When Church Attendance Influences Political Views (and When It Doesn’t)
Can pastors move the needle on things gun control and immigration?
In the world of public opinion there are issue areas that are often seen as ‘belonging’ to one party or another. For instance, foreign policy has always been seen as a strength for the Republicans, while something like healthcare has been more in the Democrats’ wheelhouse. Of course there is also a clear religious dimension to the public policy space, too. An issue like abortion is deeply intertwined with theological discourse, while something like gun control or environmental regulations aren’t often spoken from pulpits across the United States.
That’s what I wanted to do in this post today - just try and figure out which areas of policy seem more “religiously coded” and which ones aren’t. I have a pretty simple way of trying to tease that out - by looking at how religious attendance impacts views on these topics. My working hypothesis is that in areas like immigration there won’t be a really strong slope to the line - never attenders will basically feel the same as those who attend religious services on a weekly basis. While issues with a clear theological angle will see a line that tilts pretty steeply (in either a positive or negative direction).
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I picked out six issues that really run the gamut of public opinion - we’ve got abortion, gun control, crime and punishment, the environment, immigration and health care. I tried to touch on a bit of everything in this analysis. Before we throw religious attendance in the mix, though, let me help orient you to these questions through the broadest lens possible.
In 2022, 59% of all Americans thought abortion should be a choice. But the partisanship gap was a chasm. Among Democrats, 86% were in favor versus just 30% of Republicans. This division between Democrats and Republicans is there on every issue. Democrats are 54 points more likely to favor a ban on assault rifles than Republicans and 35 points more willing to support the elimination of mandatory minimums in criminal sentencing.
When it comes to environmental regulation, 92% of Democrats are in favor versus 38% of Republicans. But on the question of cutting legal immigration in half, 64% of Republicans would support such a plan versus only 25% of Democrats. Finally, nearly three quarters of Republicans would like to see the Affordable Care Act repealed, it was just 20% of Democrats. So - partisanship rules everything around us. That’s nothing new.
But let me show you how opinion changes on these issues when I calculate it by level of church attendance. By the way, I am only including people who identified with a faith tradition here - I excluded atheists, agnostics, and nothing in particular. I’m not focused on comparing very non-religious people to very religious people. My aim is to look for differences in people of faith who show up on Sunday and those who don’t.
On abortion, I think we clearly see that the trend line heads downward. More frequent church attenders are much less supportive of abortion as a choice compared to never attenders. The total drop is nearly forty percentage points. From this vantage point I think we can rightly conclude that attendance matters on a topic that is so deeply tinged with religious imagery. But the rest of this set of six questions don’t neatly fit into the Culture War narrative and thus attendance may not work in the same way.
When it comes to gun control, support for a ban on assault rifles decreases by 13 points going from never attenders to those who attend more than once a week. On the topic of eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, the folks who attend the most frequently are about 14 points less supportive than those who never attend.
For environmental concerns, there’s a modest downward slope to the line. Weekly attenders are less supportive of an active EPA compared to those who go to church less - the total difference is sixteen points. On immigration issues, there is no absolutely no difference to the answers on this question based on attendance. Which is pretty striking. And on healthcare, the more often people go to church, the more apt they are to support repealing the Affordable Care Act.
But, astute observers of American politics and religion will note that there’s a variable hanging around the analysis I just conducted - partisanship. The more people attend church, the more likely they are to identify as Republicans. Let me illustrate this point very quickly.
Again, I excluded the nones here, but you can undoubtedly see that never attenders are much more likely to be Democrats than those who attend weekly. For those who never attend, they are evenly split in partisan terms - 42% Democrats and 42% Republicans. But as frequency of attendance rises, the partisan balance starts tipping to the right. Among monthly attendees, Republicans have an 8 point advantage. It gets much larger among those who attend weekly - the GOP leads by at least 25 points among this group. The point of this is clear: church attendance is related to Republicanism and as we observed in the first graph, Republicans and Democrats are diametrically opposed on all these issues.
So, let’s control for political partisanship, then. That should help us isolate which is doing the work here - party ID or religious attendance.
Well, this is when things get very interesting for me. I want to dwell on these results just a bit and take each policy area on its own.
Abortion - For both Democrats and Republicans, the more they attend church the less supportive they are of abortion rights. But note that the baseline of support for Democrats is just way, way higher to begin with. Even among very religiously active Democrats they are still much more in favor of abortion rights than never attending Republicans.
Gun Control - This is more subtle. For both Republicans and Democrats, religious attendance matters very little, if at all. This one is just straight partisanship.
Crime and Punishment - I think there’s a bit of evidence that both Democrats and Republicans move in a more conservative direction as they attend church more often. The drop here is pretty small - less than ten points across the entire scale. But the slope of the line is about the same for both groups in this analysis.
Environment - For Democrats, attendance doesn’t matter at all. Almost all Democrats support a stronger EPA. For Republicans, the more they go to church the less they want the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide.
Immigration - Holy cow, this one was easily the most interesting of the entire bunch. The more Republicans go to church, the less supportive they become of reducing legal immigration. For Democrats, it’s the exact opposite - increased church attendance leads to more conservative views of immigration. I am thinking this has to do with race a bit, but this is still a shocking result.
Health care - For Republicans, the more they go to church, the more open they are to repealing the Affordable Care Act, but it’s only about ten points. For Democrats, it’s also a positive sloping line and it’s much steeper. In other words, the more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans on this issue.
Let me just up the methodological rigor on this by introducing a regression model into the mix. The controls here are the usual suspects: age, gender, race, education, and income.
I think that these results largely confirm what we saw in the simple bivariate in the prior graph. There are a bunch of areas in which religious attendance has very little impact. That’s true on gun control and the environment, for sure. When it comes to healthcare and criminal justice, I think it’s fair to say that religious attendance has a modest impact on opinion - but in both cases the direction is one way - more conservative. The more Democrats go to church, the more likely they are to believe in harsher prison sentences and they are more inclined to repeal the Affordable Care Act. For abortion, the same general conclusion is true, but the slope of the lines are just way steeper. Regular church attenders are just much more opposed to abortion - regardless of political affiliation.
That immigration result is just wild, though. I don’t have the space in this post to try and tease apart why we are seeing this - but you better believe that’s on my radar for another round of exploration.
Of course, casualty is an absolute bear in this discussion. Do Democrats who go to church a lot become more conservative because of their repeated exposure to church teachings? Or do they go to church more because they are already conservative? That, I can’t parse out with this survey. You would need some really, really good panel data that started with a huge sample and tracked them over a long period of time.
But I think one thing that I know for sure - some parts of American public policy are clearly ‘religiously coded’ and some just aren’t. When the church doesn’t speak into an issue, then partisanship does.
Code for this post can be found here.
Awesome read, I’ve had a feeling about this but seeing the numbers is great
On immigration:
Now that it is one of Republicans' leading issues, I would think that if you're someone who identifies as Republican but is non-religious, immigration is probably a top issue for you.
If you're religious and a self-identified Republican, it COULD be a top issue for you, but it could also be something you don't care much about; you identify as Republican for other reasons. So even though religious Republicans as a group tend to share the instincts of non-religious Republicans on this topic in broad terms, the result is watered down and more mixed, because it's a lower priority.
A little harder to make sense of what's going on with religious Democrats though. Especially since the finding holds after your regression controls, so it's presumably not just an age or race thing.
If I had to guess:
If you look at someone like a *weekly-attending* 30-year-old white male Democrat (which is kind of an unusual specimen) -- I might guess that his peer group is likely to be pretty conservative relative to a 30-year-old *never-attending* white male Democrat. He likely goes to an evangelical church -- that's where the young people are -- where he's kind of an oddball in his church peer group but still generally accepted. I know people like this. Relative to his never-attending counterpart, he likely lives in a more conservative place, where church attendance is higher.
So what you see from the slope of the line is his peers are influencing him on two issues: abortion and immigration. Why those two? Because they're the two hottest-button issues; the ones his peers care about. He still remains to the left of them on this, but he basically positions himself towards the middle. On things that people talk about less, like the EPA and ACA, peers have less influence. There, he's more influenced by media.
One problem with this thesis is that it's surprising to me that such a person isn't more influenced by his peers on guns though.