The Two Americas (on Religion)

A recent poll gives us a fascinating picture of how Republicans and Democrats view a range of religious groups

A man prays on January 22, 2023 outside Monterey Park City Hall in Monterey Park, California, the site of a mass shooting the previous evening. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

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Things around here tend to be pretty serious and even intense. Lots of ominous warnings about grave threats. That’s inevitable in a newsletter like this one. But it doesn’t always need to be so heavy.

For today’s post, I want to take a close look at a YouGov poll that first appeared in late December but just started getting play this week, I think, because Matthew Yglesias tweeted about a couple aspects of its findings. I immediately chimed in myself, and then I started seeing others retweeting the poll and commenting on it.

I understand why the findings are getting some attention. The poll measures “Americans' attitudes toward 35 religious groups, organizations, and belief systems,” to quote its executive summary. Those top-line results are interesting, though not at all surprising. It finds, for example, that Christianity is quite popular and Satanism isn’t. (You don’t say.)

Where things become more intriguing is in the pollsters’ efforts to separate out the different ways Democrats and Republicans view these religious groups, organizations, and belief systems. If it’s true—and I think it is—that the country is increasingly divided into largely closed cultural enclaves defined by partisan-based epistemologies, we would expect to see a fair amount of divergence between the two groups. And we do.

What do these differences (as well as the similarities that remain, despite the centrifugal forces pulling us apart) tell us about the members of each party—and who we are as a country—in 2023? At least a few interesting things.

By the Numbers

Let’s just proceed down the chart showing the net favorability of religious groups and beliefs among Democrats and Republicans.

Taken from “Americans’ Views on 35 Religious Groups, Organizations, and Belief Systems” at YouGov America.

As the executive summary notes, Americans like Christianity. But as we also see above, Republicans view it significantly more favorably (by 25 points) than Democrats. There’s a similar 18-point gap for Protestantism in general and a 23-point gap for Catholicism—showing, I think, that the religious divide between the two parties that began to show up around the time of the Reagan administration (with Republicans more pious and Democrats more secular) persists down to today. (Another chart included with the poll results shows that those who are very religious, who tend to be Republicans, are in most cases more favorable to all religions than those who are not especially observant.)  

All of the more generic Christian groups are net favorable for members of both parties, even if Democrats have significantly lower levels of positive feeling than Republicans. Once we get more specific and move to the Amish, the 23-point gap has Democrats at -1, meaning that members of the Donkey Party in the aggregate have a very slight edge of displeasure when contemplating horses, buggies, and bonnets.  

But that’s nothing compared to Republican reaction to Buddhists, which is net negative by 11 points and a grand total of 40 points below the 29-point favorability expressed by Democrats. (Amazing to think Democrats have roughly equally positive attitudes toward Buddhists as Republicans have toward Protestants and Catholics.) It’s not immediately clear to me where these very warm feelings for Buddhists among Democrats come from (though I engage in some speculation below). Attitudes towards Hindus, for example, aren’t nearly as positive among Democrats (or quite as negative among Republicans). But attitudes toward Muslims is downright hostile, with Democrats tilting slightly negative overall (-5), and Republicans coming in net negative by a whopping 42 points.

Attitudes toward Jews, by contrast, are far warmer—especially among Republicans (+23 compared to +9 among Democrats). At first sight, the partisan gap is surprising, given that, according to the Pew Research Center, “Seven-in-ten Jewish adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, and half describe their political views as liberal.” Yet the existence of Israel in a region of the world that plays an important role in evangelical Protestant beliefs about the second coming of Jesus Christ, Israel’s increasingly right-wing governments, and the country’s struggles with Islamic terrorism—all of it no doubt contributes to generating sympathy for Jews among Republicans and, in turn, undermining it somewhat among Democrats.

Interestingly, the poll separates out Orthodox Jews, who tend to vote for Republicans and hold social and cultural views much more aligned with the GOP than the Democrats. The results show attitudes toward this subset of American Jews coming in 10-12 points lower among both Republicans and Democrats, with the latter sinking into unfavorability by 3 points.

But that’s nothing compared to bipartisan levels of unfavorability toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (whose members are often called Mormons). Despite a heavy GOP skew among LDS voters, Republicans at large have an unfavorable view of Mormons by 12 points. That same GOP skew most likely contributes to Democratic favorability coming in 15 points lower than that.

Other smaller religious groups (Unitarian Universalists, Seventh-Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists) are viewed more negatively by members of one or both parties. But nothing quite rivals the unfavorability achieved by Satanists, who are 32 points underwater with Democrats and an astonishing 70 points underwater with Republicans.    

A final observation: The biggest partisan gap by far concerns agnosticism and atheism. Those who doubt the existence of God but don’t claim to possess knowledge one way or the other have a net favorability rating of +24 among Democrats but a net unfavorability of -27 among Republicans (a gap of 51 points). Similarly, those who claim to know God does not exist have a net favorable rating (by 13 points) among Democrats and net negative (by 39 points) among Republicans (a 52-point gap).   

The Takeaways

I think it’s possible to make some tentative generalizations on the basis of these findings.

For one thing, Republicans are more motivated than Democrats by what Plato called “love of one’s own” (thymos). Members of the GOP overwhelmingly identify as Christians, and they view fellow Christians more favorably than those of other faiths, with smaller and more unusual forms of Christianity (the LDS, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses) prompting levels of suspicion Republicans otherwise reserve for other world religions. Judaism is an exception to this rule, presumably because of Christianity’s origins in Hebrew scripture, Israel role in evangelical views of the end times, and the other considerations mentioned above.

Democrats, meanwhile, are more inclined than Republicans toward favorable views of “the other,” but especially if the other is viewed as open-minded and tolerant. This may partly explain Democratic affection for Buddhism, which most progressive Americans probably know through the practice of yoga and other increasingly popular “wellness” practices derived and adapted from Eastern spirituality.

When it comes to seemingly less tolerant (or morally stricter) faiths, Democratic approval seems related to the cultural proximity and exoticism of the religion. So Democrats have mildly negative (-5) attitudes toward Islam, which is culturally marginal in the United States, but far more negative views (-27) toward the LDS, which has its origins in the American past and plays a significant role in the political life of the nation (mostly through its influence on the Republican Party).       

Then, finally, there is the deep suspicion of religious doubt among Republicans, who display considerable negativity toward both atheists and agnostics, and respect for doubt among Democrats. We live at a time when partisanship is interacting with these broader tendencies to produce troublingly fixed (and sometimes surprising) forms of credulity and distrust. (Think of Republicans hurling invective at public-health authorities but trusting anti-vax activists, and Democrats deferring to Anthony Fauci and the FBI while also denouncing the supposedly pervasive structural racism of various American institutions.) But the underlying disposition among members of each party seems to be captured quite well by the poll: Republicans tend to distrust doubt when it comes to religion, just as Democrats tend to respect it.