On today’s episode of The Argument podcast, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias debate whether environmental activism is bad or whether activists are just misguided in their opposition to BAAJA. Paid subscribers can watch or listen to the episode ad free or read the transcript. Free subscribers can watch the episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Can Democrats wait out religious people?
America is secularizing — the share of Americans who say religion is an important part of their daily lives has dropped by 17 points over the last decade, according to Gallup’s polling. As a result, one school of thought argues that secular Americans — and the progressive causes and candidates they tend to support — just need to wait for the country to get less religious.
In Free Inquiry, a journal of secular humanist opinion, Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science Robyn Blumner made this argument bluntly: “While things look bleak, we have to remember that this is a long game, and demographics are on our side.” And in 2024, Jennifer Rubin, then a columnist at The Washington Post, argued that Gen Z’s declining religiosity offered promising news to Democrats.
The Argument’s polling says that’s a bad bet.
If you went looking for the Democratic Party’s weakest point, you might start with education, income, or race — a lot of ink has been spilled on the educational realignment that led to white working-class voters swinging hard to the right. But I’d give you a different answer: religion.
In our last two national surveys of 3,070 registered voters combined, religion persistently emerged as one of the biggest differentiators in political views. As an example, of the voters who said religion was “not too important” or “not at all important” in their life, 48% said that they were liberals and only 18% said they were conservatives. Meanwhile, among voters who said religion was very or somewhat important to their life, those numbers flipped: Just 18% said they were liberal, while 44% identified as conservative.
Here’s a prime example of how this manifests. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is, by this point, radioactive among wide swaths of America, with a net favorability rating of -23. By itself, that’s already pretty bad.
But the topline reality hides how it’s really a tale of two universes. With nonreligious voters, MAGA’s net favorability is at a shocking -54. Meanwhile, among religious voters, it’s much more evenly split, sitting at -3.
It’s a similar story with Donald Trump, where 47% of actively religious voters still approve of his performance in office. Among all other voters, this number is just 23%.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to the president, either. When it comes to political support on the generic ballot, Republicans win the support of 58% of religious voters but sit at just 30% among nonreligious ones.
In other words, the conservative bent of religious voters might be the biggest electoral Achilles heel for the left. Democrats and liberals alike are fairly dominant among people who don’t care for religion. But that doesn’t mean as much when 61% of Americans say that religion is somewhat or very important to their life.
What’s more, it’s not necessarily clear that religiosity has declined severely of late.