White America's Republican Drift
White Christians didn't get replaced — they changed their minds
I don’t try to use this newsletter to just market my stuff to all you wonderful readers, but for those who don’t know — I published a book a couple of months ago called The Vanishing Church, which focuses on the role that politics has played in American religion over the last fifty years. One of the central stories of that work is that white Christianity has become noticeably more conservative. That’s not just the case in white evangelicalism (which most people know about), but it’s also true among white Catholics. It has become increasingly the case that to be white and Christian is to support the Republican Party.
That simply wasn’t the case not too terribly long ago. As I’ve become accustomed to saying when talking about the book — “It’s not always been this way.” For younger adults, they just don’t know a religious world that is not dominated by the Religious Right. However, if you take a peek at the partisan composition of white Christians as far back as we can (1972), you see a much more complete portrait.
In 1972, a clear majority of white Christians (regardless of their denominational affiliation) were Democrats. That, by itself, is downright shocking to many audiences when I show a version of this graph. It is important to note here that these weren’t the types of Democrats that we know in modern political discourse. These were Southern Democrats (often called Dixiecrats) who felt a sense of alliance to the party because of FDR’s New Deal policies but held incredibly regressive views on racial issues. However, I do want to point out that by 1980, the share of white Christians who were Democrats had dropped below 50%.
By the late 1980s, white Christianity was essentially perfectly politically divided between Democrats and Republicans, but that didn’t last very long. As we moved into the 2000s, the Republican ascendance was already visible — hovering around 50%. There was a bit of a lull in the trend lines through 2010 or so, but from that point forward, the two trajectories headed in opposite directions. In the last few years, white Christians have become more politically unified around the GOP.
From a social science standpoint, there are only two ways for this to really happen. One is called generational replacement. Remember those Dixiecrats I mentioned above? Well, if they were dying off in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s and their children were coming into adulthood as more Republican-leaning, that would easily explain the overall shift. But there’s another possibility — white Christians simply began to change their minds about politics as each year passed. Those Dixiecrats realized that they could no longer support the Democratic Party, were won over by politicians like Ronald Reagan, and then started voting for the GOP.
Teasing that apart is going to be the point of this post: was it generational replacement that made white Christianity so Republican? Or was it just millions of Protestants and Catholics changing their minds?
One easy way to explore those possibilities is to do a cohort analysis of white Christians over time. So, let’s test that out. I am replicating the prior graph but this time breaking it down into the four most recent generations (I am leaving out Gen Z here because there just aren’t enough survey years for them).
This graph provides clear and compelling evidence to bolster the second theory under consideration: the reason for the white Christian shift toward the Republican Party is that a whole bunch of people just happened to change their minds at nearly the same time. How do we know that? Well, it’s readily apparent by just taking a look at the graphs for the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers in the top row. Their trend lines look almost exactly like what we saw in the first graph. Democrats were ascendant in the 1970s, but by the late 1980s the lines had begun to cross. For the next couple of decades, the Republican line held pretty steady around 50%, but then it began to rise again after 2010. That’s essentially a carbon copy of what we saw in the full sample with every age group included.
For Gen X and Millennials, we obviously can’t trace their timeline as far back as the older generations. There is no clear “crossover” moment that we can really discern, although you can kind of see it when looking at the mid-1980s for Gen X. However, both generations of white Christians have been plurality (if not majority) Republicans for the last 35 years. It feels like they came of age when the connection between white Christianity and the GOP was already well established, and they just fell in line.
That’s an important point to note, by the way, and something I want to visualize in a simpler way. If you look at the “entry point” for the younger generations of white Christians, you see that they come into adulthood with a much more Republican-leaning outlook than their parents or grandparents.
When Gen X entered the GSS sample in large enough numbers (around 1988), they were already 46% Republican. In 1972, when we have the first year of data on Boomers, they were only 31% Republican. Millennials were actually slightly less Republican when they started showing up in the data with a decent sample in 2006 — about 43% of them identified as Republican.
However, take a look at white Christians who are members of Generation Z. Although the oldest ones were born around 1996, we can’t really compile a decent sample until 2022 or so. But when they start showing up in the data, 58% of them are Republican. That’s essentially the same level of GOP allegiance that Baby Boomers have now — and they are all in their retirement years. The idea that younger white Christians are more politically diverse is simply not empirically supported.
But I can actually examine all of this with a much larger sample through a much shorter timeline using the Cooperative Election Study. It was first conducted in 2008, and the sample sizes are often twenty times the size of the General Social Survey. So instead of looking at generations (which often span 15 years), I can zoom in on five-year birth cohorts. I restricted my sample to two groups — white Christians and white non-religious folks — and then tracked the share who identified as Republican over time.
What we are really looking for here is the trajectory of the lines — we want to be able to discern if there are “in-cohort” changes in political partisanship. You can most definitely see that across the top row of graphs when it comes to white Christians. Their movement toward the GOP is sort of stunning to consider given that we are only looking at a timeline that goes back sixteen years. Among folks born in the early 1940s, a bare majority of white Christians were Republican in 2008. By 2024, that figure had risen to about 70%. You can see that the inflection point for many in this cohort is right around the time Donald Trump was first elected to the White House.
If you take a look at the second row of graphs, you can also see that 2015 or 2016 becomes a clear demarcation point. In the last ten years, there’s evidence that white Christians who are members of Gen X have moved toward the GOP as well. However, it’s not nearly as dramatic as the top row.
The bottom row is not so simple to describe with a broad brush. It does look like older Millennial white Christians have drifted to the right, but that’s not really replicated among younger generations. In fact, among white Christians born in the 1990s, they have actually moved away from the Republican Party in the last ten years.
Let me simplify this by just showing you the two endpoints for this time series: 2008 vs 2024.
You can see those huge Republican spikes among older white Christians in this data. For the early 1940s cohort, it rises seventeen points. But the jump across the top row is all double digits, to be fair. In fact, the GOP gained at least ten percentage points among white Christians in every birth cohort from 1940 all the way through 1969 — so that’s a lot of white Christians in Gen X who have shifted significantly to the right since 2008.
However, you also see shifts that are nearly that large among younger white Christians, too. It was eight points among those born in the early 1970s and nine points among those born between 1975 and 1979. If you exclude the very youngest cohort, the white Christian vote has shifted toward the GOP by no less than seven points among any age group.
I have intentionally left out a really interesting finding up to this point, though — one you may have picked up on if you carefully looked at the other part of this analysis: folks who claim no religious affiliation. Yes, white Christians have shifted to the right over time. But guess what? So have some white non-religious folks.
In fact, there is not a single birth cohort in this entire analysis where the nones have not become more Republican between 2008 and 2024. The size of the movement is smaller than it is among Christians, but it’s still there. In many of these cohorts, white non-religious folks are 4–8 percentage points more likely to identify as Republican today compared with 2008.
In other words, white people — regardless of religion — have become more Republican since 2008.
I do feel like I need to zoom in on that just a little bit, though. It’s really one specific type of none that has warmed up to the GOP: “nothing in particulars.”
Atheists are really strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. If you’ve hung around this newsletter for a while, you know that to be the case. Agnostics are slightly less Democratic-leaning, but it’s still about 70% of them in 2024. But look at those “nothing in particulars” — that’s what is moving the aggregate number in the prior graph. In 2008, about half of them identified as Democrats. By 2024, that had dropped to just about 40%. Meanwhile, the GOP share rose from 25% to 35% during this same period.
Why is this group so consequential? Because they are enormous in number. Nearly one in five Americans describes their religion as “nothing in particular.” That ten-point movement could yield more votes for the GOP than anything happening among atheists and agnostics — simply because there just aren’t that many atheists and agnostics.
So, what have we learned here?
The white Christian shift toward the GOP is more about people changing their minds than generational replacement. That conclusion is exceedingly clear from this analysis.
However, there is a possibility I didn’t even discuss: one reason white Christianity has become so conservative is that a lot of white moderates and liberals have started identifying as non-religious over the last few decades. I will explore that in a future post.
The GOP gains have not been limited to Christians, though. There’s good evidence here that white non-religious folks have also shifted toward Republicans over the last fifteen years or so.
This is a story not just about religion — it’s also deeply intertwined with race. The Republican Party’s grip on white America is strengthening, regardless of whether they go to church or not.
Code for this post can be found here.
Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.
