Which Religious Traditions are the Most Politically Knowledgeable?

Your first year in graduate school is like trying to drink from a firehose. It’s just so much information coming at you at one time that it’s impossible for even 10% of it to actually soak in. I’ve gone back and read a few of the assigned texts in my first year of graduate school later on and I realized just how much I missed the first time around. There are a couple of books that have stuck around in my memory, even twenty years later - Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion by Zaller, and the Semi-Sovereign People by Schattschneider. I still reference both on a regular basis. Another that is always top of mind has a pretty descriptive title, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. It’s by Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter and it’s the most exhaustive look at political knowledge that we have in the United States.

What they found was pretty simple and incredibly depressing - only about 30% of Americans can correctly answer basic questions about government institutions, public policy, etc. In other words, it’s a miracle that democracy works at all given just how little the average voter knows. That’s a finding that always lives in the back of my head when I look at survey questions that require even a modicum of background knowledge. It’s inadvisable to assume that voters have a baseline of knowledge about anything.

The Cooperative Election Study has been asking a short political knowledge battery for a while now. I just want to focus on two specific questions - can respondents correctly identify which party controlled a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate when they were asked? For instance, this poll was fielded in October of 2023, when the Republicans held a majority in the House but the Senate was in the hands of the Democrats.

A slim majority of folks knew that the House was being led by the Republicans - 52%. The share who knew the Senate belonged to the GOP was slightly higher at 56%. But, to me, the real measure of political knowledge is just answering both those questions correctly. In this sample, that was 43% of folks. That’s a bit higher than the work by Delli Carpini and Keeter, but they had a five question battery. I am keeping it as simple as possible for this and just stick with two questions.

Before I pivot to religion variables, let me just give you the ‘lay of the land’ on two key factors that can have an impact on political knowledge - partisanship and education.

It should come as little surprise that education is positively related to political knowledge. You can see that very distinct stair step pattern in this graph. For those who stopped at high school, just 34% got both questions correct. For those who earned a bachelor’s degree it was 53% and then those with at least a master’s degree did ten points better than that. The most educated are the most politically savvy.

But what role does partisanship play? I think it’s fair to say that, on average, Republicans are more knowledgeable than Democrats. Among high school grads, Republicans have the edge by seven points. For those who finished undergraduate, the GOP leads by eight points. Only among those who have graduate degrees does the partisan gap disappear.

Now, let’s pivot to religion. Which religious traditions know the most about the political world and which ones know the least?

The clear winner here? It’s the atheists. About three in five atheists managed to answer both political knowledge questions correctly. That’s seventeen points above average. There were three groups in the fifties, though: Jews at 55%, followed closely by mainline Protestants and agnostics (both at 53%). The groups that are the closest to average are Buddhists, the unclassified, and Latter-day Saints.

The bottom of the list is smaller religious traditions. Only 16% of Muslims got both questions correct, while Hindus did nine points better at 25%. It’s interesting that the other religion that is often grouped with these two (Buddhists) do quite a bit better. The other groups at the bottom of the list are non-white Catholics, nothing in particular and Black Protestants.

But an astute observer will begin to make some connections here. The groups that are listed at the top of the chart tend to have a higher level of education while some at the bottom have a lower level of education. Let me just show you that visualized in a scatter plot. The share of each tradition who have earned a four year degree is on the x-axis, while the share who got both questions correct is on the y-axis.

Let’s just make this point clear - Hindus are a huge outlier on this graph. Nearly 80% of them have earned a four year college degree. That’s fifteen points higher than any other religious group. Yet they score the second lowest on the political knowledge battery. A big part of this is that many Hindus in the United States are recent immigrants to the country (I write about this in my OUP book) and therefore haven’t had a long time to become familiar with our political system.

The other outlier on the bottom half of the graph are Muslims. Their level of educational attainment is nearly the same as Buddhists and agnostics. Yet, just 16% of Muslims were politically knowledgeable compared to 44% of Buddhists and 53% of agnostics.

I did shoot a trend line through this data, but it’s probably being really impacted by those two outlier groups. That’s the problem when you only have sixteen data points to consider. There’s a really modest positive relationship between political knowledge and education. You can see quite a few groups fall pretty close to the trend line like Latter-day Saints and Orthodox Christians.

But let me get a bit more granular now by looking at individual Protestant denominations. Also notice here that I switched to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study so that I can get a much larger sample size and include more denominations in my analysis. There’s only one wrinkle to this: in October of 2022, the House was clearly under the Democrat’s control but the Senate was split 50-50. However, because it was under the Biden administration, Vice President Harris could break the tie. That means Democrats controlled both chambers. In the entire sample about 37% of folks got both questions correct. That was about six points lower than the same set of questions from 2023.

One of the groups that were the most politically knowledgeable were from the Black Church tradition - the African Methodist Episcopal denomination. At least half of the AME answered both questions correctly. They were followed by two traditions in the mainline: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and The Episcopal Church and then non-denominational fundamentalists. Kind of a weird mix of groups there right? It’s like all sectors of the Protestant landscape are covered in the top five groups.

What about those near the bottom? Again, it’s a very odd mix. You’ve got the Pentecostal Church of God at the absolute lowest followed by the Christian Church. Then you have the Church of God in Christ, which is part of the Black Church tradition. Then another Pentecostal denomination, then two members of the mainline. That’s what is absolutely wild to me - you’ve got evangelical denominations at the top and the bottom, but that’s also true for the Black Church and the mainline. There’s just no clear relationship between religious tradition and political knowledge in this data.

But maybe it has something to do with education, right? That’s something we've seen before - more educated people are more politically knowledgeable. Let me show you another scatter plot to illustrate this relationship.

The first thing that I want to point out is that the trend line is really clear now - political knowledge is strongly related to the level of education. Those denominations with lots of degree holders tend to score well on these two questions. This model predicts that if a denomination has 50% of folks with a college degree, that 47% should be politically aware. If the share with a college degree is just 25%, then political knowledge is around 37%.

I think the outliers here keep telling an interesting story. You see a Black Church denominations up at the top of the graph - the AME Church. The model predicts that their level of political knowledge should be around 43%, instead it’s nearly ten points higher. Then there are two more outliers on the bottom - the American Baptists and the Disciples of Christ. Based on their education level, about 44% of DoC members should have gotten both questions correct. Instead it was only 35%. That’s a real head scratcher.

I’m a big believer that houses of worship (and those who lead them) need to understand their role in society is much more than theological. Churches, synagogues, and mosques should be engines of social capital. They should help spur a desire for knowledge and understanding in all aspects of American life. It looks like some denominations are doing well on these metrics and others are struggling a bit more.

Code for this post can be found here.

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And, for those who didn’t see it - Tony Jones and I had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week. It’s an initial summary of the survey we did of 12,000 non-religious Americans for a Templeton grant we won about two years ago. This will turn into a book length project that will hopefully be released some time next year.

We’ve created a new typology of non-religion in the United States that we think may be helpful for both academics and the general public. The four categories are:

• NiNos (Nones in Name Only) - 21% of all nones.

• SBNRS (Spiritual But Not Religious) - 36%

• The Dones - 33%

• Zealous Atheists - 11%

A lot more details about each group will be coming out in drips and drabs over the coming year.