The Political Paradox: Why Never-Attending Christians and Atheists Are Worlds Apart

Religious attendance probably obscures more than it reveals when it comes to voting behavior

Sometimes a single question on a survey can unlock all kinds of interesting insights into the intersection of religion and politics. For instance, the Public Religion Research Institute asked folks to agree or disagree with this statement, “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” In 2011, just 30% of white evangelicals agreed. When they posed that same statement again in 2016 it had jumped to 72%. I mean - that tells a pretty compelling story, right?

But sometimes other variables can actually obscure what’s really going on in the American population. Let’s take the example of religious attendance. A pretty basic question that could be the centerpiece of a solid master's thesis would be - what impact does religious attendance have on partisanship in the United States? It’s a great question because there’s a ton of theory that can be brought to bear that fills out a literature review pretty easily. And, it’s super easy to test with basically any dataset that contains religion questions.

However, there’s a really big problem with just using religious attendance as a proxy for religiosity. It masks a way more interesting feature of American life - a never attending person who identifies as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular is a completely different species compared to a never attending person who still identifies with a religious tradition. Let me show you what I mean in the graph below, which is just restricted to white respondents in the sample.

These two line graphs do not look at all the same even though it’s the same general category - never attending white people. Among all never attenders, the Democrats have always dominated. In 2008, they were about 57% of respondents but that’s eroded just a bit over time. Now it’s just about 52%. The Republican share has gone from 24% in 2008 to about 29% currently. But even today, Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least twenty points.

But look at the graph on the right - that’s excluding anyone who is atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. This is, by and large, never attending Christians. In 2008, the Democrats had the plurality, at just below 50%. The Republicans were around 35%. But by 2015, those percentages were exactly the same at 42%. And the lines have kept moving in opposite directions since then. In the 2024 data, 47% of never attending religious white people were Republicans and only 37% were Democrats. In other words a complete reversal from where things stood just 15 years ago.

You see what I mean when I say that attendance is just masking something bigger? Yes, the nones tend to be never attenders - but they also lean heavily towards the Democrats. A never attending white Catholic is a completely different category than all never attenders.

Let me show the Republican vote choice in the last couple of presidential elections among white people who report never attending religious services.

For the record, I would love to add groups like LDS, Orthodox Christians, and Jews to this graph. But there were just not enough of them. Among white Protestants who never attended religious services, they were evenly divided on election day in both 2008 and 2012. But when Trump’s name got on the ballot, they started shifting toward the GOP. In 2016, Trump earned 58% of their votes and he did even better in 2020 and 2024 at 64%. The GOP made a fourteen-point gain among never attending white Protestants. Among Catholics, it was a 15 point gain between 2012 and 2024. For the first time, a majority of never attending white Catholics favored the GOP in 2020 and then it repeated in 2024.

What about the nones? There is movement there, but it’s a whole lot more subtle. For atheists, it’s a five point move away from the Republicans, while agnostics have waffled around 20% for the last five cycles. Among the nothing in particulars, they have moved about six points towards the GOP in the last couple of elections.

But before we move on to other analysis, let me point out something that may be easy to miss. Compare the voting patterns of never attending white Protestants in 2008 and never attending white atheists in 2024. It was 50% versus 16% for Republicans. That’s a gap of 34 points. Now compare that same data from 2020 where it was 63% vs 11%. Now the gap is 52 points. A never attending white Protestant is on a completely different political planet that a never attending white atheist.

Again - attendance only matters when seen through the lens of religious belonging, too.

What happens when I break the sample down into born-again/evangelical or not?

The story here is completely among the white born-again never attenders. In 2012, a bare majority voted for Mitt Romney - 52%. When Trump got on the ballot in 2016, that share increased to 64% and then it went up even further in 2020 to 76% and in the most recent election it rose again to 79%. That’s a 27 point jump for the GOP between 2008 and 2024 among white evangelicals who never attend religious services. What about for non-evangelicals? There’s been no change at all. In 2012, 28% voted for Romney versus 30% who voted for Trump in 2024.

This is how Trump has managed to change the electorate - by drawing in white people who still call themselves Christians but rarely attend religious services. I want to make that point even more clear by showing you this heat map below.

Here’s the setup. I broke the white sample down into various levels of religious attendance and education then I calculated the share that voted for Trump in 2024 and subtracted the share of that same category who voted for McCain in 2008. Some positive numbers mean big jumps for the GOP, while negative numbers mean Democrats gained ground. In this first bit of analysis, I excluded atheists, agnostics, and those who claimed no religion in particular.

Holy cow, that’s a sea of red, right? There’s only one place Democrats actually did better in 2024. It was seldom attending people with a graduate degree. The GOP made gains at basically every other level of education and religious attendance in this sample. But the size of the gains tells a very interesting story of how much the white electorate shifted in a very short period of time.

Across the top of the graph, there’s a whole bunch of light red squares. Highly educated white people didn’t really move that much politically, especially among those who were attending religious services frequently. But when you get down to the bottom of the graph, the reds get much darker. That’s particularly the case in the bottom left hand side of the heat map.

For white people who never attend religious services and earned no more than a high school diploma, they shifted 17 points towards the Republicans between 2008 and 2024. And there’s a whole bunch of squares in the low education/low attendance section of the graph where the GOP gained at least 15 points. This is how Trump has shifted the electorate - by winning over white folks without a lot of education and who don’t go to church a bunch. But he also didn’t give up anything to make those gains - that’s the really impressive part of this.

But look how much this changes when I don’t exclude atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular folks from the sample.

Of course you can see that the top left part of the graph is now a sea of blue because you know who is filling those buckets up now? A ton of really educated atheists and agnostics. In many samples about 45% of atheists and agnostics have a four year college degree. They are never attenders who happen to be a whole lot more Democratic than low attending Protestants and Catholics.

What’s also worth pointing out is that adding the nones to this graph tends to move a lot of other squares outside the top left corner, too. For instance, in the first heat map among those who never attended religious services and had a high school diploma, they had moved 17 points to the right. However, when I throw in the nones, that movement is only 2 points toward the GOP.

However, as you can probably guess there’s almost no movement on the right side of the graph - that’s where the high attenders are. Obviously there aren’t enough nones who attend religious services monthly or more to make a big difference in those squares.

This is the point of writing twice a week. It forces me to kick over rocks that typically I wouldn’t bother to budge. In this case the category of “never attenders” is empirically not that helpful. We need to go another step and say, “Are we talking about never attending Protestants/Catholics or never attending atheists/agnostics?” Because as you can see above, it’s nowhere close to being the same group of people politically.

I think this also speaks to the power of religious belonging. It would be easy to assume that a never attending Catholic is not that much different than a never attending agnostic, but that assumption is plainly wrong. To willingly take on the moniker of being an atheist is probably more about declaring a political affiliation than we want to believe. The Catholic who never darkens the church’s door is about 60% Republican - which is about 50 points higher than an atheist who stays away from a house of worship.

When I say that religious belonging is most important when talking about the world of politics, this is exactly what I mean.

Code for this post can be found here.