What's the Difference Between White Evangelicals and White Catholics on Election Day?

Once your control for partisanship? Not much.

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I keep a little list in the notes app on my phone — just a running log of potential ideas for the newsletter. Most of them are only a few words, just enough to remind me to poke around in the data when I get back to my computer. If I’m being honest, about 75% of those ideas go nowhere. Either the data doesn’t tell a compelling story, or that “great dataset” someone mentioned turns out to be nothing like they described.

But there’s been one idea sitting at the top of that list for a while — and I’ve been ignoring it. It’s about the American Catholic Church and immigration. What originally made me jot it down was a press release from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops with the headline, “USCCB Files Lawsuit on Unlawful Suspension of U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.” The Catholic Church in the U.S. has long been more open to immigration than American evangelicals — or at least that’s what several Catholic friends have told me over the years.

Then Pope Leo waded into the debate. A Chicago cardinal planned to give Senator Dick Durbin a lifetime achievement award but faced pushback because Durbin has repeatedly voted to expand access to abortion services. When asked about it, the Pope said, “Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

So, let’s explore that idea today — and I think we’ll end up with a much bigger conclusion than just how the average Catholic feels about green cards.

The 2024 Cooperative Election Study includes four specific questions about immigration policy:

1. Build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico

2. Provide permanent resident status to children of immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents (Dreamers), and grant a pathway to citizenship if they meet the requirements and have committed no crimes

3. Increase the number of border patrol agents on the U.S.–Mexico border

4. Grant legal status to all undocumented immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have no felony convictions

Here’s the share of Protestants and Catholics who agreed with each of these statements.

When it comes to building the wall, white evangelicals are clear outliers, with 82% in favor. The next closest group is white Catholics, at 67%. That same pattern shows up across most of these immigration questions: white evangelicals are the most conservative, and white Catholics tend to fall right behind them.

On the Dream Act, support drops for both groups. About 54% of white evangelicals back it, compared to 62% of white Catholics. There are only two Christian groups where a clear majority don’t favor a pathway to citizenship: white evangelicals at 38% and white Catholics at 50%.

That’s interesting, right? If Catholic leadership at both the Vatican and the USCCB are consistently pushing for more expansive immigration policies, that message doesn’t seem to have much traction among the laity. If anything, they appear fairly ambivalent about the whole issue.

But notice that consistent gap between white evangelicals and white Catholics. What explains why evangelicals are usually about ten points to the right of their Catholic counterparts? If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you probably know the likely answer: evangelicals are roughly twenty points more likely to vote Republican.

In 2008, 56% of white Catholics supported John McCain. Among white evangelicals, that number was 78% — about 22 points higher. You can see this gap persist across every election since then. What’s especially interesting is how consistent it’s been over time.

The gap was 19 points in 2012, 21 points in 2016, 21 points again in 2020, and 18 points in 2024. What’s really striking is that both groups also drifted to the right during this period. White Catholics became about ten points more Republican, while white evangelicals moved roughly six points in that direction.

That led to my big “a-ha” moment while doing this analysis: what if I repeated the immigration questions, but looked only at Republicans?

Yeah, okay, now we’re really starting to get some things sorted out. When it comes to building a wall, that idea receives almost unanimous support among Republican Christians. Among white evangelicals, 94% are in favor, compared to 92% of white Catholics — not exactly a meaningful difference.

But here’s the surprising part: that’s the only one of these four issues where white evangelical Republicans differ from white Catholic Republicans at all.

On the Dream Act, 46% of white evangelical Republicans are in favor — the exact same share as white Catholic Republicans. Ninety-six percent of both groups support increased enforcement on the Mexican border. And when it comes to offering a pathway to citizenship for people who entered the U.S. illegally but have stayed out of trouble, only 30% of either group support that idea.

In other words, white evangelical Republicans and white Catholic Republicans have essentially identical views on immigration in the United States.

Let’s go one layer deeper, though. Still looking just at Republicans, I focused on the question about a pathway to citizenship among white evangelicals and white Catholics, this time breaking it down by church attendance. Maybe it’s the really frequent-attending Catholics who are more moderate on immigration, right? That would explain the gap between the public perception of Catholic attitudes and what the data actually shows.

Um, yeah. This absolutely seals it for me. I plotted 84% confidence intervals so we can get a solid sense of when the differences are statistically significant or not. And just look at those overlapping error bars. There’s only one case where they don’t overlap — among folks who never attend religious services. In that instance, a white evangelical Republican is actually more likely to support a pathway to citizenship than a never-attending white Catholic Republican. That one really surprised me.

But across every other attendance level, there’s essentially no difference between the two groups. Among those who attend monthly, 35% of white evangelical Republicans favor a pathway to citizenship, compared to 32% of white Catholic Republicans. That difference isn’t statistically or substantively meaningful.

Put plainly: once you control for race and partisanship, there’s no real difference between Catholics and evangelicals when it comes to immigration. And that runs completely counter to the conventional wisdom on the topic.

Before wrapping up, though, I wanted to include one more quick analysis that’s not about immigration — abortion policy. Think of this as a little “sanity check.” There has to be some difference between these two groups on another hot-button issue, right?

Yes, I think it’s clear that even after controlling for race and partisanship, there’s still a noticeable gap between Catholics and evangelicals on whether a woman should have access to an abortion if she wants one for any reason. Those differences are especially large among the least frequent attenders. Among those who never go to church, a white Catholic Republican is 22 points more supportive of abortion access than a comparable white evangelical. Among seldom attenders, the gap is 14 points.

Once you move into the higher attendance categories, those gaps begin to shrink. It’s about 10 points among monthly attenders and just six points among those who attend weekly. But notice something else in this graph that differs from the immigration one: attendance actually matters when it comes to abortion. Support for access drops steadily as you move from left to right across the attendance scale. That simply wasn’t true for immigration, where the line was basically flat.

When I say that politics is the master identity, this is exactly what I mean. There are only a few issues — abortion being the clearest example — where religious commitment still shapes opinion in a significant way. On topics like immigration or gun control, it’s almost entirely driven by partisanship at this point.

So, when trying to understand someone’s views on issues like these, the better question isn’t “What’s your religion?” It’s “What’s your political affiliation?”

Code for this post can be found here.