Political Ideology and Church Attendance

Sociologist Ryan Burge has a column in his substack in which he deduces from survey data that "There is almost no 'Liberalizing Religion' in the U.S."

Burge points out that the more frequently one attends religious services the more conservative they're likely to be. He observes rather wryly that, "the more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans." He offers this chart to illustrate his point:

Burge writes that,

Just 21% of never attenders are conservative, while 46% identify as liberal.

Among yearly attenders, the conservatives start to take over compared to liberals (36% vs 25%). Among weekly attenders, 52% are conservative, while just 16% are liberal. It’s even more extreme among the most frequent attenders. For folks who are attending religious services multiple times a week, about 60% are conservative and 10% are liberal.

This holds across racial lines and generally holds across denominational lines.

[Even] folks who are members of what are perceived to be left leaning or moderate denominations like the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA are showing a similar pattern to Southern Baptists - higher attendance means less liberalism.

There are only two denominations that are clearly pointing upward - the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (and that’s likely because of the weekly+ group being so liberal) and members of the Episcopal Church.

Burge closes with an interesting coda:

Every once in a while a pastor or denominational leader in a mainline church will ask me if it would be wise for them to spend time and resources on publicizing the fact that their church is not conservative. I don’t know if there’s an empirically driven answer to that question. But it doesn’t appear that young people in the United States have any concept of what liberal religious groups accomplished in American history.

The Progressive Era was driven, in no small part, by those folks who believed fervently in the social gospel. Overtime rules, child labor laws, and work safety requirements were pushed by people of faith to make this Earth a bit more like heaven.

The Civil Rights Movement was infused with religiosity from top to bottom from the impassioned sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the quiet activism of folks like James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who traveled from Boston to Selma, Alabama to march for voting rights for African-Americans. He was killed by a group of local white men, they were never charged with a crime.

For anyone born in the last forty years or so, the only conception that they have of religious activism is likely tied up with the Religious Right. Which, of course, was a conservative movement. Maybe the idea that religion can push people toward left-leaning ideas is over for good. It’s hard to say, or maybe the pendulum will swing back in the other direction at some point in the future.

From this data driven vantage point - there’s plenty of evidence that American religion is now inextricably linked to one political viewpoint. For good or for ill.

Perhaps Burge is correct, but there are reasons to think that liberal religious groups have found a new issue to devote their energies to - unlimited immigration. This article explains how not a few religious groups have been advocating for what amounts to open borders and contains the astonishing statistic that between 2010 and 2015 over 33,000 people have been killed by illegal aliens.

[The] last report the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced on illegal alien crime was in 2018. That report showed that between 2010 and 2015, illegal migrants who were incarcerated were responsible for the deaths of 33,000 people. Simple back-of-the-envelope math suggests that the total over the last 13 years could easily top 85,000.

If this is accurate it's both shocking and sickening. Maybe the folks who have no problem with it just don't go to church often enough.