Which Religious Groups Are The Most Politically Active?

(ANALYSIS) There’s a famous (paraphrased) saying from St. Augustine, “Pray as though everything depends on God. Works as though everything depends on you.”

It’s one that I have used on various occasions in various venues. It’s one that certainly plays an important role in the bigger question of how much people of faith should get involved in the political process.

For many Christians, they believe that God has preordained who will win the next election, so no matter how many doors are knocked, how many phone calls are made and how many people are driven to the polls, the outcome on election day has already been divinely determined.

But that doesn’t mean that religious groups don’t enmesh themselves in the political process. Especially as a presidential election is just about a month away now, there’s no doubt tens of millions of Americans feel like it’s their religious duty to be politically involved in one way or another.

It’s a topic that I’ve written about before — the political activity of a bunch of different religious groups. And the finding that atheists are the most politically engaged “religious” category is one that continues to come up in discussions that I’ve had in the last couple of months.

But I wanted to revisit that prior work and take the level of analysis down one layer of granularity to look at specific Protestant denominations — in the prior bit of data work I only created broad categories (evangelical, mainline, etc.). I was wondering if there’s some kind of super active denomination out there that needs to be illuminated and described.

So, the Cooperative Election Study asked about political activity in six ways during the runup to the 2020 Presidential Election. I restricted the sample to the 20 largest Protestant denominations in the data. These were groups that had at least 240 respondents in the sample. Any fewer than that and confidence intervals get huge.

Let me show you three activities first: donating money to a candidate, putting up a political sign and working for a candidate or campaign. I color coded these groups into evangelical (red), mainline (purple) and Black Protestant (blue).