CV NEWS FEED // Liberal Christians are more politically active than their conservative counterparts, according to recent data analysis by political scientist and religious statistician Ryan Burge.
On March 11, Burge posted a data analysis article titled, “Are Liberal Christians More Politically Engaged than Conservative One?”
In examining trends of which group attends more political rallies, protests, marches, and political meetings, Burge wrote that “the conclusion that emerges here is that liberal Christians are more politically active.”
“In the case of attending political meetings, such as school board or city council meetings, and putting up political signs, the difference between liberal and conservative Christians wasn’t significant. But in the other four activities, the gaps tend to be fairly robust,” he continued.
Using data from the Cooperative Election Study, which was conducted in October and November of 2020, Burge wrote that liberal Christians were “more than twice as likely to attend a protest or march, six points more likely to contact a public official,” and “eleven points more likely to donate to a candidate.”
He added that when looking at his first graph, it is “hard to say that conservative Christians are more active… It’s the liberal Christians that seem to be engaging in the most laborious type of political activity.”
Burge examined whether liberal Christian participation in politics has increased in recent years because of President Donald Trump, writing, “maybe this is just an artifact of an election where there was a lot of ire against the incumbent, Donald Trump.”
“To examine this possibility, I created a summed index of the four political acts that show up consistently over time in the data. The maximum score is four and the minimum is zero,” Burge explained.
After examining liberal Christians’ participation in politics since 2012, Burge wrote, “the finding from 2020 is not an aberration. Liberal Christians have been more politically active than conservative Christians in every election cycle since 2012.”
Within recent years, “the disparity in political engagement between liberals and conservatives has increased,” Burge noted. In 2012, the gap between political engagement for liberal and conservative Christians was 0.09. By 2016, the gap increased to 0.18.
“During President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, political involvement surged among Christians across the board,” Burge continued. “The average level of activity for liberals reached 0.80, compared to 0.62 for conservatives. It’s evident from the data that 2020 marked the peak of political participation among Christians since 2012.”
Burge also examined the data for political activity for white liberal Christians and liberal Christians of color, and wrote that the results for white liberal Christians were “incredibly robust.”
“In every single election cycle they are much more politically engaged compared to their conservative counterparts,” Burge wrote. “Liberal Christians are more politically engaged than conservative ones and sometimes those gaps are fairly large. The religious left is small, but they are very loud.”
“Among Christians of color the evidence is not as clear,” Burge wrote, noting that the differences in political activity across election cycles “aren’t substantively large. Instead, the norm is that the political activity of liberals is not statistically distinct from that of conservatives. The political activity gap that exists is really only true among white Christians.”
Examining if church attendance impacts political participation, Burge noted that even for liberal white Christians that never attend church services, they are still “20% more politically involved than a white conservative Christian who attends multiple times a week.”
However, attending church more regularly “is jet fuel for liberal white Christians,” Burge wrote. “Among those who attend more than once a week, they engage in nearly 1.9 political acts. That’s almost twice the rate of white conservatives in the same attendance bracket.”
Burge summarized that in examining Christians’ political activity, “I think it’s empirically defensible to say that liberal Christians are more politically engaged than conservative ones.”
“However, it’s even more helpful to narrow that by saying that this is especially the case when it comes to white Christians,” Burge concluded:
Liberals are much more politically involved than conservatives. And that disparity only accelerates when you throw church attendance into the mix. It makes liberal white Christians into highly engaged political actors in a way that is not true for white conservative Christians.
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