But there are pockets of support for increased church-state integration, more Christianity in public life
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 28, 2021) – The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that the country shall have no official religion. At the same time, Christians continue to make up a large majority of U.S. adults – despite some rapid decline in recent years – and historians, politicians and religious leaders continue to debate the role of religion in the founders’ vision, and of Christianity in the nation’s identity.
According to a new Pew Research Center survey, some Americans clearly long for a more avowedly religious and explicitly Christian country. For instance, three-in-ten say public school teachers should be allowed to lead students in Christian prayers, a practice that the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. Roughly one-in-five say that the federal government should stop enforcing the separation of church and state (19%) and that the U.S. Constitution was inspired by God (18%). And 15% go as far as to say the federal government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation.
On the other hand, however, the clear majority of Americans do not accept these views. For example, two-thirds of U.S. adults (67%) say the Constitution was written by humans and reflects their vision, not necessarily God’s vision. And a similar share (69%) says the government should never declare any official religion. (Respondents were offered the opportunity to reply “neither/no opinion” in response to each question, and substantial shares chose this option or declined to answer in response to all of these questions, suggesting some ambivalence among a segment of the population.)
Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey finds that Christians are much more likely than Jewish or religiously unaffiliated Americans to express support for the integration of church and state, with White evangelical Protestants foremost among Christian subgroups in this area. In addition, Christians who are highly religious are especially likely to say, for example, that the Constitution was inspired by God. But even among White evangelical Protestants and highly religious Christians, fewer than half say the U.S. should abandon its adherence to the separation of church and state (34% and 31%, respectively) or declare the country a Christian nation (35% and 29%).
Politics also is a major factor. Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party are far more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to want to secure an official place for Christianity in the national identity. However, for the most part, Republicans do not directly voice a preference for the integration of church and state. For instance, 58% of Republicans and Republican leaners say the federal government should never declare any religion as the official religion of the United States, while a quarter of Republicans (26%) say that the government should declare the U.S. a Christian nation. By comparison, among Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic Party, 80% say the government should never declare any official religion, and just 6% want the government to declare the U.S. a Christian nation.
While the above-average level of support for an overtly Christian government among Republicans and White evangelical Protestants may come as no surprise to close observers of American politics, some of the other patterns in the survey are perhaps more unexpected. For example, many Black and Hispanic Americans – groups that are heavily Democratic – are highly religious Christians, and on several of the questions in the survey, they are just as likely as White Americans, if not more likely, to say they see a special link between Christianity and America.
Nearly four-in-ten Black Americans (38%) say public school teachers should be allowed to lead students in Christian prayers, somewhat higher than the 31% of White Americans who say this. And about one-in-five U.S. Hispanics (22%) say the federal government should stop enforcing the separation of church and state, roughly on par with the 19% of White Americans who say this.
These questions about the relationship between church and state can be combined into a scale that sorts respondents into one of four categories – “Church-state integrationists” (who say they would favor the intermingling of religion with government and public life); “church-state separationists” (who favor a wall of separation between religion and state); those who express “mixed” views about these matters; and those who largely express no opinion. When the questions are scaled together this way, they show there is far more support for church-state separation than for church-state integration in the U.S. public at large.
Overall, more than half of U.S. adults (55%) express clear support for the principle of separation of church and state when measured this way. This includes 28% who express a strong church-state separationist perspective (they prefer the church-state separationist view in five or six of the scale’s questions and the church-state integrationist position in none) and an additional 27% who express more moderate support for the church-state separationist perspective. By contrast, roughly one-in-seven U.S. adults (14%) express support for a “church-state integrationist” perspective as measured by the survey.
These are among the key findings of a Pew Research Center survey conducted March 1-7, 2021, among 12,055 U.S. adults on the Center’s online, nationally representative American Trends Panel (ATP). The questions in the survey gauging American attitudes on church-state issues are similar (but not identical) to questions used by other scholars to measure what they call “Christian nationalism.” Indeed, for this study, Pew Research Center designed a series of questions modeled on items from the Baylor Religion Surveys and identified by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, authors of “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” as good indicators of Christian nationalism.
The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 12,055 respondents is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.
Full report: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/10/28/in-u-s-far-more-support-than-oppose-separation-of-church-and-state
Methodology: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/10/28/methodology-44
Survey topline: https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/10/PF_10.28.21_church.state_.topline.pdf
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