Belief vs. Behavior: Religion and Political Party Preference

By Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin

In recent years, the question of religious belief and behavior has become increasingly important in considerations of party politics. Postelection analyses of the November 2004 vote in particular have dwelt on trying to understand the relationship between political behavior and the religion of voters. But there is more than one way to approach such an analysis, as new findings from the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey show.

One is by looking at people in terms of the religions with which they identify themselves. When asked, "What is your religion, if any?" respondents to ARIS 2001 fell into thirteen groups (including those who responded "None" and don't know or refused), with a total of 80 percent identifying with one religion or another. Figures 1-3 below show the distribution of twelve religious groupings-including the no-religion "Nones" but excluding the don't know category-among three groups of political supporters: Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.

As we see in Figure 1, the most pro-Republican group by far is the Mormons. The political result is clear in Utah, where Mormons are a numerical majority of the population. Five out of six members of Utah's congressional delegation are both Mormon and Republican.

After the Mormons, the top Republican supporters are the various Protestant tradition groups-a feature of American politics throughout the twentieth century-and the lowest levels of support are among the five non-Christian groups. Catholics, the nation's largest religious group, can be found in the middle, between the Protestants and the non-Christians.

Figure 2 on Democratic Party support is largely an inversion of Figure 1. Here, Mormons, who were the top group in support of Republicans, are at the bottom of the chart. Their position at the top of Figure 1 is replicated in Figure 2 by Jews, another small religious group, who were third least likely to support the Republicans.

Not all religious groups exhibited such clear-cut party preferences. For instance, 38 percent of Mainline Christians preferred Republicans, while 29 percent preferred Democrats. Similarly, 37 percent of Pentecostals leaned toward Republicans and 32 percent toward Democrats; among Baptists the proportions were 32 percent and 39 percent, respectively. Catholics, who have been the anchor of the Democratic Party coalition since the Civil War, are now more balanced between the parties, but they still showed a significant Democratic bias.

Figure 3 shows the distribution among religious groups of Americans who choose not to identify or register with any party. So-called independents accounted for 30 percent of the population and ranged between 22 percent and 43 percent across all the religious groups. Non-Christians, aside from Jews, seemed most likely to take this position.