Who Embraces Diversity in America—and Who Doesn’t

And what role does religion play?

Is there a more loaded word in American discourse right now than “diversity”? It seems you can almost sort Americans into two camps based on how often they use the term. It certainly played a central role during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Donald Trump placed it center stage by railing against DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs. In the wake of Trump’s successful bid for the White House, hundreds of universities have either scaled back or completely dismantled offices on campus that focused on DEI type initiatives. That’s also true of major tech companies like Google and Meta, which have pledged to entirely rethink how they hire people.

For those who study concepts like Christian Nationalism - they often point to the fact that the United States is becoming less white and less Christian with each passing year. That becomes the motivation for pushing a Christian Nationalist agenda. They want to ensure that their racial group and religious preference are dominant in the discourse. But, are people actually concerned with the possibility that the country is becoming more racially and religiously diverse? The Pew Religious Landscape Study, released a few months ago, asked two questions that are helpful in probing these matters.

1. Does the fact that the U.S. is made up of people of many different races/ethnicities strengthen American society, weaken it, or not make much difference?

2. Does the fact that the U.S. is made up of people of many different religions and people who are not religious strengthen American society, weaken it, or not make much difference?

Here’s how the entire sample answered each question:

In both cases, a majority of the country believes that diversity is a strength. When it comes to a question about racial/ethnic diversity, 72% of folks said that the fact the United States was becoming less white was a point of strength for the country. Just 9% of the sample disagreed with that idea.

However, when it comes to religious diversity, there’s quite a bit more trepidation. Just a bare majority (52%) said that a growing number of people who come from diverse religious backgrounds is making the U.S. stronger, while 19% disagreed. Just as an aside, I wonder if social desirability bias may be playing a role here. Saying that racial diversity is harming the country is still a pretty taboo thing to say. I don’t think the same reluctance is there for making the same statement about religious diversity. But that’s basically impossible to parse.

But how about I put both questions into a single heatmap to better understand whether people see diversity as good in one way but not the other.

Well, about half the sample is in the top right corner of the graph. These are people who would welcome both racial and religious diversity. They believe that both are a point of strength for the United States. In contrast, almost no one is in the bottom left corner - 6%. Those would be people who really want to see the United States stay primarily white and primarily Christian.

But you can see how there’s a lot more variation on the religious dimension than the racial one. For instance, 14% of the sample said that racial diversity strengthens the country but religious diversity makes no difference. What about the opposite combination? It’s just 2% of the sample. And 9% of folks say that racial diversity is a good thing but religious diversity is a bad thing. It’s only 1% of people in the exact opposite position.

In other words: people are much more sold on the idea of a multi-racial country than a country with a tremendous amount of religious diversity.

But let me show you that same heatmap but I’m going to break it down into sixteen different religious groups. I wanted to know if the non-religious view these questions differently compared to evangelicals or Catholics.

To me, the top right square of each graph tells you a huge part of the story. Remember, that in the entire sample about 49% of folks believed that both types of diversity made the country stronger. Many Christian groups fall pretty close to the mean: Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and ‘other Christians’ don’t deviate much at all from the rest of the country.

Then, if you look at the bottom two rows, you’ll see that the top right square is a darker blue. Small religious groups like Jews, Muslims, and Hindus place an incredibly high value on diversity. In each case at least ⅔ of them say that diversity (both racial and religious) are a good thing for the future of the country. Among the non-religious it’s slightly lower at 62%. But that’s still about a dozen points above the national average.

Now, I intentionally skipped a single group in the above description: evangelicals. They are, without a doubt, the biggest outliers in this analysis. Just 32% of them were in the top right corner—17 points lower than the national average and significantly lower than other types of Christians. For example, compare evangelicals to LDS. 60% of Mormons think that diversity is a good thing. Additionally, 18% of evangelicals say that racial diversity is good but religious diversity is a negative thing. That’s double the national average.

I had to do some digging on that. I initially thought that a big reason for the divergence is that evangelicals tend to be older. And, let’s be honest here, older folks aren’t typically the ones that embrace a changing culture that fast. So I can test that. I produced those same heat maps for just evangelicals and then the entire sample. But I broke it down by decade of birth of the respondent. That way we can compare older Americans to older evangelicals.

Yeah, there’s one huge clear conclusion to this graph - age is not the reason that evangelicals are reluctant to embrace a changing country. Among those born in the 1940s, about 41% of the entire sample are in the top right corner (saying diversity is good - on both dimensions). Among evangelicals, that top square is 24% of the sample. And guess what? The gap between those two squares remains remarkably consistent across all age cohorts.

It’s 16 points among those born in the 1950s. It’s 18 points among those born in the 1970s. It’s 17 points among those born in the 1990s. And even among those folks born in the 2000s, an evangelical is 13 points less likely to think that religious and racial diversity is a good thing compared to the rest of people in their birth cohort.

Think about this another way: an evangelical who is between the ages of 18 and 25 years old has the same views of diversity as an average American born in the 1970s. This is clearly not a case of old white people being reluctant to embrace change. Among young evangelicals, there’s quite a bit of trepidation about the future of the United States.

But, okay, I know what you are all thinking as you read this - politics has to play a huge role. And I agree with that! I grew up in an evangelical household and went to church twice a week for most of my adolescence. I don’t ever remember anyone saying anything overtly negative about diversity in the United States from the pulpits or the pews. So, this may be another case where it’s really just people listening to folks like Donald Trump, not necessarily their pastor. I can test that, of course.

So, I put together a regression model. The dependent variable is being in that top right square - thinking that diversity (on both dimensions) strengthens the country. I controlled for a bunch of stuff like age, race, gender, and income. I wanted to know if attending an evangelical church more often changed the views that folks had about diversity. And if that was mediated at all by political partisanship. Here are the results of that regression.

Okay, there are two huge conclusions that jump out of this graph. Let me deal with each one in turn.

1. Evangelical Democrats are much more likely to embrace diversity than evangelical Republicans. I mean, the gap is a chasm. It’s about twenty-five percentage points when comparing the same level of church attendance. This is a phenomenon that is being driven largely by politics. I feel very vindicated by this as a political scientist, by the way.

2. But going to church more often drives down the likelihood of embracing diversity. What’s even more wild about this finding is that it’s true for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. For Republicans, the drop in support for diversity is about 13 points. Which is also the case for the Democrats, too.

I’ve written about this before. “The more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans.” That question was in the context of the social gospel, but it also absolutely applies in this case. More frequent attendance leads to more conservative views. That’s something we should reflect on much more.

I do this type of analysis all the time on all kinds of issues and I can’t think of a single instance where increased church attendance drives a Christian to the left side of the political spectrum. For better or worse, religion is right wing coded in the modern American discourse.

It’s even more intriguing in this instance because being around people at church (which could possibly be more racially diverse) makes people less likely to believe that diversity would strengthen the United States. That’s something worth pondering going forward.

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.