There Is Almost No 'Liberalizing Religion' in the United States

The more people attend, the less liberal they are

I just wanted to point you all to a long essay I wrote for the Deseret. It’s called: My church is closing, and I don’t know what comes next — for me, or America. No graphs there - just a lot of reflection about what it feels like to be the last pastor of a church that was founded in 1868.

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All credit to the tremendous Landon Schnabel for a great paper that was published at the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. The title tells the story, “A Search for Liberalizing Religion: Political Asymmetry in the American Religious Landscape.” The conceit is pretty simple - there are lots of examples of highly religious people being really conservative. Schnabel wants to conduct a search for any evidence that being highly engaged in a certain religion pushes someone to the left side of the political spectrum.

Let me summarize the conclusion by just quoting from Schnabel’s last paragraph:

Even “liberal” religion is typically conservatizing and the fact that we can call it “liberal” at all appears to be a function of selection.

This is something that I have seen threads of in other work that I have put out there. For instance, I wrote a post using data that focused on measuring beliefs about the social gospel for Religion News Service a couple of years ago. It’s no shocker that evangelicals are less likely to subscribe to the tenets of the social gospel, but this last regression was really surprising to me. It’s the likelihood of someone saying that “God is more concerned about individual morality than social inequalities.” I estimated a regression for Democrats, Independents and Republicans based on religious attendance.

What is really stunning is the fact that even among Democrats, going to church more makes them more likely to believe that individual morality is more important to God than societal problems. In other words, the more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans. I wanted to pull on that thread just a bit more.

This is the political ideology of the sample but it’s broken down by frequency of religious attendance.

You can see that trademark cascade pattern. The top row (which is never attenders) has a whole lot of blue and not much red. Just 21% of never attenders are conservative, while 46% identify as liberal. As church attendance goes up, those ratios begin to shift from left to right.

Among yearly attenders, the conservatives start to take over compared to liberals (36% vs 25%). Among weekly attenders, 52% are conservative, while just 16% are liberal. It’s even more extreme among the most frequent attenders. For folks who are attending religious services multiple times a week, about 60% are conservative and 10% are liberal.

But, race has to play a role here, right? This probably only holds for white respondents and breaks down for people of color. Nope. The finding is consistent for every racial group.

Among white respondents, 45% of never attenders are liberals. It’s just about 12% of white weekly attenders. A Black person who never attends religious services is twice as likely to identify as a liberal compared to one who attends multiple times per week (48% vs 23%). The Hispanic trend line isn’t so smooth compared to the previous two, but the trajectory is the same - there aren’t many Hispanic liberals in the pews each Sunday.

There’s just no two ways about it - people who are more religiously active are significantly less likely to describe themselves as liberals. That’s the case for every racial group as well - this transcends these categories.

Let me put a finer point on this by showing you how this relationship works for the twenty largest Protestant denominations included in the data. Same basic analysis - calculating the share who identify as liberal at each level of church attendance.

That’s a whole lot of trend lines pointing downward - meaning those who attend the most frequently are the least likely to identify as liberal. That’s true for Southern Baptists and a lot of non-denominational folks, too. Which tracks - those are evangelical denominations. There are several where the line is pretty flat like the Assemblies of God and Church of Christ. In both cases, there’s no relationship between religious attendance and political ideology.

However, what may be most striking is that even folks who are members of what are perceived to be left leaning or moderate denominations like the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA are showing a similar pattern to Southern Baptists - higher attendance means less liberalism.

There are only two denominations that are clearly pointing upward - the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (and that’s likely because of the weekly+ group being so liberal) and members of the Episcopal Church.

That’s the only two out of these twenty where the most frequent church goers are more liberal than those who attend with less frequency. Those two denominations represent about 8% of the sample that was used to make the graphic above. The Southern Baptists by themselves are 15%.

But what about non-Protestant groups? I tested that, too. I had to expand my sample to include the last four years of data to make sure that my N size was large enough.

Among Catholics who never attend Mass, 28% are liberal. It’s 18% of weekly Mass attenders. It does jump up among those Catholics who attend multiple times a week, but that’s only 6% of all Catholics. Weekly attenders are four times larger than that. The Jewish trend looks like the one for Catholics. High attending Jews are much less liberal than low attending Jews. Among never attending Jews, over half say that they are liberal (54%), it’s half that rate (27%) among Jews who are at synagogue multiple times a week.

It’s hard to make heads or tails of that bottom row, really. Even when I binned together four different survey years, I still struggled to find statistical significance. I think it’s fair to say that there’s no real relationship between liberalism and frequency of attendance among Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.

Looked at in totality, it’s hard to look at this data and say that there are significant pockets of liberalizing religion in the United States. The more people go to church, the less liberal they are. That’s true across racial lines. That’s also true in a lot of major Protestant traditions including a few mainline stalwarts like the United Methodist Church and the PCUSA.

I find Schnabel’s writing on this to be especially prescient,

Alternatively, maybe “liberal” religion was never so liberal in the first place, with, for example, mainline Protestantism being historically tied to power structures, traditional values, and “conservative” stances on issues such as race and eugenics

Even when religion does appear to be liberalizing, it tends to be more liberalizing among structurally advantaged groups such as the highly educated, further limiting the emancipatory potential of religion for the structurally disadvantaged.

Every once in a while a pastor or denominational leader in a mainline church will ask me if it would be wise for them to spend time and resources on publicizing the fact that their church is not conservative. I don’t know if there’s an empirically driven answer to that question. But it doesn’t appear that young people in the United States have any concept of what liberal religious groups accomplished in American history.

The Progressive Era was driven, in no small part, by those folks who believed fervently in the social gospel. Overtime rules, child labor laws, and work safety requirements were pushed by people of faith to make this Earth a bit more like heaven. The Civil Rights Movement was infused with religiosity from top to bottom from the impassioned sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the quiet activism of folks like James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who traveled from Boston to Selma, Alabama to march for voting rights for African-Americans. He was killed by a group of local white men, they were never charged with a crime.

For anyone born in the last forty years or so, the only conception that they have of religious activism is likely tied up with the Religious Right. Which, of course, was a conservative movement. Maybe the idea that religion can push people toward left-leaning ideas is over for good. It’s hard to say, or maybe the pendulum will swing back in the other direction at some point in the future.

From this data driven vantage point - there’s plenty of evidence that American religion is now inextricably linked to one political viewpoint. For good or for ill.

Code for this post can be found here.