New research has found that Christians who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election are more likely to drop the evangelical label and their churches compared to those who voted for Donald Trump.
The study of voting patterns for the 2016 elections conducted by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group showed that 16 percent of Clinton voters who identified as evangelical or born again at the beginning of the survey period had dropped the label by 2017.
The latest figures show that Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely to stop identifying as evangelicals compared to Trump voters at nine percent.
The findings also revealed that former evangelicals who abandoned the label over the past six years were less likely to approve of Trump's presidency, compared to those who did not leave evangelicalism.
As many as 60 percent of evangelicals approved of Trump as president in 2017, compared to 40 percent of former evangelicals. Among those who never identified as evangelicals, 36 percent expressed support for Trump's presidency.
The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group has conducted a study on the voting behavior of 5,000 Americans over a seven-year period. The surveys were first conducted in December 2011 and repeated in 2012. The researchers also carried out studies before and after the 2016 presidential election, and another survey was conducted in July 2017 via YouGov.
The research also found that voters who abandoned evangelicalism prior to the elections were split between Trump and Clinton.
Between 2011 and 2016, 51.2 percent of voters who dropped the evangelical label supported Clinton, while 47.8 percent supported Trump.
When it came to church attendance, the study revealed that those who supported Trump were more likely to go to church regularly.
Evangelical and former evangelical voters who supported Clinton attended services less than once a month, compared to evangelical Trump voters who attended at least once a month.
Among voters who had dropped the evangelical label, 22 percent had abandoned religion altogether, the study revealed, as reported by Christianity Today.
Another recent study published in the American Journal of Political Science has suggested that politics is not the main reason why people are abandoning their churches.
The research, led by Paul Djupe, an associate professor at Denison University, has found that the number of people who leave their churches due to extreme political views is actually small and most of those who decide to leave are marginally involved with their respective churches.
"All we're really seeing here is a little churn," said Jacob Neihesel, co-author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Buffalo's Department of Political Science.
"We don't see people ensconced within the institutional framework leaving. These are people at the periphery so we don't see religious sorting where people on the left are disproportionally becoming anti-religious while people on the right are doubling-down on religion," he added.
Neihesel maintained that politics is not the primary reason behind people's decision to abandon religion and it is not significantly contributing to further polarization in the U.S. "It's demographics; it's generational; it's many other things," he said.
