Racial attitudes mobilize white and minority evangelicals differently at the ballot box

A person’s beliefs about race can influence whether they decide to cast a ballot on Election Day, but how this dynamic plays out heavily depends on their religious and cultural background. A recent study published in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics found that holding conservative racial attitudes is related to higher voter turnout among white, Asian American, and Latino evangelicals, while the exact same attitudes are linked to lower turnout among Black evangelicals. These results hint that the overlapping social communities people belong to can entirely change how personal biases motivate political behavior.

Political scientist Nathan K. Chan of Loyola Marymount University initiated this research to understand the varying voter participation rates among religious Americans. While white evangelicals currently make up a declining proportion of the overall population in the United States, they consistently represent a unified and active voting bloc. Their share of the electorate routinely outpaces their actual population numbers.

Previous research has established that people often make political choices based on their feelings toward different social groups. Political scientists track a concept known as racial resentment to map these feelings in national surveys.

The concept refers to a specific set of conservative racial attitudes. A person scoring high in racial resentment generally believes that Black Americans face little societal discrimination and should overcome challenges without structural or governmental assistance. A person scoring low in racial resentment generally recognizes the systemic hurdles created by a history of slavery and discrimination.

Chan wanted to explore whether this specific type of racial animus actively influences a person to go out and vote. He reasoned that overlapping social identities could collide to shape human behavior at the ballot box. In other words, a person’s religious community and their racial background might determine whether their personal biases become a reason to vote or a reason to abstain.

To understand this, Chan referenced a psychological framework known as conflict decision theory. When people face a complex choice where no single option aligns neatly with all of their personal values, they experience internal friction. This cognitive tension can lead them to abandon the decision entirely and take no action.

Chan suggested that a person’s religious identity and their racial background might create this exact type of friction during an election. He expected that white evangelicals would experience no such conflict. In recent political cycles, white evangelical community norms have frequently aligned with conservative political stances and candidates. Because their political, religious, and racial identities often pull in the same direction, Chan predicted that holding high levels of racial resentment would strongly encourage white evangelicals to vote.

In contrast, Black communities possess distinct social norms centered around racial solidarity. Chan theorized that a Black individual holding conservative views against their own racial group might feel a severe disconnect between their personal attitudes and the expectations of their peers. Navigating these conflicting pressures could result in taking no action on Election Day.

Scholars have recently started paying closer attention to expressions of anti-Black prejudice among non-Black people of color. Studies show that Asian Americans and Latino Americans sometimes adopt negative views regarding Black Americans. Because some evangelical theology places a heavy emphasis on individual responsibility, Chan projected that Asian American and Latino evangelicals might feel spiritually and politically empowered to act on conservative racial attitudes when voting.

To evaluate these ideas, Chan analyzed data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey. This specific survey is highly useful for this type of political tracking because it explicitly oversamples minority populations. Standard national polls often lack the statistical power to compare the habits of smaller subsets of voters, such as Asian American evangelicals. The survey also allowed respondents to take the questionnaire in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

The survey asked the respondents whether they identified as evangelical, fundamentalist, or mainline Christians. It also asked them if the official voting records in their state would indicate that they cast a ballot in the November 2020 election.

To precisely measure racial resentment, the survey asked respondents how strongly they agreed or disagreed with four specific statements. For instance, one statement asked if participants agreed that previous generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Black individuals to work their way out of the lower class. Another asked if they agreed that Black Americans should do the same as other minority groups and work their way up without any special favors.

Chan gathered all these responses and categorized the participants by race. He then separated those who identified as evangelical from those who did not. Finally, he used statistical models to calculate how varying levels of racial resentment related to a person’s stated likelihood of voting.

He controlled for a wide variety of demographic details, including age, income, education level, gender, and whether the respondent was born outside of the United States. He also accounted for their degree of baseline political interest.

The analysis revealed distinct patterns in how racial attitudes correlate with going to the polls. Among white Americans who identified as evangelical, higher levels of racial resentment were strongly associated with a vastly higher probability of voting. The statistical models showed that white evangelicals holding the absolute highest levels of racial animus were roughly 22 percentage points more likely to vote than those holding the lowest levels.

For white Americans who did not identify as evangelical, those same racial attitudes had almost no association with their voter turnout numbers. The link between racial animus and an increased desire to vote was entirely isolated to the evangelical group.

Chan observed a very similar pattern among Asian American and Latino populations. Asian American and Latino evangelicals were much more likely to cast a ballot if they held high levels of racial resentment. The data indicated that Latino evangelicals with the highest racial resentment were roughly 20 percentage points more likely to turn out to vote compared to those with lower resentment.

Just like the white respondents, Asian American and Latino individuals who did not adhere to the evangelical faith showed no such behavioral association. Their racial attitudes did not serve as a mobilizing force for electoral participation.

The behavioral results shifted completely when checking the data for Black Americans. Among Black evangelicals, higher levels of racial resentment were associated with a steep and dramatic drop in voter turnout.

Black evangelicals holding the most racially conservative views were roughly 23 percentage points less likely to vote than Black evangelicals with the most racially liberal views. Black respondents who did not identify as evangelical also showed a drop in voting likelihood when they held high racial resentment, though the drop was slightly less pronounced than in the evangelical group.

These varying effects match the expectations proposed by conflict decision theory. For white, Asian American, and Latino evangelicals, conservative racial attitudes functioned as an active trigger that pushed them to cast a ballot in the 2020 election.

For Black evangelicals, holding those very same attitudes appeared to create a psychological blockade. Navigating the friction between their personal racial animus and the solidarity expectations of their racial group may have prompted them to avoid the political process completely. In a bid to minimize the internal conflict, these voters simply stayed home.

Like all survey-based studies, this research contains some analytical boundaries. The data relies heavily on self-reported religious identities. Participants might define the word evangelical differently when taking a survey in their homes.

Some respondents might select the term based entirely on a specific theology they adhere to, but others might select the term because they view it as a cultural or political label. Future investigations could deploy alternative metrics to measure a person’s religious identity. For instance, researchers could classify people by their specific church denomination rather than an open-ended label. Doing so would verify if these voter behavior patterns hold true across different methodological choices.

Additional research might also explore how the frequency of religious service attendance alters these social dynamics. Initial numbers inside the regression models hinted that attending church frequently might actually depress voter turnout among Latino evangelicals. This unusual detail offers another specific angle for political scientists to examine moving ahead.

Ultimately, the findings emphasize how a single psychological trait can yield completely opposite behaviors in the real world depending on a citizen’s overlapping community ties. Acknowledging all of these identity layers can help researchers construct more precise models of political participation.

The study, “Racial Attitudes, Voter Turnout, and the Politics of Evangelicals Across the Racial Divide,” was authored by Nathan K. Chan.