What the 2024 Election Revealed About Religion in America

The GOP’s Faithful, the Dems’ Doubters

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Here’s my bias - I think about nearly every social and political phenomenon through the lens of religion. I don’t know how to not do that. I guess it’s because I am always on a desperate search to find interesting questions to drive content on this newsletter twice a week. Maybe this is just my warped perception of the world but I’m pretty convinced that there’s not many aspects of society that aren’t influenced by religion in some way.

For instance, the political parties in the United States are so incredibly different from each other. I think we all know that. There are many vectors to explain this divergence. Certainly race plays a role. Republicans are a whole lot more white than Democrats. There’s the geographic divide. The GOP is a party of rural America and the Democrats tend to do much better in densely populated urban cores. You get the picture.

But, of course, the parties are also incredibly divided in the area of religion, as well. We’ve got a term for it: The God Gap. Simply put, religion in the United States (particularly white religion) is now Republican coded. The Democrats, on the other hand, are the party of the nones. Well, we just had an election and I’ve got new data. So let me show you how the religious composition of Trump’s voters diverged from those who cast a ballot for Kamala Harris.

Let’s start using a religious behavior metric - attendance at houses of worship. This is the breakdown in each of the last five presidential elections among voters who cast a ballot for the Republican candidate.

The GOP was highly religiously engaged back in the Obama vs. McCain matchup. About 44% of McCain’s voters reported attending a house of worship every week. In comparison, only 29% said that they attended church less than once a year. But that low attending share has risen significantly in subsequent elections. In the last two cycles the share of Republican voters who attend never or seldom has risen to 42%. That’s due, almost entirely, to the rise of the never attending Republicans. They were only 10% of voters in 2008 and now it’s around 20%. That’s a pretty good data nugget - Republicans are twice as likely to never attend today compared to 2008.

And you can probably guess that attendance at the top end has also dipped. Weekly attendance dropped to 42% by 2012, and lost another 6 points by 2016. But what’s really striking to me is that this share hasn’t budged during Trump’s three runs for the White House - it’s been stuck at about 35%. The other thing worth noting is that the share of Republican voters who attend weekly hasn’t really changed much, it’s the more than once a week people who have started to disappear.

What about Democrats?

In 2008, half of Democratic voters were attending never or seldom and just a quarter were weekly attenders. But those low attendees have really skyrocketed in the last couple of cycles. It was above 60% in 2020 and then look at those 2024 numbers. About two-thirds of voters for Kamala Harris were attending a house of worship seldom or never. Among Trump voters it was 42%.

And, you can probably guess that there aren’t a lot of weekly attenders left on the Democrats’ side, either. In 2024, just 17% were weekly attenders. Let me put it to you this way: For every Harris voter who attended church weekly in 2024, there were about 4 Harris voters who attended less than once a year. If that’s not the God Gap, I don’t know what is.

But let’s also do this based on religious affiliation. If you want to see what the Trump coalition looked like in 2024, this is it. I also threw in this same analysis when McCain was on the ballot to get a sense of how things have shifted.

Here’s the huge headline for me - evangelicals are incredibly important to the GOP on election day. It’s hard to overstate this fact. In 2008, 38% of all McCain’s voters were evangelical. When Trump won in 2024, 42% of his ballots came from evangelicals. There is no more important voting bloc in the country than evangelicals if you are Republican. It’s basically impossible to win any race without their support. But other Christian groups are less important in recent years. The mainline share is down 4 points since 2008, and the white Catholic voters were six points fewer in 2024 than they were in 2008.

The only other group that really registers much at all are the ‘nothing in particular’ people. They were 8% of McCain’s votes and Trump drove that up to 12%. But note that atheists/agnostics account for just 5% of all the GOP votes now. That’s up just two points since 2008. But that’s really the whole ball of wax. Let me make this exceedingly clear - the GOP is a party of Christians. About 80% of all Trump’s votes came from Christians. To be even more specific, 70% came from white Christians. The GOP is the party of white Christianity.

What about the Democrats? Well, they certainly aren’t running up the score with Catholics and Protestants.

I am pretty struck by how much stability I see across the top couple of rows, honestly. About 13% of Obama’s votes came from evangelicals in 2008. It was 13% for Harris in 2024. Think about this simple fact for a minute - there were more evangelicals who voted for Harris than mainline Protestants. That’s just how small the mainline is now. Even if they were super liberal (and they aren’t) there just aren’t enough voters to really make a huge difference at this point. But it’s also true that the Democrats have problems with the Catholic vote - white Catholics were only 11% of the Harris vote.

So, how do Democrats not get blown out in every election? It’s the nones. That’s the answer. There are a lot of nones and they lean heavily towards the Democrats. I just wrote about this, but I want to make this point clear - atheists and agnostics were 16% of the Obama coalition. Now, they are about a quarter of the Democratic party. If you throw the nothing in particulars in there, the nones make up 45% of all Democratic votes cast. That’s up 10 points since 2008.

Let me just summarise this succinctly.

The GOP vote is 80% Christian and 17% non-religious.

The Democratic vote is 48% Christian and 45% non-religious.

That’s the God Gap.

Let me go one layer deeper on this and show you the religious composition of both parties but break it down by voters under 35 and over 65. That will give us a sense of where the parties were a few decades ago and where they will be a few decades from now. I know there’s a lot going on this graph and I tried a bunch of different ways to visualize this.

The top left are young Republicans in 2008 and 2024. Note how little the nones have risen between these two elections. They were 19% of McCain voters in 2008 and were 26% of Trump’s coalition in 2024. In other words, there’s not this huge wave of nones coming in the next generation of the GOP. Practically speaking, if I were running GOP campaigns, I wouldn’t worry about reaching out to secular voters too much. There just aren’t enough of them.

But also take note of the bottom left graph - there’s been almost no religious shifting among older Republican voters. The white Christian share is incredibly high - still 82% in 2024. That’s the core of the GOP in my estimation - old, white Christians. But also note that even a majority of young Trump voters were still white Christians in 2024. The GOP is the party of white Christianity.

The future of the Democratic party is decidedly not among the white Christians. Just one in five voters under the age of 35 who voted for Harris were white Christians. That’s down six points since 2008. In contrast, 57% of all young Harris voters were non-religious. That’s 31 points higher than the young Trump voters.

Yet, I was also struck by how much the nones had risen among older Democrats, too. In fact, it was the largest increase in any of these four graphs. In 2008, just 22% of Obama’s older voters were non-religious. In 2024, among voters over the age of 65 who supported Harris, 36% of them were non-religious. That’s ten points higher than Trump’s young voters in 2024.

I think that both parties should take heed from these results because both the Democrats and Republicans are going to face big structural problems in the future.

1. The GOP needs white Christians to win elections. The share of Americans who are white is dropping. The share of Americans who are Christians is the lowest it’s ever been (but the number has plateaued). You can’t win elections with a shrinking demographic group.

2. The Democrats are the party of the non-religious and the non-Christian groups. But the problem there is that the nones aren’t large enough to sway national elections right now. They might be in 15 to 20 years, but certainly not yet. A coalition of Muslims, Black Protestants, and atheists is not easy to hold together either.

It seems that the two parties are trying to navigate some very significant demographic shifts in the population right now. Race is changing. Religion is changing. Society is changing. But we still go to the ballot box every two years. How the parties can build a slightly bigger coalition without alienating their base will dictate how many elections they win or lose.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.