The Partisan Coding of Christianity
As Democrats shed religion and Republicans embrace Christianity as a tribal marker, faith risks becoming just another partisan signal
Religion, especially Christianity, is becoming partisan coded. That’s not good, but there may not be much we can do about it.
The reformist center-left web site the Liberal Patriot wrote about the demise of religion among Democrats.
Although the rise of religious “nones” has occurred nationally, the share among Democratic voters more than doubled from 2008 to 2023—from less than one-fifth of Democrats to nearly four in ten—while the percentage of Christians in the Democratic coalition dropped by 20 points. Over this same period there was a slight increase in “nones” within the Republican coalition but only a 5-point decline in Christians. More than eight in ten Republicans identified as Christian in 2023.
They think this is an electoral loser, and that Democrats should work harder to make religious people feel welcome in their coalition.
You can see the problem for Democrats. Since more than two-thirds of U.S. voters overall remain Christian, the increasingly non-Christian and secular Democratic Party remains out of touch with a huge chunk of Americans.
No one can make the Democrats be more religious, but Democratic leaders and voters could certainly be more welcoming of the faithful and more accepting of their different cultural and social views. There used to be serious effort put into this religious work prior to the rise of Barack Obama. In the early aughts, the so-called progressive movement spent a decent amount of time and money trying to organize and appeal to both mainline and evangelical Protestants and social justice-oriented and more traditional Catholics, along with both Jewish and Muslim Americans.
But those days are over, replaced by the increasingly zealot-like demands of secular non-profits and democratic socialist ideological movements that decry religious adherents as misguided or worse—“white Christian nationalists.”
It’s a different story for Republicans, where Christianity is becoming a de facto tribal identity marker on the right.
