Mellman: Religion’s political power  | The Hill

Donald Trump is little known as a Christian scripture scholar, but he’s now a Bible peddler. This is a strange story that encapsulates an important reality in America today.

Traditional religious practices are losing influence over Americans as a whole. Even though that influence has contributed greatly to the modern Republican Party, it does not seem to have had much influence over the former president.

For decades, The US was an outlier. Americans were more religious than people in other high-income countries except Ireland. We are not yet Western Europe, but things are changing.

In the 1950s and ’60s, fewer than 4 percent of Americans claimed no religious affiliation. That number started rising in the 1970s and reached 22 percent last year, according to Gallup data. In other studies, Moderately high 27%.

This trend, which we euphemistically refer to as the “relentless force of generational change,” is likely to continue. Among people under 30, 35 percent claim no religious affiliation.

Some of this change may reflect a series of modifications to Gallup’s question wording, but it’s not the only indicator that Americans have lost their religion.

In 1965, 70 percent of Americans said religion was “very important” in their lives, but today that number has fallen to 45 percent.

In the mid-1950s, just under half of the population claimed to have attended a religious service in the previous week. That decreased to about 32 percent. In 1992, 34 percent said they attended religious services weekly. Currently only 21% say so.

Gallup first asked respondents in 1937 whether they were members of a formal place of worship (church, synagogue, mosque, temple). 73% answered positively. This figure hovered between 65 and 73 percent for more than two generations, but began to decline sharply from the beginning of the 21st century, dropping to 45 percent last year.

Research on American national elections provides insight into changing beliefs. In 1992, 45 percent of American voters believed the Bible is literal truth, but this number dropped to 26 percent in 2020.

Americans are generally becoming less religious, but traditional beliefs and customs remain central to the Republican Party.

While 37% of Democrats and 44% of independents consider themselves “religious,” a large majority of Republicans (61%) say that word describes them.

In 2020, 18% of Democrats and 21% of independents believed in the literal truth of the Bible, but that number rose to 37% among Republicans.

Similarly, Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to attend religious services weekly.

An examination of voting behavior recorded in exit polls further reveals the continuing influence of traditional religion on politics.

Among the 32% of voters who never attend religious services, Joe Biden won 63% to 35%. Among people who attend religious services weekly, Trump won by a nearly mirror-image margin of 61% to 37%.

Americans who identify as Protestants (43% of voters) voted for Trump by a 20-point margin. With 22 percent of voters identifying as Catholic, Trump won by a very narrow 1 point. The 13% who identify with other religions supported Biden by 22 points, while the majority (21%) who professed no religion gave Biden a landslide victory of 47 points.

In other words, people from religious streams, particularly Christian denominations, voted for Trump, while Biden’s support came from people with no religion.

You can also draw the circle even tighter.

Twenty-two percent of voters identified as white evangelical Christians, and they cast a massive 81% vote for Trump, compared to just 18% for Biden. Among everyone else, Biden won 58 percent to 40 percent.

So how important are religious voters to the Republican Party? About 38 percent of President Trump’s votes in 2020 came from white evangelicals. If white evangelicals and weekly churchgoers didn’t exhibit unique voting behavior and instead voted like everyone else, Trump wouldn’t have won a single state in 2016 and 2020. Likely (with the exception of Utah, which has huge support from religious Mormons).

Americans are losing their religion. But the Republican Party is in power because of religious voters.

We don’t know if Donald Trump has ever read the Bible, but Christianity Today reported: “Mr. Trump did not regularly attend church before he was elected president.” But without Bible-believing, Bible-buying, church-going voters, he could never have been president, and he never would have been president.

Melman is president of the Melman Group, which has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of members of the House of Representatives. Mr. Mellman served as a pollster for the Senate Democratic leadership for more than 20 years, is president of the American Association of Political Consultants, a member of that association’s Hall of Fame, and is chairman of the Israel Democratic Majority Party.