Populism, Evangelicalism, and the Polarized Politics of Immigration

Abstract

Past research has established that evangelical Protestant elites have increased their involvement in immigration reform efforts pursuing Biblical values of “welcoming the stranger.” This article confirms and updates these previous research efforts. Prior work has also established that, at the mass level, white evangelical Protestants hold the most conservative immigration perspectives of any religious group in the United States. This article examines reasons for this finding through analysis of Democracy Fund Voter Survey panel data. It demonstrates that partisanship, presidential voting, and right-wing cultural populist attitudes are the primary driving forces underlying white evangelical attitudes about immigration.

Keywords:

• Evangelical Protestantism
• Mainline Protestantism
• Roman Catholicism
• partisanship
• populism
• immigration, comprehensive immigration reform

Notes

1. In prior work, we evaluated fault lines amongst the evangelical laity across all racial and ethnic categories, which reveal evangelicals of color to be markedly more internationalist about immigration than their white coreligionists; see Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt 2019, chapter 5.

2. That status temporarily prevents deportation of immigrants from those countries.

3. Data for this analysis came from the large 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey (N = 35,000).

4. The largest portion of the remaining whites are unaffiliated with a religious group including a sizable number of agnostics and atheists.

5. The panel survey design involved interviewing the same individuals at different time points, while the more usual cross-sectional design would include different respondents at the several time periods. See also Ekins 2018.

6. In data not shown, after dividing the factor score into five equal sized groupings, we find that white evangelicals hold the highest level of right-wing populist views with 56 percent in the two high categories in 2011 and 63 percent in 2018. Right-wing populism also increased for mainline Protestants and white Catholics (41 and 47 percent for the mainline over time and 45 and 48 percent for Catholics). The remaining whites in the sample became less populist between 2011 and 2018 going from 38 to 28 percent in the two right-wing categories.

7. Presidential voting had to be excluded from the analysis as the immigration measure in 2011 preceded the 2012 vote measure.

8. If future surveys include a more fulsome set of religious measures, more populism measures, and, most important, more immigration measures such as questions about a border wall, policies toward “DREAMers,” and asylum seekers, the variance explained would likely increase.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Melkonian-Hoover

Ruth Melkonian-Hoover is chair and professor of the Political Science Department and directs the International Affairs major at Gordon College. Her scholarly interests include Latin America, immigration, and religion and international affairs. She and Lyman Kellstedt recently co-authored Evangelicals and Immigration: Fault Lines Among the Faithful (2019), and she has published articles in Social Science Quarterly, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Latin American Perspectives, and Political Research Quarterly.

Lyman A. Kellstedt

Lyman A. Kellstedt is a Professor of Political Science (Emeritus) at Wheaton College, IL. He is the author of scores of journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers on the topic of religion and politics. His books include Rediscovering the Religious Factor in American Politics, Religion and the Culture Wars, The Bully Pulpit, The Oxford Handbook on Religion and American Politics, and Evangelicals and Immigration.