What Religious Groups See the United States as More Polarized?

When I was in graduate school for American politics, there was one debate that absolutely dominated the discourse when it came to political behavior - is the United States more polarized? It’s hard to pinpoint when the debate kicked off, but a good starting place is James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. It was published way back in 1992 and basically makes the argument that we are all deeply familiar with now - there are two factions in the United States: an orthodox camp and a progressive camp and they just have completely different understandings of moral authority.

But in 2004 (about a year before I started graduate school), Morris Fiorina published Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, which as you can probably guess thinks that this entire debate has really no substance to it. Fiorina actually has a pretty nuanced argument. He thinks that there is probably a growing amount of polarization among elites - but it’s not really trickled down to the average American. It’s a topic I tackle head on in my forthcoming book with Brazos that should publish in about a year. Chapter 7 is actually titled: Are We Really Polarized?

Let me noodle around on that topic today in a way that I don’t in the book by using a nice question battery in the Cooperative Election Study. It asks folks to put themselves on an ideological scale that ranges from 1 (meaning very liberal) to 7 (meaning very conservative), while 4 is “middle of the road." Let me just start by showing you how each individual religious group places itself on this scale in the most recent data.

Just to give you all a baseline of understanding - in the entire sample the average American puts themselves at 4.1/7. That means, they are just barely to the right of dead center. It’s amazing how in all the noise and nonsense of the discourse, this is where the average person lands. But, I don’t think anyone will be surprised by the fact that white evangelicals are the group that places itself furthest to the right. Their mean is 5.4 - which is significantly higher than the LDS in the sample who have a mean of 4.9.

Then there’s a pretty big cluster of folks that range from white Catholics to Orthodox Christians to non-white evangelicals and the mainline. Their mean spans from 4.3 to 4.5. Then a nice cascade forms for the rest of the groups. Non-white Catholics are slightly left of center at 3.9, but then each group is progressively more liberal. The average score for Hindus is 3.2. But, without a doubt the most left-leaning group is atheists at 2.5. From this angle, atheists are a bit further from the average American (1.6 points) compared to the average white evangelical (1.3 points).

But the means can really obscure some stuff going on behind the scenes. So let me show you the actual distribution of each of these religious traditions.

Among white evangelicals, 31% identify as very conservative and 28% say they are conservative. There’s no other group that comes even close to that. Among the LDS, about 44% fit in those categories. For the Orthodox Christians, 16% identify as very conservative and it’s 14% of white Catholics. White evangelicals are just really conservative, overall, in a way that is not really replicated among other groups. Just 17% say of them they are “middle of the road” and 11% are liberal.

What about groups that tend to cluster around the middle of the spectrum? One third of Black Protestants say that they are ‘middle of the road’ but there are a bunch of other groups that are similar. It’s 35% of ‘nothing in particulars’, 31% of non-white evangelicals, and 33% of non-white Catholics. But what strikes me is that there are basically no groups where the liberals are found in nearly equal proportion to the conservatives. Among non-white Catholics, it’s 37% liberals and 30% conservatives. For the mainline it’s 31% liberals and 45% conservatives. But that's as close as it gets.

What about the left side of the ideological spectrum? Among atheists, 36% identify as very liberal and 26% say that they liberal. There’s no other group that is even in the same ballpark as atheists. For agnostics, about 50% fall in those two categories, and Jews are the next closest at 40%. It’s clear that a lot of the smaller religious traditions like Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus have more liberals than they do conservatives, though.

But let me show you a fuller picture of the data. Not only did the survey ask folks to put themselves on that seven point scale, it also asked respondents to do the same for the Democratic and Republican parties. This is the mean score over the last 11 years of survey data.

I love this type of graph because it’s like every single individual tradition tells its own unique story. I could probably write a book just based on this data visualization. I marked the midpoint of the range with a vertical dashed line so that it’s easier to keep our bearings. Let me just point out a couple stories that jump out to me and feel free to add some more reflections in the comments.

White evangelicals see zero distance between themselves and the Republican party. That was true before the ascendance of Donald Trump and that’s true now. White evangelicals are Republicans and Republicans are white evangelicals.

The mainline graph should be pinned to the top of my Twitter page. The average mainline Protestant is to the right of center. And that hasn’t changed since 2012. That’s also true of the white Catholics in the sample, too. Slightly right of center.

In 2016, the average atheist saw no distance between themselves and the Democratic party. That’s not true anymore for two reasons. One is that atheists see the Democrats as becoming slightly more moderate as time has passed. The other reason is that the average atheist sees themselves as moving to the left. For agnostics, they were to the right of the Democrats from 2012 through 2018. But since then they think they have shifted left and the Democrats have become more moderate.

I could write a dozen more paragraphs on this, but you don’t want 5000 word posts. So let me show you a couple more things before I stop.

I wanted to just focus on the ideological ratings of the two parties for a bit. So this is the share of every tradition that labels Democrats as very liberal or the Republicans as very conservative.

In 2012, about 48% of white evangelicals thought Democrats were as liberal as it gets. That number jumped during the Trump years. In 2022, 64% of white evangelicals said Democrats were very liberal. It receded in 2023 to 56% but I’m not sure if that is just an aberration or not. In contrast, only 23% of white evangelicals think the GOP is very conservative. A pretty slanted view of the ideological world, which is also shared by atheists but in the other direction. In 2023, 67% of atheists described the Republican party as very conservative, while only 14% said Democrats were very liberal. They are mirrored opposites of each other.

But there are a bunch of groups that think both sides are extreme in almost equal measure. For instance, among mainline Protestants in 2023, 34% think that the Democrats are extreme and the same share think that about the Republicans. For non-white Catholics the numbers are pretty similar, too. But for many groups in this graph, it’s apparent that a larger share sees one party as much more polarized than the other. And it’s always the “other party.” Jews tend to vote for Democrats, so they see the Republicans as more extreme. Latter-day Saints are largely Republicans, so they tend to see Democrats as further away from the mainstream.

You get the point here, right? Not many folks are Republicans but also think that the Republican party is fringy. People want to point fingers at the other party to justify their current affiliation. This is a great example of negative polarization. We don’t vote for our party, we vote against the other one. And it’s pretty easy to do that when we label them as extreme.

Speaking of polarization, let me try to show you my attempt at assessing this idea. So here’s what I did. I calculate the share of each religious tradition which indicates that they were a 1 (meaning very liberal) AND the GOP was a 7 (meaning very conservative) or the opposite of that - they were very conservative AND the Democrats were very liberal. In my estimation these types of people see the world as perfectly polarized. For them, there’s nothing in the middle.

In 2012, 13% of white evangelicals said they were very conservative and the Democratic party was very liberal. In 2020, that share jumped to 30%. Think about that for a second. Almost a third of white evangelicals saw the political world as divided as humanly possible. For the groups in which this view was more prominent, no other percentage comes even close. For instance, look at the mainline, just 8% said that they were very conservative and the Democrats were very liberal. And while I didn’t show this in the graph above, the share of the mainline who described themselves as very liberal and the Republicans as very conservative was 5-6% during this time series. So, stop with the “super liberal mainline” trope. It’s just empirically false.

What about groups that see themselves as very liberal and the GOP as very conservative? Well, atheists are obviously on another level for this. In 2012, this described 15% of atheists. Over the last couple of years it’s been about 30%. Like I mentioned before, it’s amazing to me how white evangelicals and atheists look almost exactly the same just on completely different sides of the ideological spectrum.

But I think what is striking to me is how a whole bunch of groups just reject this idea of perfect polarization. Among Black Protestants, this view is incredibly rare. In most years less than 10% of Black Protestants see the world this way (in either direction). For white Catholics, it’s pretty low, too. I think the problem with the discourse is that the loudest voices come from white evangelicals and atheists when the vast majority of traditions are measured, moderate, and seek compromise and consensus. (This is a central theme of my upcoming book, by the way).

If you will permit me to get back in the pulpit for just a second. Different is not bad, different is different. Just because you don’t vote for Republicans doesn’t mean they are evil. Just because you vote for the GOP doesn’t mean that the opposition are destroying America.

Most people are much more moderate than you think that they are. It’s just the nutty people who say nutty things on social media that get all the attention.

Never forget that.

Code for this post can be found here.