Activists demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court during the annual March for Life in Washington, DC
OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP via Getty Images
When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, many white evangelical Protestants not only saw the Supreme Court’s ruling as a political victory: it was a spiritual victory. For decades, religious conservatives have been singularly focused on ending the constitutional right to abortion, a priority few other demographics shared. White evangelical Protestants, a group that, since the 1980s, voted mostly for Republicans — were much more likely than other religious groups to say abortion was a high priority.
The fall of Roe appears to be changing that. In 2021, the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans (a group that includes atheists, agnostics, and people who identify with no particular religion) who said abortion was a critical issue began to rise. And for the first time in 2022, the year the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. who said the same
Surveys by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life and the Pew Research Center found that abortion has become far more important to religiously unaffiliated Americans than in the past, while becoming a less critical concern for white evangelicals. These findings suggest that an entirely different group of people could become the next generation of “abortion voters,” a label once associated with the religious right. An overwhelming majority (71%) of unaffiliated Americans, who made up a quarter of the electorate, voted for Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. This makes them a crucial part of the Democratic base. Historically, Democratic politicians have not done much to mobilize non-religious voters, but that could be about to change.
“People with no religious affiliation are concerned about this issue in a way that they weren’t before Dobbs,” he said. David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who studies religious and non-religious Americans. “And evangelicals may feel a little more ambivalent about abortion restrictions now that they’re actually happening. We’re in a very different era now, and it’s changing how people feel about the importance of the issue on both sides.” .
The question of how much Americans care about the issue of abortion has always been key to understanding the politics of the issue.
Before the Dobbs decision, public support for legal abortion was very consistent. However, the 2022 midterm elections sent a strong and early signal that voters on the left felt differently about abortion, and this trend seems particularly pronounced among non-religious Americans. When abortion was protected by Roe v. Wade, Americans who supported abortion rights did not tend to prioritize it as a voting issue. Pew found that in 2020, only 31 percent of non-religious Americans said abortion would be very important in deciding how they would vote; by 2022, more than 6 in 10 (63%) said abortion would be very important. In that same period, the share of white evangelical Protestants who said abortion was a very important voting consideration fell by 7 points.
Non-religious Americans are increasingly concerned about abortion
Proportion of each religious group who said abortion was a “very important” issue in making their decision about congressional or general elections in each election year
Registered voters were given a list of issues they independently rated as very, somewhat, not at all, or not at all important to making a decision about who to vote for in a given election cycle.
Source: Pew Research Center
Unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly agree on abortion today, even more so than white evangelicals. A new survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that 60% of white evangelical Christians believe that abortion becoming less available is a good thing for society, but a much larger percentage (78%) of unaffiliated Americans they say this has been a negative development. And a Pew survey found last year that religiously unaffiliated Americans are much more united in support of legal abortion than white evangelicals in opposition (84% vs. 74%, respectively). recent survey It also found that 65 percent of non-religious Americans say the term “pro-choice” describes them very well, up from 54 percent about a decade earlier.
It’s true that non-religious Americans have become a loyal Democratic constituency, so it’s possible that what we’re seeing is just an outgrowth of the broader rise in enthusiasm for abortion rights in the ‘left that followed the Dobbs decision. But there are signs that the abortion issue might be especially stimulating for people who actively identify as secular, not simply people who don’t identify with a particular label.
This distinction between people who are unaffiliated and people who identify as lay is important, because people who are lay are united by a common definition, rather than the absence of one. The broader lack of political and ideological identity among religiously unaffiliated Americans has been a problem for Democrats until now. “It’s very difficult to organize a group that defines itself by what it’s not,” Campbell said.
This ability to rally around a shared cause or identity is very important if religiously unaffiliated Americans are to become an influential force in politics. There are potential parallels between this time and the early 1980s, when white evangelical Protestant leaders began organizing around issues such as abortion, gay rights, desegregation mandates, and pornography. At the time, evangelicals were a diffuse group without a set of shared political goals; indeed, they were notoriously disengaged from politics during most of the 20th century. The Christian Right’s success in getting the Republican Party to support its issues was due, at least in part, to grassroots evangelicals being deeply invested in the abortion issue, according to Andrew Lewis, professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. “Abortion got people out to vote, even in the primaries, which was critical to the role Christian right activists played in reshaping the Republican Party,” he said. “They had a lot of influence at the grassroots level. The grassroots activists knocking on doors, registering people to vote, were motivated by abortion.”
There are some big differences between then and now. One is that nonreligious people don’t have to persuade Democratic politicians to care about abortion; has already become one main priority of the party. And there are also places where non-religious people gather, such as churches, that can become centers of grassroots organizing. “With evangelicals or any religious group, you have an integrated set of organizations,” Campbell said. “This is difficult to reproduce among secularists.”
But the abortion issue may influence Americans’ views on religion in the future, strengthening the link between rejecting religion and supporting abortion rights.
Political scientists have previously shown that conservative Christian activism in opposition to LGBTQ rights caused some moderates and leftists to disidentify with religion. The abortion issue may work the same way. I would explain why a recent Study of the bank found that the gap in abortion rights between secular and religious Americans is greater in the US than in other countries. It would also explain the rise in non-religious identity among young women, who are among the strongest supporters of abortion rights. Ryan Burge, analyzing the General Social Survey, Found that young women (born around 2000, according to Burge’s analysis) are now as likely as young men to identify as non-religious, a break with the past. And young women’s views of organized religion fell sharply in the past two years. A 2022 survey by the Survey Center on American Life found that the number of young women who said churches and religious organizations “bring people together” has dropped 10 percentage points since 2019.
And what about white evangelical Protestants? Abortion is clearly still an important issue for many of them, even if it seems to have diminished in importance after the Dobbs decision. But in a quick reversal, the abortion issue is now much more complicated on the right than on the left. Evangelicals live disproportionately in places where abortion is now banned or highly restricted, so it may become less of a political priority for them because the anti-abortion movement has achieved its goals in their area. And while it is true that white evangelicals they are strongly opposed to abortionthere is no universal support for the blanket bans that some states have implemented.
“A lot of this is about how people feel about the status quo, and the status quo has changed,” Lewis said. “Many evangelicals are now more satisfied with the current state of abortion law and policy in the United States, and a growing number of non-religious people are frustrated and outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision. These are important changes and important and it’s no surprise to see them changing the way people on both sides think about the issue.”
