Sorry to bring this up again, but I really have to because of the many religion-news angles unfolding in the final weeks of this year’s presidential race, and lots of U.S. Senate races as well.
Hang in there with me. We are heading toward a puzzling passage in a recent Religion News Service analysis that ran with this headline: “ ‘Humanists for Biden-Harris’ to mobilize nonreligious vote.”
Now, that flash back: Frequent GetReligion readers will recall that, in the summer of 2007, political scientist and polling maven John C. Green spoke at a Washington Journalism Center seminar for a circle of journalists from around the world. The topic was press freedom in their home countries, but most of the journalists — especially those from Africa — wanted to talk about the young Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who was jumping into the White House race.
The bottom line: Obama was speaking directly to Democrats in the black church, but he was also reaching out to an emerging power bloc in his party — a group Green called the “religiously unaffiliated.” These so-called “nones” were poised to form a powerful coalition with atheists, agnostics and liberal believers. They shared, you see, a common cultural enemy on many issues, as in believers in traditional forms of faith. As I wrote in 2012:
On the right side of the American religious marketplace, defined in terms of doctrine and practice, is a camp of roughly 20 percent (maybe less) of believers who are seriously trying to practice their chosen faith at the level of daily life, said Green. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there is a growing camp of people who are atheists, agnostics or vaguely spiritual believers. …
In recent national elections this growing camp of secularists and religiously unaffiliated people have formed a powerful coalition with Catholic liberals, liberal Jews and the declining numbers of people found in America's liberal religious denominations (such as the "seven sisters" of oldline Protestantism). Add it all up, Green said in 2009, and you had a growing camp of roughly 20 percent or so on the cultural left.
The bottom line: This coalition was emerging as the dominant voice in the modern Democratic Party on matters of culture and religion.
In those days, Green was doing quite a bit of work with the Pew Research Center — so this was a foretaste of the information that would create waves of headlines with the 2012 release of the “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise” studies.
At press events linked to the release of that data, Green said, once again:
The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the “Nones” skew heavily Democratic as voters – with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.
“It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters.
Now, with all of that in mind, let’s focus on that RNS analysis.
This is what caught my eye and left me a bit perplexed:
The “Humanists for Biden” group … is chaired by Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The humanist and nonreligious community is poised to be a very significant part of this presidential election in that we represent maybe 30% or so of Democratic voters,” Epstein told Religion News Service.
The group also announced a slate of co-chairs that includes Sarah Levin, who also co-chaired the Democratic National Convention’s Interfaith Council and heads Secular Strategies, an organization that mobilizes secular voters. …
Epstein said Humanists for Biden hopes to reach a broad swath of atheists, agnostics and other religiously unaffiliated voters who make up the largest belief group in the Democratic Party, constituting around 28% of its members, according to political scientist Ryan Burge.
Wait a minute. I thought the 2019 Pew numbers for atheists, agnostics, “nones” (or “nothing in particular” believers) put that coalition at roughly 26% of the entire American population.
If that’s the case, then it doesn’t appear that the Democratic Party is much more secular — or more “spiritual, but not religious” — than the rest of America. #REALLY
Thus, I contacted Burge, a GetReligion contributor (and a must-follow on Twitter), for some clarification.
There are several ways to look at this issue and, apparently, all of them point to this coalition having massive clout in the Democratic Party or in cultural groups adjacent to it.
Burge wrote me back and here is some of what he had to say:
The issue there is a measurement one. There are two ways to measure the nones — the [General Social Survey] way, and the updated way that Pew has been using along with a lot of other surveys. That gives you three options to be a none: atheist, agnostic, nothing in particular. …
In the 2018 GSS, 23% of Americans were nones. In the 2018 [Cooperative Congressional Election Study], 30% of Americans were nones.
In the CCES, 37% of Democrats are nones in 2018. It was 28% of Democrats in the GSS.
The bottom line: Burge is convinced that the “GSS undercounts nones pretty significantly.”
For more information on that, see this article — “How Many Nones Are There? Maybe More than We Thought” — that Burge wrote for the Religion in Public weblog.
Readers may also want to check out this recent Burge piece for Religion Unplugged: “Are Democrats Influenced By Religion As Much As Republicans?”
This chart is crucial:
Here is part of what Burge had to say about that information:
… For five of the six identities the ranking never moved more than one position up or down from strong Democrats to strong Republicans. For instance, being an American was the second most important for all Democrats, but only bumped up to the first position for those who classified themselves as strong Republicans.
However, the outlier here is religion. For strong Democrats, it ranked as the least important (sixth out of six). But, as one follows the yellow line from left to right it begins to rise — becoming more important. For independents, it was in the fifth position, but then jumped up to fourth among weak Republicans. Finally, it ends as the third most important for strong Republicans just behind being an American and close family.
It’s clear from these results that religion is deeply intertwined with political partisanship.
Now, that that into consideration when following political debates in the weeks ahead or, for that matter, the ongoing debates about the religious beliefs of Judge Amy Coney Barrett joining the U.S. Supreme Court.
Once again, here is that Green quote from 2012, echoing the information he shared with our WJC students at the 2007 seminar: “It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party.”
True, that.