How did People Vote? The Religious Breakdown

America’s voters are overwhelmingly Christian: 78 percent of voters identified themselves as Christians in exit polls Nov. 6. That is down just 3 percent from 81 percent, the highest Christian participation in the previous three elections. Despite some of the pre-election rhetoric about the nation being overrun by non-believers of various stripes, this obviously did not happen.

Of the remaining 22 percent of voters, 9 percent followed other religions, such as Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Twelve percent fell into the “unaffiliated” category, which includes atheists and agnostics, but primarily consists of people who are religious but did not choose to identify themselves with a particular religion.

Further study of this information from polls conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals several important conclusions.

First, white evangelical Protestant voters continue to punch above their weight. Even though they make up only 19 percent of the nation’s population, they accounted for 23 percent of the voters. The same held true for mainline Protestants, although to a lesser degree; their 15 percent of the population resulted in 16 percent of the electorate.

Both Protestant groups voted for Romney, the evangelicals by a margin of almost 4-to-1. Despite theological misgivings about Romney’s Mormonism, they actually gave him a higher percentage of their vote than they did to McCain four years earlier. This also was a point higher than he gained among the Mormon population.

Second, white Catholics voted for Romney in percentages similar to mainline Protestants. While mainline Protestants preferred Romney 55 percent to 44 percent, white Catholics voted for him by a margin of 59 percent to 40 percent.

Third, minority religious voters favored Obama. More than 75 percent of Hispanic Catholics voted for Obama, while 95 percent of black Protestants did so. Together, they accounted for 14 percent of the electorate, compared to 61 percent of the white Christian vote.

Nothing is particularly surprising in these numbers. They are similar to the voting preferences for Republican and Democratic candidates in the previous three elections.

One religious trend within the country’s population did not play out as expected. The role organized religion plays among the U.S. population has been decreasing. This year, for the first time, the number of people who report themselves as unaffiliated with any religion has hit 20 percent, according to Pew’s pollsters. While this group went overwhelmingly for Obama, they did not actually vote in large numbers. They made up only 12 percent of the voters on election day. This poor turnout indicates that neither party is addressing their concerns.

A third of young people (ages 18-28) belong to the unaffiliated crowd, those who check the “none of the above” box when it comes to religious identity. Many pundits have identified this as a problem for the Republican Party, fearing that this identification will continue as these voters get older. This will probably not be the case. College-age people, as a group, always rebel against their parents when they leave home and dropping out of church is part of that. When they marry and have children, they tend to join churches and other religious institutions again.

The real problem for the Republican Party is its identification with religious policies and views that are insensitive to women. The reopening of the debate over reproductive matters has alienated many female voters. The suggestion that workers at religious institutions should have fewer health-care rights than those employed at other businesses does not sit well with many women. Similarly, the views on rape expressed in religious terms by some male Republican candidates further damaged the party’s image among women.

In the end, it seems that people largely voted for the party that made them feel welcome. Republicans attracted those who were white, Christian and male, winning their votes by large numbers. Democrats attracted majorities among those voters who did not belong to all three of these categories. Add these results to the roughly 40 percent of the white male Christians who voted for Obama, and that explains the election’s outcome, at least from the religious perspective.

Is Religion Irrelevant to the 2012 Presidential Election?

Even before primary voting began nearly a year ago, media coverage of the presidential campaign was emphasizing religion and the role it plays in the contest for the top job. The religious views of every Republican candidate were featured and parsed, looking for clues to voter preferences. For several months, Mitt Romney’s Mormon beliefs were a visible problem for the party’s Evangelical voters, and at some moments, the primaries seemed to be a search for a candidate with a different religious identity.

Religion was less debated on the Democratic side, if only because President Obama’s record over the past four years provided so much more to discuss. Obama’s mainline Protestant identity has provided little fodder for debate this time around, even though it was featured in the 2008 election.

Since the conventions, the media interest with the candidates’ religious beliefs has continued. Time magazine’s Oct. 8 cover story featured “The Mormon Identity,” while many major news organizations used the debate between the vice-presidential candidates to discuss the Catholic beliefs of both contenders.

But, while the media have focused on the candidates’ religious character, they have missed the big story. Coming down the home stretch, the candidates' religious identities are essentially irrelevant to the voters, no matter what their own religious persuasion.

Press reports have frequently observed that Republican voters are more “fired up” this fall than Democratic voters. This observation applies even to the party’s large Evangelical block. While a recent Pew Forum survey indicates that more than 90 percent of Evangelicals are “uncomfortable” with Romney’s Mormon beliefs, they will vote for him by a margin of more than three-to-one.

Polling this year further indicates that the decades-old block of Catholic voters has disappeared. Catholics are just as divided as the electorate, as a whole, with about a third of Catholics breaking for Romney, a third going for Obama, and a third in the “undecided” middle.

For both groups, Evangelicals and Catholics, views on abortion provide a better indicator of their vote than religious identity.

In the midst of all the election coverage, an important religious story has had only a little public play. The United States no longer has a Protestant majority, even though Protestants have made up the majority since European migration began centuries ago. According to this month’s Pew survey, people identifying themselves as Protestants have dropped from 53 percent in 2007 to 48 percent this year.

This is not an isolated development, but is accompanied by related trends. This year marks the first time that the Republican Party lacks a Protestant on its presidential ticket. Similarly, the Supreme Court no longer has any Protestant justices.

In part, the reason for this decline is the rise of people who are unaffiliated with any religion. Even though Catholics remain about 22 percent of the nation’s citizens, those checking “none of the above” on religious surveys now number 20 percent. And the trends indicate that the number of “nones” is growing, while the percentage of the other two religious groups is shrinking. This means that soon Catholics will only be America’s third largest religious group, behind the unaffiliated.

And how do they vote? It is unclear at this point. While there are some indications that the nones lean towards the libertarian side of social issues like abortion and gay marriage, they also are focusing more on economic matters in this election.

In the end, it turns out that roughly 40 percent of Americans do not know the religious affiliation of one or the other presidential candidates. That is a clear indication of the irrelevance of religion in this election.

Perhaps there is one exception to the unimportance of religion in this fall’s presidential election. The number of people who mistakenly believe that President Obama is a Muslim has risen from 11 percent in 2009 to 18 percent in 2010. This may be enough to impact the election. We will just have to wait and see.