It’s “Seismic!”
Amid growing partisan conflict over abortion rights, immigration and other hot-button issues, the idea has taken hold that young Americans are leaving the Republican Party in droves. But the data doesn’t actually bear that out, according to Ryan Burge, a political scientist based at Eastern Illinois University.
In a recent Twitter thread drawing on the Cooperative Election Study, he showed that the opposite is actually true in a variety of major faith groups.
“In 2008, 83% of young Black Protestants were Democrats. That’s down to 63%. Noticeable drops among non-White Catholics and evangelicals. Muslims, too,” Burge wrote.
Where the claim that young Americans are ditching the Republican Party does hold up is among young adherents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Burge has found that young Latter-day Saints are “significantly less conservative” than older ones and described the change as a “seismic political shift” in a recent Substack post.
“The average younger Mormon is noticeably more moderate today than in 2016,” he wrote.
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One key takeaway from a new study on U.S. Latinos and faith
Pew Research Center recently released an in-depth look at the religious lives of U.S. Latinos, and noted that fewer members of this population identify as Catholic today than in the past, while more identify as religiously unaffiliated.
One finding that jumped out at me is the influence birth location appears to have on Hispanic Americans’ ultimate religious beliefs and behaviors.
Pew found that U.S.-born Latinos are nearly twice as likely as foreign-born Latinos to identify as religious unaffiliated (39% vs. 21%).
The surprising states losing the most religious adherents
You may know that states in the Pacific Northwest have fewer religiously active residents than states in the South, and that Catholics are more likely to live in the Northeast than across the West.
But I bet you can’t guess the states that saw the biggest drops in total religious adherents from 2010 to 2020, which Burge recently calculated using county-level data from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.
Burge determined that losses were mostly concentrated in the Midwest and named Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, North Dakota and South Dakota as the states seeing the biggest losses. I was surprised by this list, since I would have guessed the biggest religious changes are happening along the East and West coasts.
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