Are White Evangelicals Populists? The View from the 2016 American National Election Study

Abstract

The role of religion in the rise of populism is sometimes contested, but usually neglected. In this article, we consider the question of whether white American Evangelicals are part of the populist movement. Using the American National Election Study of 2016, we demonstrate that Evangelicals share almost all of the central traits of “populists” posited by observers of such movements and consider some of the implications of this finding.

Keywords:

• evangelicals
• populism
• nationalism
• internationalism
• biblical literalism
• immigration
• nativism

ORCID

James L. Guth http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8598-957X

Notes

1. The omitted reference group in the regressions consists primarily of those with no religious affiliation, often referred to as “Nones” in journalistic discourse, and some smaller religious groups. The reference group is less “populist” than the sample as a whole, a point to be remembered in evaluating the relative position of religious groups in the regressions.

2. Indeed, these items form a powerful index of traditional religiosity, but we have kept them separate in the multivariate analysis because attendance often “reverses sign” when all are included.

3. There has been an enormous amount of effort to use religious identities in social science research, with mixed results. For some problems using these measures, see Leege and Kellstedt 1993; Smidt, Kellstedt, and Guth 2009. Our analysis of these items (not shown) suggests that they do capture, in varying degrees, the basic theological divisions posited by scholars such as Wuthnow (1988) and Hunter (1991).

4. This patriotism may also reflect Evangelical proclivity for “American exceptionalism” (Guth 2012).

5. Authoritarianism is based on the standard set of ANES child-rearing questions. The author has several reservations about the use and interpretation of “authoritarian” scales in political science research. This measure is included here because it is a consistent feature of scholarly interpretations of populism and, perhaps more important, is highly correlated with other populist traits, as we will see in the analysis below.

6. This is the standard “Conover-Feldman” scale derived from four questions: whether we agree that the world is changing and we need to adjust our values, whether new lifestyles are breaking down society, whether we should be more tolerant of other moral standards, and whether there should be more emphasis on traditional family values.

7. One is tempted to interpret even the modest differences among religious groups in terms of partisanship, which has increasingly come to shape citizens’ assessment of the economy—and even of their own personal situation. Some scholars would argue that partisanship is primary here, but we need not contest this to note the religious differences.

8. See the legend on Table 7. As an alternative better suited to identifying distinct aspects of populism we ran a factor analysis, which produced virtually the same findings as the PCA. We used a listwise deletion for missing values, but using mean substitution produced almost identical results with only a very slightly reduced amount of variance explained by the first component.

9. The rich lode of ANES items would allow us to add some additional variants on many of the included items, but such additions would do little to bolster this score.

10. Not too much should be made of this sign reversal: at the bivariate level, greater church attendance is marked by much more populist attitudes in every white religious tradition. As higher church attendance is characteristic of those with more orthodox religious views and higher religious salience, these variables explain most of the populist effects. The reversed sign for service attendance thus represents a combination of its impact in other traditions, and the anti-populism of Christian theological liberals who attend frequently—a very small contingent.

11. This common explanation has been offered by an Evangelical White House “insider,” Cliff Sims, in his account of religious politics in the Trump administration (Sims 2019, 194).

12. Although questions in this clergy survey (conducted by the Henry Institute at Calvin College) do not match perfectly those in the 2016 ANES, they tap most of the same traits examined here. When included in a principal components analysis these items produce only one significant component, with item loadings closely resembling those reported for the laity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James L. Guth

James L. Guth is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Political Science at Furman University. He has written extensively on the role of religion in American and European politics. His most recent book is Religion and the Struggle for European Union with Brent F. Nelsen.