An op-ed in the New York Times on July 14 caught our attention: “We Pick a Party, Then a Church.” The author, Michele Margolis, an assistant professor of political science at Penn, contends that the common assumption about religious and political affiliations in America—that party affiliations are based on religious views—has it backwards. An abundance of sociological data suggests, she writes, that “most Americans choose a political party before choosing whether to join a religious community or how often to attend religious services. . . . It may seem counterintuitive, if not downright implausible, that voting Democrat or Republican could change something as personal as our relationship with God,” Margolis concludes. “But over the course of our lives, political choices tend to come first, religious choices second.”
So, for instance, a large number of Americans go through a more secular period in their late teens and early twenties, but many of those either return to religious observance or embrace it anew in later years, by which time they’ve already chosen their political identities.
We suspect there’s something to Margolis’s point, even if religious affiliation is far too complicated and multifaceted a thing to treat as a single impulse as described in the Times piece. But it’s probably true that the contentious nature of our politics plays a part in many people’s choice of church or denomination. “Hearing evangelical leaders praise Mr. Trump and noting his persistent approval among white evangelicals,” Margolis writes, “white Trump supporters may find themselves more and more drawn to the evangelical label and to churches they know will be filled with politically like-minded congregants. And ‘Never Trumpers’—especially those raising children—may refuse to embrace the evangelical label and search for churches more in line with their politics.”
Well, okay. But surely the biggest reason politics determines religious choices instead of the other way around in today’s America has mainly to do with the fact that our political controversies trespass more and more on our deepest philosophical commitments. “Evangelical” or otherwise traditionalist churches are increasingly populated by people who until yesterday held only moderate or lukewarm religious views—or no religious views at all—but were shocked and appalled to perceive the aggressive hostility with which the nation’s left-leaning political class and media treat traditional religion.
So maybe it’s true at some superficial level that a lot of people end up identifying with one party before they settle on a religious identity. The more important reality is that in an age when our “political” disagreements have to do with the abortion of unborn children and the redefinition of marriage and the coerced offering of transgender bathrooms, one’s choice of party is a—perhaps reluctant—expression of one’s beliefs about God.
