Did The Election of Donald Trump Drive People from the Pews?
(ANALYSIS) I remember in grad school we used to sit around in the graduate assistants’ office and ask each other super nerdy questions, like “What is your favorite journal article?” Yeah, I know — that’s exactly what you would expect from a bunch of folks in their early 20s who were reading hundreds of pages of political science every week while making poverty-level wages. No money for beer, but the library offers us free books!
When it comes to religion and politics, I have a few answers to that question. The one I probably think about most often is an article by Wald, Hill and Owen simply titled, “Churches as Political Communities.” It was published in 1988, which is forever ago in the world of religion and politics. But the theory is just as relevant today as it was during the last days of the Reagan administration.
The thrust of the article is that every religious community is political, no matter how hard they try and hide it. Something so subtle as a fundraiser for the crisis pregnancy center can signal the partisanship of the congregation. The authors even talk about walking through the parking lots of churches and reading bumper stickers to get a sense of what they were about to encounter when they entered the worship space.
That article was formative in the way that I approach the world now. When I get invited to give a talk to a church group, the first thing I do after I arrive and greet my host is to walk around the building and just observe the subtle clues. Do they have a flag in the sanctuary? Do they have recycling bins? Or a gender-neutral bathroom? All those things tell me a lot about how that community thinks, worships and votes.
There is no doubt in my mind that politics is one of the main culprits for the emptying out of American religion. That was my starting point for this piece.
What follows is a peek inside how I think through a problem like that. My approach has always been to start broad, then narrow just a bit, but always look for the thread of the story. I need to find something that is easy for a reader to understand but hard for them to forget.
So, let’s pull on the thread of religion and politics a bit.
I always think that if you can break something down by birth cohort, you should. That’s especially true when it comes to religion. Younger folks are living in a much-different religious environment than older ones. So, I divided the sample down into five-year cohorts and then calculated the percentage of folks who said that they never attend religious services in each year from 2008 through 2022.
The trend is clear — it’s upward. Every single cohort is more likely to be never attenders today than in 2008. And it’s not just the youths. It’s everyone. For folks born in the early 1950s, 16% were never attenders in 2008. That’s nearly doubled to 30% today. My birth cohort is the early 1980s — 25% were never attenders in 2008; it’s 36% today.
It’s worth pointing out how the trend line starts at a higher point in 2008 with each successive birth cohort. In 2008, less than 15% of those born in the late 1930s were never attenders. For those born in the early 1990s, it was 25%. So, young folks are already entering the race with a head start.
Now, let’s make it a bit more complicated. Same analysis, but I subdivided the sample into Democrats and Republicans. I left out independents because I wanted to simplify the narrative just a bit.
The pattern here is consistent and straightforward — Democrats are more likely to be never attenders than Republicans. That’s the case in every single cohort, and the trend lines run in parallel for most of the cohorts. In the majority of cases, Republicans in 2020 have “never attending” rates that are the same as Democrats in 2008.
These gaps aren’t small, either. For instance, look at the 1990-1994 cohort. Among Democrats, 42% were never attending in 2020. It was only 21% of Republicans. That 2-to-1 gap is really the norm across cohorts.
In a graph like this, there’s a lot going on, with 28 total lines to look at. So, it’s worth staring at it for a minute. Here’s what really jumped out to me: Look at the blue lines in the 1975-1979 and 1980-1984 cohorts. Notice how they were essentially flat from 2008 through 2016, then they start trending up? Yeah, I had to do a deeper dive there.
So, here’s how I approached that. I wanted to understand if there was a clearly different trend happening from 2016 onward. So, I calculated how much the never attenders rose from 2016 through 2022 and compared that to 2010 through 2016. That’s the graph below, by cohort and political party. I hit paydirt.
The blue bars represent the increase in never attenders between 2010 and 2016, while the orange bars represent the increase from 2016 through 2022. For Republicans, this story is pretty boring. The rise of the “nevers” is small in magnitude and doesn’t increase at a noticeably faster rate after the election of Donald Trump.
But the Democrats tell a much more interesting story. In several cohorts, the rate of change in never attenders was much higher after 2016 than it was before. For instance, in those late 1970s and early 1980s cohorts, the nevers rose dramatically. For those born between 1975 and 1979, the never attenders rose 3% between 2010 and 2016. The share of never attenders rose 16% between 2016 and 2022. The increase is nearly as large for those born between 1980 and 1984, as well.
There are also big leaps among Democrats in other cohorts too: late 1930s, late 1940s and late 1960s.
I will give you one final look at this by generation and partisanship, except this time it’s the share of folks who have no religious affiliation. Notice how flat the Republican lines are between 2016 and 2022? Outside of Generation Z, their secularization has been frozen.
For Democrats, nonreligion has become much more prevalent. The share of boomer Democrats who were nones rose eight points. It was four points for Generation X and eight points for millennials. Now, 54% of Gen Z Democrats are atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular compared to just 28% of Republicans in the same cohort.
Social behavior doesn’t just change that quickly, unless there is a methodological change or some kind of exogeneous shock. The Cooperative Election Study has the same survey mode and questions. So, that can’t be it. Of course, there’s a possibility that church attendance shifted because some cohorts were entering different parts of the life course (marriage, children, etc.) But that seems unlikely with those in the 1975-1984 range. They were between the ages of 32 and 41 in 2016, which means that a significant number were already parents.
The only other logical explanation in my mind is Donald Trump. And the literature in political science has coalesced around that same conclusion, as well.
Here are just a few examples from the literature that back up this point.
“How fights over Trump have led evangelicals to leave their churches” by Djupe, Niehiesel and Sokhey. Washington Post.
“Study: Clinton Voters Much More Likely to Leave Evangelicalism than Trump Voters” by Djupe and Burge. Christianity Today.
From Politics to the Pews by Michele Margolis. University of Chicago Press.
“Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics” by Patrick Egan. American Journal of Political Science.
“Congregation Shopping During the Pandemic: A Research Note” by Higgins and Djupe. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
“Reversing the Causal Arrow: Politics’ Influences on Religious Choices” by Michele Margolis. Political Psychology.
“The Politics of Church Shopping” by Hafner and Audette. Politics & Religion.
In each of them, the portrait becomes clearer: people are picking their religion based on their politics, not their politics based on their religion. That means that moderates and liberals are feeling less and less welcome in evangelical churches and are heading to the exits, never to return.
That also means that more and more Americans are being drawn to evangelicalism because of the political and cultural connotations of the term, with little regard for the theology. This is a point I made in the New York Times and a debate I did with Andrew Walker last year in Washington, D.C.
The only fights left are between the George W. Bush conservatives and the Donald Trump conservatives. The Southern Baptist Convention is emblematic of this new stage in the evolution of the “religious right.”
The purification of White American religion is nearly complete now.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge. Subscribe to his “Graphs about Religion” column on Substack, where this post first appeared.