Growing up in Asian and White church spaces, politics was rarely discussed. When it was, it was almost always implicitly and sometimes explicitly claimed that to be God-fearing was to be Republican. The idea of a Christian Democrat seemed an oxymoron; any Christian who was a Democrat was someone who had not read their Bible enough, had not been prayed enough, or were pretending to be Christians but were in fact living in sin and captive to depraved theology.
That perception remains widespread today, stoked by opportunistic politicians on the right who race to see who can hold up bibles higher or tweet more bible verses while pointing to the hostility to religion by some politicians on the left. The impossibility of faithful Christians voting Democratic is whispered from the pews, sometimes implied from the pulpit, and loudly resonates through the echo chambers of conservative spaces. The repeating resonance of a narrative where one party is the party of God, the defenders of the Bible, and the sanctified representatives of faithful churchgoers has been repeated so many times that it can be easy to see that as objective truth.
But the claim that to be godly is to be Republican is at best factually incomplete and at worse culturally naïve and arrogant. This is clear when we look beyond our own church experiences and take a more comprehensive view of the landscape of Christians in America. Data from the General Social Survey collected in 2016 and 2018 reveals that contrary to what I and perhaps what you learned in church, many faithful Christians are Democrats.
Among self-identified Christians (those who identify as a Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or inter/non-denominational), 40% generally think of themselves as Republicans, 19% are Independents, and 41% are Democrats. In other words, more than 4 in 10 Christians in America are Democrats.
But being a Christian is more than self-identification. Religiosity such as frequency of church attendance and prayer, beliefs about the Bible, and identification as a Christian also matters. Among Christians who go to church, identification as a Democrat declines with frequency of attendance. But even among Christians who attend church weekly or more, 37% identify as Democrats. Similar patterns emerge when considering how frequently Christians pray. While those who pray less are more likely to be Democrats, among those who pray daily or more, 41% identify as Democrats. Based on how Christians view the Word of God, those taking the most liberal theological view (that the Bible is an ancient book of fables) are most likely to be Democrats (56%), but 39% of those who hold the most conservative view (the Bible is the Word of God and should be taken literally) also consider themselves Democrats. And in factoring identification as a Christian, 37% of those with the lowest identification as a Christian (somewhat strong) identify as a Democrat.
Combining these measures to create a composite religiosity scale, it’s clear that Christians with lower religiosity are more likely to be Democrats. But among the most religious Christians (who pray daily, go to church weekly, identify strongly as a Christian, and hold orthodox views of the Word of God), 37% or nearly 4 in 10 identify as Democrats. And 18% of the most religious Christians identify as strong Democrats, almost equal to the number who identify as strong Republicans (19%).
One reason for the dissonance between the reality of religious pluralization among religious Christians and the assumption that godly Christians cannot be Democrats lies in the demographic differences between very religious Democrats and Republicans. Since most people go to church with people similar to them, lack of exposure and close contact with Christians different to you may lead you to misconceptions that all Christians are like you and hold similar political views as you.
The first big difference between very religious Democrats and Republicans is race. While 90% of religious Republicans are White and 4% are Black, 40% of religious Democrats are White and 48% are Black. Just as partisanship of less religious Americans are also significantly shaped by race, so it is in the pews. Religious Democrats are also more likely to be female than religious Republicans (68% vs 58%) and to be over twice as likely to be born outside the country than religious Republicans (20% vs 7%).
But perhaps the most significant difference between religious Democrats and Republicans is political ideology. Religious Democrats are ten times more likely than religious Republicans to identify as liberal (30% vs 3%) and over twice as likely to identify as moderate (43% vs 17%). By contrast, religious Republicans are nearly three times more likely to identify as conservative than religious Democrats (80% vs 28%). Ideology shapes more than just vote choice but also reflects worldviews and cultural expectations about society and ideals of the country. And ideology is likely the dominant cultural lens we use when we read, interpret, and seek to apply biblical truths in our specific contemporary contexts.
In an increasingly polarized world, ideology also shapes our media consumption. A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center finds partisanship and ideological differences predict trust in media and media consumption of political news. There are asymmetric divergences in trusted media. For example, 75% of conservative Republicans trust Fox News while 77% of liberal Democrats distrust Fox News. Similarly, while 70% of liberal Democrats trust CNN, 67% of conservative Republicans distrust CNN. This divergence in trust matters because it can seem that we live in very different Americas depending on where we get our news. These polarized views of America are then brought into the pews and endowed with some religious embellishment so that a particular truth becomes sanctified as the truth, nay God’s truth.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that the church reflects the political and demographic cleavages of contemporary American society. But the challenge for the church is to consider how it can, guided by the unity we have in Christ, model better embrace of diverse social and political views. Instead of being a witness of counter-cultural graciousness, too many are too quick to denounce as ungodly and un-Christian those who read the same Bible and pray to the same God but vote for a different party. That so many today still cannot imagine a faithful godly Christian being a Democrat or assume the incompatibility of biblical truth with anything outside Republican policies reveals how far the church needs to grow in appreciating the diversity of the church, realizing the multiplicity of ways that biblical truths translate into social policy in a pluralistic democracy, and deconstructing how we have allowed the kingdoms of this world to distort how we understand and participate in the kingdom of God.
