Editor’s note: You knew this was coming, sooner or later. Ryan Burge has packed up lots of his charts and headed to Substack. With his blessing, as part of his cooperation with this blog, we will offer chunks of those articles and point readers to them.

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Everyone who even tacitly thinks about religion and politics is well aware of the linkage between white Christians the Republican party. But, I think that is a pretty severe oversimplification of what is actually happening.

I took the Cooperative Election Study’s 2008 wave and compared it to the just released 2022 wave. Both surveys were conducted right around election season. White Christians are those who identify as Protestant, Catholic, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Eastern Orthodox.

Here are the overall shifts in the share who identify with the Republican party in 2022 vs 2008. A negative number denotes movement toward the Democrats - note how rarely that happens.

Almost all the story can be found in the bottom left boxes — that’s those with low levels of education and attend church in frequently. Those shifts there are at least ten percentage points. Among those who seldom or never attend and have a high school diploma or less — it’s a 21 percentage point difference.

That’s huge.

But also look at the rest of the graph. Nothing major to report all across the top rows — that’s folks with a college degree. They aren’t moving toward the Republicans, or away from them either. And, among weekly attenders (the column furthest right), there’s very subtle changes, too.

Some astute replies are focused on the idea that the highest attenders can’t move that much further to the right because they were already consistently Republican by 2008.

That may be true, but it’s not explaining the whole situation. Seventy percent of white Christians with a college degree who attended weekly were Republicans in 2008. That’s certainly a lot, but other groups are more homogeneous. For example, 90% of Black Protestants align with the Democrats — it’s 80% of atheists. So, there is room to the right.

But look at a group like those with a college degree who attend yearly or monthly. They were 56% Republicans in 2008 and 56% Republican in 2022.

That’s nowhere close to a politically cohesive group. There are stories there to cover.

CONTINUE READING: “White Christians Are Becoming More Republican” by Ryan Burge, at his new Substack feed.