(CP) A recent study taking a look at church attendance amongst Evangelicals reveals that conservatives are the almost certainly to discover as “low-attending Evangelicals.”
In a post on his Substack Graphs About Religion on Monday, researcher Ryan Burge examined the church attendance rates of self-identified Evangelicals based on data from the Cooperative Election Study through the years. He began by highlighting a rise within the share of self-described Evangelicals who “never” attend church services from 3% in 2008 to 10% in 2023, while noting that the share of self-identified Evangelicals who “seldom” go to church has risen from 13% to 17% in the identical time period.
Broken down by political affiliation, 5.5% of conservative self-identified Evangelicals said they either “seldom” or “never” attend church services in 2008. That figure rose to 12.6% in 2023. By contrast, the share of self-identified moderate Evangelicals who “seldom” or “never” go to church increased from 5% to eight.5%, while the share of self-described liberal Evangelicals with similarly low church attendance rates saw the smallest change through the years, jumping from 3.5% to 4.5%.
Burge explained that the gap between the share of liberal and conservative Evangelicals who either rarely or never go to church increased from 2 percentage points in 2008 to eight percentage points in 2023. “This is pretty compelling evidence that this phenomenon is being driven, in no small part, by politics — not religion,” he wrote.
The post also checked out the connection between education levels and church attendance inside the Evangelical community, finding that just one.8% of Evangelicals who had graduated college never or rarely went to church in 2008 in comparison with 7.7% of Evangelicals with a highschool diploma or less. By 2023, 4.6% of Evangelicals with college degrees had low church attendance rates, together with 13.2% of Evangelicals with a highschool education or less.
When examining church attendance amongst Evangelicals by race, Burge found that the share of white Evangelicals with low church attendance rates (5.8%) was the very best amongst all racial groups, followed by blacks (4.8%), Hispanics (2.5%) and Asians (1.5%).
However, by 2023, the share of black Evangelicals who never or rarely go to church (11.2%) had eclipsed the share of whites in the identical category (9.2%). The percentage of Hispanics (7.4%) and Asians (4.8%) with low church attendance rates had also risen through the years.
Upon placing the variables he examined right into a regression model, Burge found that “being a conservative” had “more predictive power (in either direction) than all the opposite ones thrown on this model” relating to forecasting the likelihood that somebody is a “low-attending Evangelical.” He concluded that “low-attending evangelicalism is a phenomenon driven largely by political concerns not theological beliefs.”
Burge also determined that white conservatives were almost certainly to be “low-attending” Evangelicals, with 9% of those in that group fitting the label. Across all racial groups, conservatism was a robust predictor of whether someone was a “low-attending” Evangelical, with moderates less likely than conservatives to fall into that category and liberals less likely than moderates to achieve this.
Burge suggested that a difference in understanding in regards to the meaning of the word “Evangelical” might explain the disparities in church attendance rates between racial groups and political ideology.
Burge’s research comes as religious affiliation and church attendance are widely seen as aspects that influence a person’s political preference. Exit polling from the 2020 presidential election shows that 76% of white Evangelical Christians supported Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump, while exit polling from the 2016 presidential election measured white Evangelical Christian support for Trump at 80%.
Exit polling from 2016 also documents a relationship between church attendance and voting behavior. Among those that attend religious services at the very least once every week, 55% supported Trump, while 41% backed Democratic candidate and former first lady Hillary Clinton. Forty-nine percent of respondents who attend church services at the very least once a month voted for Trump, while 47% supported Clinton.
By contrast, 48% of those that attend church a number of times a yr voted for Clinton, while 46% backed Trump. Among respondents who “never” go to church, a solid majority (62%) favored Clinton over Trump. Broken down more broadly, Trump won a majority (53%) of voters who go to church at the very least once a month, while Clinton won most (54%) who attend religious services “less often than that.”
