Cooperative Election Study

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Handy religion info for political-desk files: Iowa is not a very evangelical state

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Handy religion info for political-desk files: Iowa is not a very evangelical state

I don’t know if you knew this or not, but there was a bit of a dustup in Iowa’s Capitol building a few weeks ago. Here’s a quick summary.

The statehouse has a policy that allows different groups to put up a display for a period of time. The Satanic Temple made a written request to use this opportunity to display a Baphomet statue. After some back and forth on details, it was approved.

The display went up and folks got angry. The governor urged folks to pray over the building.

A Mississippi man, Michael Cassidy, drove across the country, entered the State Capital and destroyed the display with a hammer.

Cassidy was charged with a crime for his actions. However, there is a small (but very vocal) contingent of true believers on X (formerly Twitter) that believes Cassidy to be a hero and that all charges should be dropped.

The following tweet is illustrative of that (and click here for tmatt’s GetReligion post on the media coverage). But, I would argue that Ben Zeisloft has a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the religious composition of Iowa. In fact, Iowa is not some throwback to when America was very religious. Just the opposite - it reflects the overall movement away from religion in places where it used to dominate.


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Americans who never attend worship services are a bit of a political puzzle these days

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Americans who never attend worship services are a bit of a political puzzle these days

I was thinking a bit today about the idea of subgroup composition in the world of politics and religion.

For example, evangelicals could be the same share of the population today as they were in the early 1980s, but that doesn’t mean that the composition of the group hasn’t changed significantly during the previous four decades. In fact, it would be pretty shocking if the racial composition of evangelicals hadn’t shifted and the average educational attainment hadn’t climbed, given the overall macro-level movement in American society.

That got me thinking quite a bit about a specific group — those who never attend religious services.

In 2008, according to the Cooperative Election Study, about 20% of all respondents reported that they never attended religious services. By 2022, that share had risen to 34%. A fourteen point jump is a whole lot of folks, by the way. In fact, in real numbers that’s over 45 million Americans.

But the composition of never attenders has also changed as that group has grown so much larger. What I really wanted to do is help readers better conceptualize this group — especially when it comes to politics.

One of my hobby horses recently has been trying to convince people that they need to stop thinking about Republicans as incredibly religiously active and Democrats are the ones who have nothing to do with religion. The Republican coalition is looking less and less religious every year and this is going to have big impacts in the elections to come.

Let’s start broad — with the share of each party identification that never attended religious services between 2008 and 2022.

In 2008, Independents were the most likely to be never attenders — bet you wouldn’t have guessed that.

Twenty-eight percent of them checked the “never” box, which was four points higher than Democrats. There were very few Republicans who were never attenders back when Barack Obama faced off against John McCain for the White House — just 10%.


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In 2023 America, organized religion has (this is not good news) become a luxury good

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In 2023 America, organized religion has (this is not good news) become a luxury good

I’m in absolutely no sense a biblical scholar. I’m nothing more than a lay preacher who was called by a local American Baptist congregation because I was willing to fill the pulpit each Sunday. I took about five courses in the Bible in undergraduate.

I don’t remember a lot about those courses, but a handful of things have stuck with me. Let me get just a little bit preachy for a second. (And forgive me for any heresies).

One idea that I just can never shake is that one of the central themes in the Gospel of Luke is the great reversal. It’s most succinctly stated in 13:30, “Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”

It’s all over the text. The Magnificat of Mary, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.” (Luke 1:52). “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 14:11) And, of course, “Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’” (Luke 5:31-32.)

The way that I understand Christianity is that Jesus was especially concerned with people on the margins of society. The sick, the poor, and the outcasts were high on his priority list. Thus, churches (being the extension of Jesus’ ministry), should focus their efforts on those exact same people.

But the data says that is not happening. Just the opposite in fact.

Religion in the 21st Century America has become an enclave for people who have done everything “right.” They have college degrees and marriages and children and middle-class incomes. For those who don’t check all those boxes, religion is just not for them.

I’m going to stop quoting scripture now (not my strong suit) to describing the data (which is way more comfortable for me). The conclusions are unmistakable: religion has become a luxury good, and that’s leaving most of society on the fringes, yet again.

Let’s start with that old chestnut that I roll out from time to time — the basic relationship between education and religious disaffiliation.


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The rise of singleness and how organized religion is being impacted, big time

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The rise of singleness and how organized religion is being impacted, big time

A few months ago, I wrote a post about falling marriage rates and the possible link to religion: “Marriage rates are falling. Is the decline of religion to blame? (behind paywall).

But when I read over those graphs I think I had a big blind spot — gender.

Obviously marriage rates aren’t the same for men and women for a wide variety of reasons. For instance, an article in the New York Times in late July was focused on how online communities have sprouted up to help other women know that specific men they find on dating apps are safe to be around.

Dan Cox, from the American Enterprise Institute did some polling and found that younger women (18-29) were significantly more likely to report that they were single in 2022 compared to 2020 (45% vs 38%). And a book published in 2015 called, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game,” found that educated women just didn’t have that many options when it came to finding a potential mate because the share of men going to college has declined sharply in recent decades.

So, I wanted to explore that gender gap on marriage a bit. But also I wanted to see how all of that related back to religion.

I think it goes without saying that lots of people have found their current spouse at a house of worship. But is being single driving women further away from religion than unmarried men? These are questions worth some analysis and reflection.

Let’s start with the broadest question: are women more likely to report that they have never been married compared to men? 

In 2008, about 20% of all women in the sample reported that they had never been married — it was 30% of all men. That’s not a small gap and it’s persisted for the entire length of the Cooperative Election Study. Both trend lines have slowly edged up every year.

However, I would be remiss to point out that the line for women has stayed relatively stable beginning in about 2018 when 26-27% say that they were never married.

For men, the number continues to climb. In the most recent data collected from 2022, about 37% of men say that they have never been married. The overall conclusion is pretty unmistakable: singleness is on the rise for both men and women, but women are still 8-10 points less likely to never be married.

This is clearly a function of age, of course. Older people have just had more opportunities to get married compared to younger ones.


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Are white evangelicals devoted to Fox News? Do atheists flock over to MSNBC?

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Are white evangelicals devoted to Fox News? Do atheists flock over to MSNBC?

One of my favorite things to do when the weather is nice is walk my dog. She’s a seven-pound Yorkshire terrier named Lucy. Oftentimes she wants to take a stroll around the neighborhood in the early evening and it’s a good excuse for me to stand up from the computer and actually move around a bit.

It helps to know that I live in an older neighborhood in the Midwest where many houses were built close together and only 10 feet from the sidewalk. So, I can easily see in someone’s living room when I am walking by with the dog.

I love to catch a glance at what’s on their television. Lots of times it’s the St. Louis Cardinals, but that’s a less frequent occurrence as the team has been terrible this year. But if it’s not baseball, it’s usually the news. I see a little MSNBC, a bit more of CNN, but a whole lot of Fox News. If you go to a local doctor’s office, it’s what is on the television in the waiting room. It’s really the default channel for most public spaces in rural, deep-red America.

I am not a scholar of media and politics, but there have been dozens of books written about the 24 hours news cycle and the rise of polarized outlets like Fox News and MSNBC and the impact that they are having on society and politics. But I’ve never really seen a whole lot written about religion and media consumption. It’s time to change that.

The Cooperative Election Study asks people if they have watched a variety of media outlets in the prior 24 hours. They get all the legacy networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) but also the news channels like FNC, MSNBC and CNN. The results are fascinating and every time I look at the heat map, I seem to find a little nugget that I didn’t see the previous time.

The big networks still do pretty well, honestly. A decent chunk of America is watching NBC, CBS and ABC on a regular basis. And what’s interesting is that there’s not a ton of variation from top to bottom. For example, ABC hovers between 30% and 50% for basically every group (aside from Black Protestants). The other networks are in that same range, too. There’s pretty wide penetration across all kinds of religious groups.

I was surprised how broad the viewership is for CNN.


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Double-thinking about atheists: What's up with their role in America's hot public square?

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Double-thinking about atheists: What's up with their role in America's hot public square?

I live in Southern Appalachia, which is in Bible Belt territory on anyone’s map of America.

Then again, I live near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — a place where the nerdy PhD’s per-square-foot count is the same or higher than, well, the California Institute of Technology or the University of California, Berkeley. In other words, it’s surprisingly easy to run into local atheists and agnostics just about anywhere one engages in conversation (take the gym, for example).

Are these unbelievers hostile? Let’s just say that the real people I meet in this niche religious group (#ducking) are different from those I encounter in cyberspace. Maybe there’s something about the Southern Highlands that attracts friendly atheists-agnostics?

I thought about this phenomenon when I saw this recent Graphs about Religion headline from political scientist (and GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge: “Just How Much Do Americans Dislike Atheists?”

This new Burge piece reminded me of his earlier piece: “No One Participates in Politics More than Atheists — Even White Evangelicals.” Remember these reflections on the Cooperative Election Study question: “Have you done any of the following activities in the previous month?”

The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.

The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.

HALF of atheists report giving to a candidate or campaign in the 2020 presidential election cycle.

And while they don’t lead the pack when it comes to attending a local political meeting, they only trail Hindus by four percentage points.

Anyway, I stashed these Burge URLs in my growing “Thinker piece” file — along with a very interesting (and I would argue, related) Pew Research Center post with this headline: “One-in-six Americans have taken steps to see less of someone on social media due to religious content.”

Let’s try to connect a few dots.


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Religious Right? Those true believers are nowhere near as politically active as atheists

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Religious Right? Those true believers are nowhere near as politically active as atheists

The last 40 years of politics and religion has been focused squarely on the ascendancy of the Religious Right.

I must admit that I’ve probably contributed my fair share to that discourse, as well.

A motley crew of white evangelicals and traditional Catholics locked arms on some social issues, started voting in large numbers for Republican candidates, and changed American politics forever.

But I think that era of religion and politics is rapidly coming to a close. The Religious Right is no longer a primarily religious movement — from my point of view it’s one about cultural conservatism and nearly blind support for the GOP with few trappings of any real religiosity behind it.

Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics. Let me put it plainly: atheists are the most politically active group in American politics today and the Democrats (and some Republicans) ignore them at their own peril.

The data is clear and unequivocal on this point - no one gets involved in the political process to the level of the average atheist.

The Cooperative Election Study always asks a nice little battery of questions about political engagement. It’s phrased simply as: have you done any of the following activities in the previous month? Because the CES is fielded in the height of election season, if someone was going to get politically active, they would be doing so in October or November of an election year.

The group that is most likely to contact a public official? Atheists.

The group that puts up political signs at the highest rates? Atheists.


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Thinking about a sort of 'religious' question: Why do atheists have so few children?

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Thinking about a sort of 'religious' question: Why do atheists have so few children?

One thing I love about studying religion is that it impacts every aspect of social life. How people vote, where they live, what kind of jobs they pursue, are influenced in some way by their religious beliefs and behaviors.

One choice that is clearly shaped by religion is when (and if) adults have children and how large they want their families to be.

In the United States, the fertility rate in 2008 was 2.06 children per woman. In 2023, it’s projected to be 1.78 children per woman. Forty-nine out of 50 states had a lower fertility rate in 2020 compared to 2010 (North Dakota was the only one to buck the trend.)

Obviously, there are a ton of factors that lead to a drop in fertility. Economics is usually considered to be a leading culprit for a drop in fertility. The Great Recession is supposed to lead to an enrollment cliff in higher education in the next five years because people decided to delay pregnancy.

But here’s another explanation that may be playing a noticeable role in the drop in American fertility: the increasing secularization of the United States.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all encourage their adherents to marry and have children. But lots of Americans don’t adhere to those faiths anymore. I wrote an entire book (actually two of them) about the rising number of Americans who reject religion entirely or, at least, organized forms of faith.

Does this actually matter, though? Do we see in the data a difference in parenting rates for atheists compared to Latter-day Saints, for instance?


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