The Politics of Religion
9/1/23
Everything else being equal, the more religious the individual in the U.S. today, the higher the probability that the individual identifies with or leans toward the Republican party. I called this the “R and R rule” in my 2012 book on religion, found the phenomenon alive and well in my 2014 review of Gallup data, and now, nine years later, Gallup’s data confirm that this religiosity gap is more evident than ever.
Americans’ political identity is a powerful correlate of a wide range of Americans’ attitudes and behaviors, including, in particular, a wide range of attitudes about hot-button political and social issues. And we know that political identity is related to views of the national economy, views of the nation’s institutions, happiness, perceptions of the nation’s most important problems, and a variety of other measures. It is thus not surprising that political identity would also be related to religion.
One key measure we use in analyzing this politics and religion relationship is the absence of religious identity -- those who, when asked by a survey researcher about their religious identity, reply that they have none. “Nones” have risen from essentially zero in some Gallup surveys in the 1950s to above 20% in recent Gallup surveys (and higher than that in some other firms’ surveys). Not surprisingly, researchers have zeroed in on this phenomenon, and the term “nones” has entered the popular vocabulary (as exemplified by books with titles like The Nones: Where They Came, From Who They Are, and Where They Are Going (by Ryan P. Burge),
None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the U.S. and Canada (by Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme) and The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (by James Emery White). An aggregate of five recent Gallup surveys conducted from May 2021 through May 2023 confirms the extent to which Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to be nones. Twenty-six percent of nones identify with or lean toward the Democratic party, compared with just 11% of nones who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party.
Looked at differently, across the combined 2021-2023 data, equal proportions of Americans identified as Democratic or Democratic-leaning (46%) or Republican or Republican-leaning (46%). Yet, the group of Americans who are religious nones split 63% Democratic versus 26% Republican -- far different from the population at large.
Other measures of religiosity Gallup tracks show the same general R and R relationship. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to report that religion is important in their daily lives, and Republicans are more likely than Democrats to report attending religious services.
Partisan Gap in Nones Increasing Over Time
The magnitude of this religion gap has increased over the years, to the point where I think it is fair to say that a significant part of the explanation for the “rise of the nones” lies with changes among Democrats, not Republicans. I looked at this relationship on a year-by-year basis using our annual May GPSS Values surveys, a valuable exercise because the same questions have been asked in basically the same survey context every May since 2001. The percentage of Republican nones has edged up over the last 10 years or so, but the percentage of Democratic nones has increased significantly more. In short, the relatively small partisan gaps in none identification seen two decades ago have increased substantially over the years.
Republicans Less Likely to Be Nones, but Much More Likely to Be Protestants
Mathematically speaking, if Democrats are more likely to be nones than Republicans, Democrats have to be less likely to identify with one or more other religious groups to make up for it. The two largest religious groups where this could play out are Protestants (about 46% of all national adults) and Catholics (about 24% of all national adults). The data are clear that it is the Protestants who take the brunt of the rise of the nones among Democrats, not Catholics.
The differences are striking. Fifty-six percent of Republicans identify as Protestants, compared with just 38% of Democrats. That compares to the 11% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats who, as noted above, identify as nones. By contrast, the percentage of each party identifying as Catholic is roughly equal. Unlike Protestants, Catholics have maintained a roughly stable percentage of the American population over time and have remained largely immune from the partisan divide evident among Protestants and nones. Explanations for this phenomenon are tied up with -- among other factors -- the impact of immigration on the composition of the Catholic population.
Searching for Explanations
Figuring out why the basic R and R relationship exists provides a fascinating and important challenge for social scientists. Not surprisingly, we have seen a cascade of books, papers and other publications focused on theories and explanations for this aspect of American social and political life.
As is true with any correlation between two variables, the first question becomes one of causality (as taught in beginning statistics classes, correlation is no proof of causation). It could be that those Americans who -- for whatever reason -- are personally religious pick and choose a political identification that best fits their underlying religious beliefs. Or, conversely, it could be that Americans who -- for whatever reason -- are either Republican or Democratic in their political orientation tailor their religious beliefs to their politics. Or it could be that a third underlying factor -- say, one’s ethnic or racial background, or the geographic location of one’s residence, or simply one’s family heritage -- is the underlying causal factor that causes one to both be religious and to be Republican, or to be less religious and to be Democratic.
University of Pennsylvania political scientist Michele Margolis, in her 2018 book, From Politics to the Pews, makes the case that political identity is the primary causal factor in determining Americans’ religious identity, more so than the other way around. Her analyses, and our own Gallup discoveries on the extraordinary power of political identity in shaping Americans’ worldview, make this a quite plausible explanation.
This leads to the idea of an antireligion “backlash” -- the hypothesis that Democrats have moved away from religion in reaction to the increasing visibility given to the association between religion and Republican and conservative politics. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer in 2002 concluded a review of the evidence by saying, “This political part of the increase in ‘nones’ can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.” University of Connecticut sociologist Ruth Braunstein has more recently reviewed in great detail various manifestations of how this backlash theory could be playing out in the U.S. today.
The key takeaway is the possibility of a spiral or self-fulfilling prophecy effect -- the idea that as religion becomes identified with Republican and conservative politicians and positions, it will continue to drive Democrats and liberals away from religion, amplifying the pattern by which Republicans increasingly dominate the group of those who remain religious. This, in turn, may mean that we are seeing a general pullback from religion in part because religion (like so much else in American life today) has become politicized.
This could work the other way around, as Braunstein points out in her review. Democrats could, in theory, react to what they see among those on the Religious Right by organizing their political beliefs around progressive values (the Religious Left) -- one of three “narrow backlashes” Braunstein describes. There is not a lot of evidence supporting the idea that this is occurring. But this line of thinking raises the possibility of future patterns different than the increasing defection of Democrats from religious identity we have been seeing up to this point.
Final Thoughts
One explanation for the connection between Protestant religion and Republican politics is that it benefits both sides of the equation. Protestant religious leaders can gain fame, influence and authority when they are connected to political positions and political leaders. (Dr. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the very large First Baptist Church of Dallas, begins his online biography with an explicit reference to his political outreach: “Dr. Robert Jeffress is Senior Pastor of the 16,000-member First Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas, and a Fox News Contributor.”) Politicians, for their part, covet the support of highly religious Protestants, and Republican political candidates make repeated pilgrimages to evangelical churches and to religious events in efforts to gain the support of these highly religious voters. So, there are compelling reasons why the R and R connection may continue in the months and years ahead.
But this connection between religion and politics carries within it a singular paradox. Most religions, including Christianity, the dominant religion in the U.S., argue for social cohesion and love for one’s neighbor, while politics carries within it the fundamental structure of disagreement, conflict, argument, and castigation of one’s opponents. How this plays out in the future is a matter of fascinating theological and practical concern.
All of this matters, because religion matters in society. The evidence is clear that more religious people have higher levels of wellbeing and happiness. And religion has a number of other positive functions in society, including its influence on morality and pro-social behavior, its influence on charity and giving back to the community, and its contribution to social cohesion and solidarity. A continuing decrease in overall religiosity in American society, like the continuing decrease in faith in other American institutions, can have significant consequences for the health and viability of the country going forward.
.Author(s) Frank Newport, Ph.D., is a Gallup Senior Scientist. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well. Twitter: @Frank_Newport
Focus on the Family founder dies
Conservative Christian launched radio show in 1977
James Dobson, who founded the conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family and was a politically influential campaigner against abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, died on Thursday. He was 89.
Born in 1936 in Shreveport, Louisiana, Dobson was a child psychologist who launched a radio show to counsel Christians on parenting and started Focus on the Family in 1977. Alongside fundamentalist giants like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he became a force in the 1980s for pushing conservative Christian ideals in mainstream American politics.
At its peak, Focus on the Family had more than 1,000 employees and gave Dobson a platform to weigh in on legislation and serve as an adviser to five presidents. His broad reach includes authoring more than 70 books, being translated into 27 languages, and airing on 4,000 radio stations, according to the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
His death was confirmed by his institute. He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Shirley, as well as their two children, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.
Dobson interviewed President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office in 1985, and Falwell called him a rising star in 1989. Decades later, he was among the evangelical leaders tapped to advise President Donald Trump. in 2016.
In 2022, he praised Trump for appointing conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who allowed states to ban abortion.
“Whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you supported or voted for him or not, if you are supportive of this Dobbs decision that struck down Roe v. Wade, you have to mention in the same breath the man who made it possible,” he said in a broadcast.
Dobson belongs on the “Mount Rushmore” of Christian conservatives, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, another group Dobson founded. He promoted ideas from “a biblical standpoint” that pushed back against progressive parenting of the 1960s, Perkins said.
In his 1970 parenting book “Dare to Discipline,” updated in 1992, Dobson said parents should spank kids to discipline them and enforce boundaries. Children should not be struck in anger, but “the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause genuine tears.” “I know that some of my readers could argue,” he wrote, “that the deliberate premeditated application of minor pain to a small child is a harsh and unloving thing to do. To others, it will seem like pure barbarism. I obviously disagree.”
John Fea, an American History professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, is critical of Dobson’s ideas. However, he recounted how his father — a tough Marine — was a better parent after becoming an evangelical Christian and listening to Dobson’s radio program. “Even as a self-identified evangelical Christian that I am, I have no use in my own life for Dobson’s politics or his child-rearing,” he said. “But as a historian what do you do with these stories? About a dad who becomes a better dad?”
After developing a following of millions, Dobson considered running for president in 2000, following in the footsteps of former television minister Pat Robertson’s surprise success in 1988. “He was not afraid to speak out,” said Ralph Reed, a Christian conservative political organizer and lobbyist who founded the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “If Jim had decided to run, he would have been a major force.” Still, Reed’s enduring memory is traveling through rural America as a younger political organizer, with Dobson’s voice as his sole companion. “I’d be out there somewhere, and I could go to the AM dial and there was never a time, day or night when I couldn’t find that guy,” Reed said. “There will probably never be another one like him.”
Focus on the Family moved from California to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the 1990s, establishing the city as a hub for evangelicals sometimes nicknamed the “Vatican of the West.”
James Bopp, a lawyer who has represented Focus on the Family, said Dobson could rally public support like few other social conservatives. Dobson helped create a constellation of allied Family Policy Councils in around 40 states that push a socially conservative agenda and lobby lawmakers, said Peter Wolfgang, executive director of one such group in Connecticut. “If there is one man above all whom I would credit with being the builder — not just the thinker — who gave us the institutions that created the space for President Trump to help us turn the tide in the culture war, it would be Dr. James Dobson,” Wolfgang wrote in an online column last month.
Records compiled by the watchdog group Open Secrets show Focus on the Family and Family Research Council together spent more than $4 million on political ads and nearly $2 million lobbying Congress since the late 1990s. Dobson left Focus on the Family in 2010 and founded the institute that bears his name. He continued with his nationally syndicated radio show Family Talk, carried by 1,500 radio outlets with more than half a million listeners weekly, according to the institute. Guests on his show have discussed the importance of embracing religion and promoting the idea that people could change their sexuality.
By Mike Catalini and Holly Meyer, Associated Press
Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian
The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian
Jason Colavito
TNR
August 21, 2025
The Trump administration has stepped up its antagonism of America’s treasured museums. But conservative antipathy toward the institution began long ago—with the bones of Bible giants.
Did you hear the one about the Smithsonian hiding the bones of Bible giants in the basement? No? Well, Missouri Republican Representative Eric Burlinson did, and he recently said he wants to develop a “strategy” to use Congress’s investigative power to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I do believe [giants] were real,” Burlinson told a Blaze TV program in June, shortly before he gave a speech at NephCon 2025, a gathering of people who are hunting the remains of the Nephilim, or the giants from the Book of Genesis.
Burlinson’s comments on Prime Time With Alex Stein were delivered with laughter, but his attendance at a Nephilim conference was not exactly funny. It came only weeks before the Trump administration sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian demanding a full review to ensure museum exhibits and curatorial processes conform to the president’s vision of history.
With the president declaring the Smithsonian “out of control” on Truth Social, the shape and scope of the growing threat to America’s premier public museum from the right wing is rapidly coming into view. And that shape is increasingly that of an internet fever dream of conspiracy, one that has been fomenting distrust of the Smithsonian for decades in service of a deeply conservative and religious agenda that sees both history and science as its ideological enemies.
For most of the nation’s history, the Smithsonian has served as symbol of national unity, receiving praise from members of both political parties and the public at large. Intermittent efforts to challenge the museum, such as Christian radio host Dale Crowley Jr.’s 1978 federal lawsuit demanding the Smithsonian cancel an exhibition on human evolution, have largely failed to materialize. That all changed in 1994, when veterans’ groups and conservative politicians, including Patrick J. Buchanan, vocally criticized the National Air and Space Museum for highlighting the Japanese casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in a proposed exhibit tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the Enola Gay. They considered any questioning of the decision to drop the A-bomb as dishonoring veterans, and thus anti-American. It was, in Buchanan’s words, “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.”
“We’ve got to get patriotism back in the Smithsonian,” conservative Texas Congressman Sam Johnson said, on being appointed to the museum’s Board of Regents shortly afterward to provide so-called ideological “balance.” “We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up.”
The year-long media and political firestorm, and the attacks on historians as unpatriotic fantasists, helped fuel the politicization of the Smithsonian, but they did so in tandem with a development occurring on the nascent internet.
A year before the Enola Gay controversy, in 1993, future Ancient Aliens star David Childress, then a self-described “world explorer,” introduced the world to his new conspiracy theory, that the Smithsonian was actively trying to suppress the “truth” about various lost races of white giants, ancient Egyptians, and assorted what-have-you that allegedly occupied prehistoric America. He wrote about this in his self-published magazine, World Explorer, and in the New Age Nexus New Times that year. He dubbed the conspiracy with the not-so-original moniker “Smithsonian Gate.”
Childress gathered a passel of unconvincing evidence and wrapped it up in a sort of homage to the 1981 Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose final scene showed the U.S. government secreting away the fabled Ark of the Covenant in a warehouse, never to be seen again. “To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups,” he wrote, “there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute [sic], an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.”
Childress’s evidence was about as solid as Indy’s celluloid adventures. Childress pronounced a 1909 newspaper hoax about an underground Tibetan city in the Grand Canyon true. He berated the Smithsonian for discrediting 32,000 ceramic statues, including some of people having sex with dinosaurs, because he assumed the modern fakes were ancient and proved evolution a lie. He heard a secondhand story about the Smithsonian dumping a barge of “unusual” artifacts into the Atlantic to stop anyone from seeing them. (Possibly this was a garbled version of the allegation, apparently dating to the 1990s, that the American Museum of Natural History dumped unwanted mammoth bones into the East River in 1949.) The list goes on.
The most important part of Childress’s conspiracy, though, was the specific claim that John Wesley Powell, the director of the Smithsonian in the late 1800s, orchestrated a cover-up of evidence for giants who were part of a lost race that had been in contact with Europe and built pyramids and mounds across America. The most spectacular of these mounds, Monk’s Mound at Cahokia near St. Louis, has a base as large as the Great Pyramid at Giza’s.
Childress wanted to disprove the popular notion that Native Americans erected these mounds, on the grounds that they were too stupid and lazy to create these features—something that nineteenth-century scholars assumed only white people or Bible giants could do. Childress implied that Powell suppressed the truth because he was too sympathetic to Native Americans and had chosen to improperly aggrandize their cultures by suppressing evidence of (imaginary) ancient European colonists that would have connected ancient America to the country’s current Caucasian population. He called this the Smithsonian’s “official dogma.”
Childress relied on Victorian reports about large bones that Powell’s team, led by Cyrus Thomas, had dismissed in 1894 as unevidenced. Hundreds of such reports littered the papers in the late 1800s, and claiming to find the bones of giants became a popular appeal to “prove” the Bible’s superiority to Darwin. The Smithsonian politely informed inquirers that these bones did not belong to the mythical Nephilim.
We know, of course, what those bones really were. As the onetime head of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, Ales Hrdlička, told Science News Letter in 1934, the so-called bones of “giants” the public sent to the Smithsonian for review fell into three categories: those measured incorrectly, those misunderstood due to ignorance of anatomy, and those belonging to mastodons and mammoths. When they arrived at the museum, they were correctly classified, and thus the bones of “giants” vanished into the catalogs of normal human bones and normal animal bones.
Twentieth-century evangelicals and creationists had long cited sensational newspaper stories of giant bones as proof of the Bible’s inerrancy, but even the most famous creationist book on the subject, Charles DeLoach’s 1995 work Giants: A Reference Guide From History, the Bible, and Recorded Legend, did not blame the Smithsonian for hiding the bones.
However, in the early 2000s, the creationist thread quickly wrapped itself around the needle of growing conservative anger at the Smithsonian’s perceived politics. Intermittent attacks on the Smithsonian over everything from evolution and environmental conservation to sweatshops (the apparel industry was offended) may have been forgotten, but the conspiracy about ancient giants elevated the same concerns to the level of myth and made them an article of faith.
Influential conspiracy theorist David Icke picked up Childress’s story for his 1993 book The Biggest Secret, but the reprint shared on the (now defunct) KeeleyNet paranormal bulletin board in 1993 spread Childress’s claims across the internet. Then, in 2001, a writer names Ross Hamilton produced an article in Nexus called “Holocaust of Giants: The Great Smithsonian Cover-Up,” expanding on Childress’s claim and linking it explicitly to conservative evangelical Christianity. Hamilton argued that the Smithsonian suppressed evidence of Bible giants not just to help Native Americans but to keep Christians from realizing that “Darwin’s troublesome theory” was false.
Hamilton’s article, often paired with Childress’s, crashed into a burgeoning alternative history media revolution that revolved, ultimately, around grievances against government, science, and “elite” academics who questioned jingoist renditions of the past. Whether it was popular books of fringe history that sought “white” gods in ancient America or cable TV documentaries looking for prehistoric Europeans who ruled ancient America, the overarching theme was a longing to return to an imagined past when a rapidly diversifying United States was still mostly white and Christian.
A lost white race of Bible giants—literally bigger, stronger, and whiter than everyone else—fashioned as a symbol of everything conservatives wanted to remake America into, is an all-too-convenient bit of lore for the conspiracy-besotted right. (Never mind that the Nephilim were technically the villains in Genesis!) And the Smithsonian was, if anything, a useful foil for a fringe movement looking for an enemy to accuse of suppressing the truth.
Soon enough, claims that the Smithsonian intentionally hid the bones of Bible giants went mainstream, presaging the country’s own rightward shift. By the 2010s, the Smithsonian’s secret giants appeared in popular paranormal books, on late-night radio shows, in multiple cable TV documentaries (including at least two separate History Channel shows), and across a network of evangelical and far-right media outlets.
Among the most popular of these were the Christian DVDs and later podcasts produced by Steve Quayle and his Nephilim-hunting partner, Timothy Alberino. Quayle, an archconservative, blamed Bible giants for “teaching” men to be gay. He and Alberino were regulars on the right-wing podcast circuit in the 2010s, often appearing with figures like Alex Jones and Jim Bakker so Quayle could hawk their merch, attack Democratic politicians as demonic, and advocate for a targeted genocide of Nephilim-controlled liberals.
Burlinson told Blaze TV that he had been radicalized against the Smithsonian through Alberino’s podcasts and videos. In his podcasts, Alberino has described Bible giants as a “superior race society.”
In recent years, Alberino has made moves to go more mainstream. He has appeared on Ancient Aliens, the History Channel show advocating historical conspiracies, where David Childress is a featured star. That same show also hosted Tucker Carlson, Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchett, and others to peddle conspiracies about government cover-ups of space aliens, interdimensional beings, demons, and more.
For the far right, the E.T.s of Ancient Aliens—the same ones Congress is currently hunting in various UFO hearings—are actually angels and demons, and those demons are the souls of the giants who died in the Flood, according to a nonbiblical text Alberino endorses. Burlinson said in 2023 that he thinks UFOs could be angels, and more recently he promised that a congressional UFO hearing to be held on September 9 would feature witnesses who “handled the bodies” of these beings.
Conspiracies about Bible giants are basically the Christian version of UFOs and aliens, and it’s no wonder there is significant cross-pollination between believers in the two camps, even in Congress, where several representatives like Burlinson and Burchett have publicly discussed their belief in both. In fact, both conspiracies give pride of place to the Nephilim narrative from Genesis 6:4 as proof of either fallen angels or alien intervention.
It would be laughable if the Smithsonian conspiracy theory and tales of Bible giants now being spread on Blaze TV, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and across right-wing media, were not a kind of Trojan horse to soften up the public to accept political propaganda in place of history and complete the assault on America’s museums that failed in the 1990s. But the conspiracists continue to spread their lore, and mainstream conservative politicians continue to escalate their attacks on the Smithsonian—a far-right pincer movement directed at an institution that is both the nation’s premier repository of historical fact and a potent bolsterer of America’s civic fabric. And that is no laughing matter.
Jason Colavito is an author in upstate New York writing about history, science, and popular culture. He is the author of The Legends of the Pyramids and Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean..