December 26, 2024 - 8:00am
Following a comprehensive election loss, the Democratic Party has been left reconsidering its fractured coalition. Now, the New York Times has reported that prominent Democrats of faith — including Texas state representative James Talarico, Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro — are urging the party to embrace discussions of religion in politics.
That’s because a “God gap” has opened in American politics, where Republicans have become the party of religious voters, while the Democrats have become the party of non-believers (with the exception of black Christians, who overwhelmingly lean blue). In the Nineties, 63% of Democrats believed in God; today, the figure is 39%. To put this shift in perspective, religious Republicans have gone from 67% to 63% in the same time frame. Sociologist Ryan Burge says that these voters adhere to the “three Bs” of belief, behaviour, and belonging. The country may be becoming more secular, but they are a cohort of reliable voters whom the Democrats ignore at their peril.
In 2024, Pew Research found that the relationship between voters’ religious affiliation and partisanship remains strong, with those of no religion finding a home with the Democrats. Some 84% of atheists and 78% of agnostics lean Democratic, while a majority of Christians of all denominations lean Republican. Among Hispanics in particular, the GOP is continuing to make inroads among evangelicals and Catholics.
Inflation and economic issues may have been on factor behind the electorate abandoning the Democrats in this year’s election. But the increase in people of faith moving to the Right — not just Christians, but Jews and Hindus as well — points to some cultural concerns bubbling beneath the surface, such as abortion, gender and sexual expression, and parental rights. Bridging the two is the perception that liberals are too focused on cultural trends, at the expense of bread-and-butter issues.
The issue for Democrats is that there is a sense that big-city secular elites, the people so closely identified with the party establishment, look down on people of faith. Barack Obama’s infamous 2008 utterance that working-class people in industrial towns decimated by job losses “cling to guns or religion” is frequently invoked as a line in the cultural sand. Apparently failing to heed this lesson, in October Democratic Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer was accused of mocking Holy Communion in a video in which she fed Doritos to a kneeling podcast host, for which she later apologised. It also didn’t help when Joe Biden proclaimed a transgender day of visibility on Easter.
Too often, religious people are characterised as angry old white men shaking their fists about abortion, when people who identify as white Christians now make up less than half of the country. While a secularising nation means that religiously observant people tend to be older than in the past, the more reachable voting blocs for the Democrats among people of faith are younger immigrants, Latinos, black voters, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists who have strayed from the party which would otherwise be their natural home. In an increasingly diverse country, it’s critical that liberals do not alienate these groups.
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