoing. In 2022, for the first time, the proportion of white Protestants who were Republicans rose above 60%.
However, white Protestant Christianity encompasses a wide range, from Southern Baptists, who tend to be very conservative, to Episcopalians, who tend to be very liberal. Now, let's further divide white Protestantism into its two main branches: evangelical and mainline.
These two graphs clearly diverge from one another. In the 1970s, white evangelicals were predominantly Democrats. In the earliest surveys from the GSS, about 55% of white evangelicals were Democrats and about 35% were Republicans. Those lines moved quickly in the opposite direction, though. By 1990, it was clear that white evangelicals were more aligned with the GOP. It’s also worth pointing out that there weren’t really any plateaus in the trend lines. While the Republican share did level off somewhat from 1990 to 2005, it continued to inch upward.
Now, white evangelicalism is more politically homogeneous than it’s ever been. About two in three white evangelicals are Republicans, and 15% are Democrats. (By the way, the point estimate for this in 2022 is slightly below 10%). We will see if that’s just an aberration in the data or not when new surveys are released.
For mainline Protestants the story is pretty boring. Those lines are nearly straight across. It's important to note, however, that mainline Republicans have always outnumbered mainline Democrats. The gap was smaller in the 1970s at about six points, but then widened by 1990 to about thirteen points. Then, the lines slow begin to move back towards each other. Today, about 48% of mainline Protestants are Republicans and 40% of Democrats. When people call the mainline “liberal,” they must mean theologically. Because to say that the average mainline Protestant’s politics are left of center is empirically false.
To delve even deeper, let's examine the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, which includes the 20 largest majority-white Protestant denominations, and see if we can identify those denominations where Democrats predominate.
Okay, I only need one hand to get to the correct number. Actually, I only need one finger. In the Episcopal Church, 58% are Democrats and 33% are Republicans. That’s the only one on this list where it’s clear that there are more Democrats than Republicans. There are some traditions where the numbers are essentially equal: Other Baptist, Other Non-Denominational, ELCA, ABCUSA, PCUSA, and Free Will Baptist.
But, notice that I sorted this list from the largest denominations at the top and the smallest ones at the bottom. Look at just the top three - 65% of Southern Baptists are Republicans, just 25% are Democrats. For United Methodists, it’s 20 points more Republicans than Democrats, and for non-denominational evangelicals it’s a 57 point gap. Those three groups make up 11% of all Americans, 17% of all white Americans, and 38% of all Protestants. And they are overwhelmingly Republicans.
In comparison, the Episcopal Church represents 1.2% of the entire sample, 1.6% of all white respondents, and 3.7% of all Protestants. There is no denomination out there that counterbalances a group like the Southern Baptist Convention, or the growing number of non-denominational Protestants when it comes to the ballot box.
Speaking of the ballot box, here’s the two party vote share for Donald Trump in 2020 from those same twenty denominations.
Donald Trump secured at least 55% of the vote in 12 of the major white Protestant denominations. He garnered nearly 80% of the vote among non-denominational evangelicals and members of the Assemblies of God. Among Southern Baptists, his vote share was 70%, and it was slightly lower, at 69%, among Missouri Synod Lutherans. Surprisingly, Trump received 62% of the vote from the United Methodist Church, a denomination often perceived as moderate or even left-leaning by those casually observing religion and politics.
There were a few denominations where the vote was more evenly split, including the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), the ABCUSA (American Baptist Churches USA), and the PCUSA (Presbyterian Church (USA)). All three are part of the Seven Sisters of the Mainline Protestant churches, indicating that these denominations are politically diverse at the congregational level. The Episcopal Church stood out as an exception, with less than a third of its members voting for Donald Trump in 2020.
But, let’s put some real numbers on this. Just how rare is it to find a white Christian Democrat today versus a few decades ago?
In 1972, nearly a quarter of all respondents to the General Social Survey identified as white Protestant Democrats, with just under 17% identifying as white Catholic Democrats. This indicates that around 40% of American adults were white Christian Democrats in the early 1970s.
Subsequently, both shares began to decline significantly. By 2000, less than 10% of all GSS respondents were white Catholic Democrats, and less than 15% were white Protestant Democrats. In the most recent sample, only 7% identified as white Protestant Democrats and 6% as white Catholic Democrats, totaling 13% in 2022 compared to 40% five decades earlier.
Currently, in the United States, the number of white Christian Democrats is roughly equivalent to the number of atheists and agnostics. It is likely that in the next five years, atheists and agnostics will outnumber white Christian Democrats. It wouldn't be surprising if the percentage of white Christian Democrats falls into the single digits within the next 10-15 years.
Many readers of this Substack are familiar with American religious history, where major social movements that significantly impacted the United States were led by groups of white liberal Christians. Movements such as the abolitionist movement, the Progressive Era, and the Civil Rights movement were driven by white mainline Protestants, with religious convictions often providing the impetus for these activists. However, nearly all these religious traditions are now in a significantly weakened state, and many individuals in these progressive congregations lack the capacity to actively participate in causes they believe in.
While social movements in the United States are far from over, it raises the question of what sources of inspiration future generations will draw upon as they embark on their own quests to effect change in the world.
Code for this post can be found here.
"When people call the mainline 'liberal,' they must mean theologically. Because to say that the average mainline Protestant’s politics are left of center is empirically false."
I think liberal theology is correlated with politics, but not perfectly. I suspect there are a lot more people on the political right who are essentially liberal in their (admittedly fuzzy) personal theology than people on the political left who are essentially orthodox/conservative/traditional.
My understanding of the Mainline is that it gets more liberal as you go up the pyramid; the clergy are more theologically AND politically liberal than the congregation, and the denominational bureaucracy (and the seminaries) tend to be more theologically and politically liberal still.
The political gap between TEC and PCUSA/ELCA is curious. Particularly because the conservative alternatives to PCUSA/ELCA are much larger, in relative terms, than conservative Anglicanism is, so it's easier for conservatives to flee those denominations without much change in liturgy than to flee TEC.
An important factor in this change is that the Democrat party used to be a very mixed party. Now it is overwhelmingly Left.