In recent years, research has consistently shown Black Americans becoming less religious. In a 2023 Pew poll, 72 percent of Black people identified as Christian, with 24 percent identifying as religiously unaffiliated. Just a decade earlier in 2013, 79 percent identified as Christian and 16 percent identified as religiously unaffiliated. For political epidemiologists like myself who study the psychology of voters, religion frequently represents a "sleeper" variable in how we think about the Black vote. At first glance, these transitions seem to hint that Black people are poised to move deeper into the Democratic Party's progressive wing. Another possibility? They're experience a deepening disillusionment with the pace of racial progress and with the Democratic Party which, according to a new NBC News poll, only a dismal 27 percent of registered voters currently have a positive view of.
For many Black Americans, their Christian faith is not only a key dimension of their identity; it rivals the importance of their national and racial identities and is in fact intertwined with them. Surprisingly, unlike white Christians who tend to hew Republican, Black Christians are no more likely to be Democrats or Republicans. This adds an extra level of nuance to forecasts on how the Black vote will look in the future. The United States Census Bureau predicts a 41.1 percent increase in the size of the nation's Black population by 2060. That's no small bump in a country where state electoral outcomes frequently rest on a margin of just 1 or 2 percentage points. (In contrast, the non-Hispanic white population is expected to decrease by 9.5 percent during this period.)
Read Full Article »