Evangelicals

FF: The Religious Roots of New England’s Support for Same-Sex Marriage

Juhem Navarro-Rivera, , , , , Leave a comment

Flashback Friday (FF) is a category of posts previously published elsewhere that still have some contemporary relevance. This FF post was originally published on April 25, 2013 in the PRRI blog.

Yesterday, the Rhode Island State Senate voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The bill now returns to the State House of Representatives, which already voted in favor of a similar bill. Independent Governor Lincoln Chafee, a former Republican U.S. Senator, is expected to sign the bill into law once it reaches his office.

If and when Rhode Island finally codifies same-sex marriage into law, it will make New England the first region in the country where all states have legalized marriage for gay and lesbian couples. According to PRRI’s recent survey, a slim majority of American (52%) favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. However, in New England, support increases to 7-in-10 (70%) residents. This high level of support may be related to the concentration of the religious groups most likely to favor same-sex marriage in the region.

New England has a low percentage of groups opposed to same-sex marriage. Only 7% of New Englanders identify as white evangelical Protestants, compared to nearly 1-in-5 (18%) Americans overall. Only 24% of white evangelicals favor same-sex marriage (71% are opposed). Black Protestants, who also oppose same-sex marriage (37% favor, 57% oppose), are also underrepresented in New England compared to the national population (3% vs. 8%). Instead, Catholics (30%), mainline Protestants (22%), and Jews (6%) are overrepresented among New Englanders, and majorities of these groups favor same-sex marriage (57%, 55%, and 81%, respectively). In addition, 1-in-5 (21%) New England residents are religiously unaffiliated, a figure that’s similar to the rest of the country. More than three-quarters (76%) of religiously unaffiliated Americans favor same-sex marriage.

Massachusetts was the first New England state to approve same-sex marriage in 2004. It was later joined by Connecticut (2008), Vermont (2009), New Hampshire (2010), and Maine, which is one of the three states that extended marriage rights for same-sex couples through referendum last November.

FF: The Religious Roots of New England’s Support for Same-Sex Marriage
{advertisement}

More on the White Evangelical-to-Religious None Pipeline

Juhem Navarro-Rivera, , , , , , Leave a comment

On my post “The Nones are Causing the White Evangelical Aging Crisis” I wrote:

I guess they [younger people] are leaving [evangelical churches] more because of politics than theology, while the older folk are leaving due to theology. Why do I think this? Because the political differences between white evangelicals and former white evangelicals are wider among people who left religion than people who switched congregations.

A new research paper by Paul A. Djupe, Jacob R. Neiheisel, and Kimberly H. Conger shows that in states with anti-gay rights policies, the nones increased more rapidly. Abstract below

Hout and Fischer have made the repeated, controversial claim that the dramatic rise of “religious nones” in the United States is due to the prominence of the politics of the Christian Right. As the argument goes, the movement’s extreme stands on gay rights and abortion make religion inhospitable to those who take more moderate and liberal positions. We take another look at this proposition with novel data drawing on expert reports and interest group counts that capture the prominence of the movement in each American state from 2000 to 2010. We attach these data to decennial religious census data on the unchurched, as well as estimates of the nones from Cooperative Congressional Election Study data. At stake is whether religion is independent of political influence and whether American religion is sowing its own fate by failing to limit taking extreme stands. Rising none rates are more common in Republican states in this period. Moreover, when the Christian Right comes into more public conflict, such as over same-sex marriage bans, the rate of religious nones climbs.

This paper is very useful for understanding how politics affects religious identification. Alas, it doesn’t answer (and it wasn’t its goal to do so) the larger question about the religious beliefs of people who move toward no-identification. I think people, particularly young people, who become nonreligious and come from a conservative Christian background leave religion because of doubts about the veracity of religious beliefs than political matters. Otherwise they would join or start to identify with a more liberal Christian tradition.

Aside

Immigrants among us

Juhem Navarro-Rivera, , , Leave a comment

On Saturday I gave a talk titled “Immigration Justice for Immigrants” at the 2018 Secular Social Justice conference in Washington, DC. When the video is finally up, I’ll post it here. But, one thing that I noticed after I finished was that people were surprised about the number of immigrants in the secular cohort.

I mentioned that 13 percent of nonreligious people in the United States are immigrants, while a nearly identical percentage (12 percent) are children of immigrants (2nd generation). These numbers come from the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey.

13% of nones are immigrants and 12% are children of immigrants

I added those numbers to my presentation because I actually didn’t expect that the secular community would have more immigrants and children of immigrants in their midst than evangelical Christians.

For ages, the media narrative has been that Latinos and Asian Americans are joining evangelical denominations and changing the demographic landscape of evangelicalism. Yet, only 9 percent are immigrants while 7 percent are children of immigrants.

9% of evangelicals are immigrants and 7% children of immigrants.

Next time you think issues of immigration have nothing to do with the secular community remember that about 7 million of the roughly 59 million nones in the country are immigrants. Fighting for immigrant justice is not just one remote feel-good human rights issue. We’re fighting for our own.

Immigrants among us