Aug 05, 2024

If there’s a quote from the last ten years that lives in my orbit it’s this one from Ross Douthat from the New York Times. In February of 2016, he tweeted:

That statement has sort of taken on a life of its own at this point. The Week published an analysis of it back in 2017. And The American Conservative did the same that year with the title, “The Douthat Scenario is Coming True.” In fact, just a few months ago, Ross titled one of his regular New York Times columns, “Is There a Post-Religious Right?”

The debate over a potentially less religious future for the Republican Party took center stage during discussions surrounding the Republican National Convention in July. On the first day of the festivities, Amber Rose was given a speaking slot. Ms. Rose is an OnlyFans model and her appearance drew the ire of a lot of conservative commentators on Twitter, including Matt Walsh, and many others who believed that Rose should not be platformed by the RNC. He wrote,

The RNC gives a primetime speaking slot to a pro-abortion feminist and self-proclaimed slut with a face tattoo whose only claim to fame is having sex with rappers. Truly an embarrassment. Not a single voter will be mobilized by this person.

The undercurrent from this is that some socially conservative Republicans (the Religious Right) are being supplanted in the GOP by a younger crop of Trump supporters who tend to be less religious. That’s troublesome for more traditional Republicans.

Is there a rising number of non-religious Republicans that are going to take the party in a less socially conservative direction? Let’s see what the data has to say about that.

I broke the modern GOP down into five age brackets ranging from 18-35 years old to 65 and older, then I calculated the religious composition of each of those age categories. I only used five categories of religion for ease of interpretation.

The share of younger Republicans who identify as Protestants has clearly declined significantly among the youngest adults. Among 18-35 year old Republicans, just 38% are Protestants. Among retired members of the GOP it’s twenty points higher. The Catholic share is basically unchanged, though. In every age category 22-24% of Republicans indicate that they are Roman Catholic. Although, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that based on the data from this post:

Is Catholicism Surging Among Younger Folks?

My wife and I bought our house about fifteen years ago. It was built in 1940 and had sat empty for a couple of years before we moved in. There were a lot of problems, obviously. But, in true Midwestern DIY style, I wanted to fix all of them myself. I set to work replacing water lines, peeling wallpaper, and refinishing the hardwood floors.

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There is some evidence that the ‘other world religions’ crowd is a bit larger among younger Republicans – that’s a category that includes Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists. It’s about one in ten young adult Republicans, it’s less than 4% of the oldest Republicans.

But the nones are clearly more robust among 18-35 year old Republicans. About 21% of them report that their religion is nothing in particular and another 8% describe themselves as atheists or agnostics. In crude terms, here is the composition of young Republicans – 60% Christians, 30% nones, 10% everyone else.

Older Republicans are much less likely to be nones – just 3% atheist/agnostic and 10% nothing in particular. Their composition is (crudely): 80% Christians, 15% nones, 5% everyone else. So, yeah, the younger generation of Republicans is clearly less attached to Christianity than the older set – about twenty points less Protestant and Catholic.

How much has the composition of young Republicans changed over the last fifteen years, though? I calculated the composition of 18-35 year old Republicans when Obama won the White House in 2008 and then did the same calculation using data from 2022. The changes aren’t really that large.

For instance, the Protestant share of young Republicans declined just three percentage points during this time period and there was a similar decline for the Catholic percentage, too. About 68% of young Republicans were Protestants or Catholics in 2008. It was 62% in the 2022 data. So, not some dramatic slide away from these two faith traditions.

The nones have risen, too, but certainly not in a numerically large way. In fact, there has been no statistically significant increase in the number of young adult Republicans who say that they are atheist or agnostic (7% to 8%). There has been a much more noticeable uptick in the ‘nothing in particular’ category, though – rising from 12% to 21%. But, again, this isn’t some tremendous shift away from religion among young Republicans. It’s there, but not in significant numbers to actually lead to major changes in the GOP platform.

Let me take one more angle on this. There’s a question that asks folks how important religion is to them and they are given four response options ranging from ‘very important’ to ‘not at all important.’ I calculated how those percentages changed among Republicans across the age spectrum from 18 to 75 years old.

A plurality (but not a majority) of the youngest Republicans say that religion is ‘very important’ to them. It was 43% of the sample of 18 year old members of the GOP. In contrast, just one in ten of them say that religion is ‘not at all important.’ About three quarters of this group chose the top two options on this question, so it’s hard to argue, based on this data, that the coming wave of Republicans is particularly non-religious.

However, what is also true is that younger Republicans are less religious than older ones based on this metric. A majority of the oldest Republicans (56%) say that religion is very important – about thirteen points higher than their college aged counterparts. But the differences in the far left and far right side of this graph aren’t that significant in the other three lines. For instance, a 75 year old Republican is only five points less likely to say religion is ‘not at all’ important compared to an 18 year old. I wouldn’t call that substantively large.

But are there actual policy differences between religious Republicans and non-religious ones? I broke the sample into those two categories based on their answer to the religious affiliation question and then further divided it into five age categories. I wanted to look at an area in which this division may actually matter, so I chose the topic of abortion. This is the most permissive scenario – allowing abortion as a matter of choice.

There are clear gaps between religious and non-religious Republicans on this topic. Excluding the youngest age bracket, there’s at least a twenty point gap between these two groups. In each case, non-religious Republicans are much more permissive of a woman seeking an abortion for any reason. It’s notable that among non-religious Republicans under the age of 55, a majority favor the pro-choice position.

The smallest gap between these two groups is among the youngest Republicans. And there’s a very interesting reason for that. Among non-religious Republicans across the top row of ages, the share in favor is very consistent. About 57% of them want a woman to have the right to choose an abortion procedure. But among the youngest religious Republicans, support for abortion is surprisingly high at 40%. It’s only 25% of religious Republicans who have seen their 65th birthday. If there’s any upshot here it’s that young religious Republicans seem much less hard line on abortion than their older counterparts.

The Culture Wars, 2023 Edition

I’ve been listening to a fascinating audiobook on my drives the last couple of weeks – Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward Larson. It’s a tremendous look at the debate over biblical interpretation and political discourse at a critical juncture in American religious history.

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Let’s try another social issue – gender transition for minors. The statement is, “make it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition.”