Although state-level data appears not to exist, it is a safe bet the composite religious backgrounds of those serving in Texas Legislature does not match the composite picture of the state’s citizens, Robert P. Jones told a group of Texas journalists April 8.
Jones, founder of Public Religion Research Institute, was the opening keynote speaker for a symposium on telling the story of religion in the Lone Star State held at Southern Methodist University and sponsored by the Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.
“If for example, you were to go down to the statehouse and interview — and I looked for data, I could not find it … — of all the elected officials representing the state in Texas and you were to compare that to the actual breakdown Texas, it would look quite different. I am sure even though I don’t have the data to back that up, but it would be much less white and much less Christian and certainly much less evangelical Christian in its makeup.”
If the Texas Legislature looked like the state’s population, Jones illustrated, it would be:
- 20% unaffiliated (“none”)
- 19% Hispanic Catholic
- 14% white evangelical Protestant
- 11% white Mainline/non-evangelical Protestant
- 11% Hispanic Protestant
- 8% Black Protestant
- 6% white Catholic
As with American politics overall, Texas politicians do not match the religious or ethnic makeup of their constituents, he said.
Texas and the nation are full of religious diversity not seen in legislatures, he continued.
“If in your mind when you thought about what’s a typical religious person in Texas you were thinking a white Christian person, you would be describing only one in three Texans. … In fact, there are far more Christians of color in Texas than there are white Christians in Texas.”
White evangelical Christian “make up only 13% of Americans and only 14% of Texans,” Jones reported. “Usually there are jaws dropping when people hear me say that because they’re so present … and wielding power … disproportional to their actual numbers.”
Also often overlooked in a state like Texas is the influence of Mainline Protestants like Methodists, he added. “The Methodists are almost as big in Texas as the white evangelicals are. They’re 11% of the population versus 14%. And in the country, they are exactly the same proportion of the country as white evangelicals are.”
And then there’s the Catholic Church, which people also underestimate, he said. “White Catholics make up 6% of Texans. Latino Catholics make up 19% of Texans. They are three times as big as. So if you’re thinking about the Catholic Church in Texas, it is three parts Latino and one part white.”
But none of these groups are the largest religious bloc in Texas or the nation, Jones added. “The biggest slice on here … are the unaffiliated in Texas.”
These are the so-called “nones,” who when asked what religious group they identify with reply, “None.”
“They make up nearly three in 10 Americans. They make up two in 10 Texans, so it’s slightly less in Texas, but it still edges out Latino Catholics as the largest single wedge.”
While Donald Trump and his allies are on a mission to stamp out diversity, both the nation and the state of Texas are religiously diverse, Jones noted. He showed a county-by-county map of the U.S. that measures religious diversity.
In Texas, all the major urban areas — Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso — show much darker on the map, indicating great diversity. “The further west, the south you go, the darker the colors get and you can also see the kind of popups for metropolitan areas is where you typically also see more diversity.”
With that as background, Jones turned to data about white Christians and how that is changing. “In early 2000s, if you measured all white Christians in the country, the country was a majority white Christian country, 54% in 2006. … Today that number is 40% at the national level. So we’ve gone from a country that was 56% white Christian to one that is 40% white and Christian today.”
In Texas, 44% of the population was white Christian in 2007, compared to 31% of the population today.
That is true in Texas as well as across the nation due to two merging realities, he explained: A decline in the population of white Christians and a rise in the population of “nones.”
The decline is even more sharp for evangelicals and Mainliners when you realize white Catholics are the only group in Texas holding steady, at 6%, he added.
The religious makeup of Latinos in Texas is a bit more complicated, Jones said, because “there is a lot of turn happening here.”
He noted: “The overall thing is about half of Latinos are Catholic, about a quarter are Protestant, but about one in five are unaffiliated, and that’s a growing piece of the population.”
When these data are applied to politics, the differences grow sharper.
“The Republican number is the one that jumps out here. Only one in 10 Republicans are religiously unaffiliated versus three in 10 independents and 22% of Democrats. So that’s just the kind of partisan religion overlay. So what happens if we work in the religion piece of this? It gets pretty interesting.”
“Democrats basically look like 18-year-old Texans in their religious and racial makeup (and) Republicans look like 70-year-old Texans in terms of their religious and racial makeup,” Jones said. “Now, if I were looking at my crystal ball to the future, I would be worried about this if I were a Republican in Texas.”
Later in his presentation, Jones extrapolated what all these datapoints mean for understanding white Christian nationalism in Texas.
Other PRRI polling shows a solid majority of Texans (58%) want a society with people from all over the world while only 7% want to live in a society made up primarily of those from Western European heritage.
When asked about support for religious pluralism, however, Texans lag behind the nation by 10 points, and only 41% of Texans prefer to live in a culture made up of people from a wide variety of religions.
PRRI has developed a five-question scale for gauging a person’s level of support for white Christian nationalism. In Texas, “there’s slightly more support for every single one of these questions” than in the nation as a whole, Jones noted. “Usually on the level of five to six percentage points over where all Americans are on this.”
PRRI’s vast trove of research data has shown “a very, very strong independent prediction of support for Christian nationalism and support for Donald Trump at the ballot box,” he said. “In fact, if I were writing a statistics textbook and I wanted to say what an example of a strong linear correlation looks like in a scatter plot, this could be it.”
An orientation toward Christian nationalism is a “powerful predictor” of how a person will vote, he said.
This also means Republican voters increasingly appear out of step not only with Democrats but with independents, Jones said. “We hear a lot about polarization in our politics, but the real term you want here is ‘asymmetric polarization.’ That’s the term that political scientists have been using to describe ways in which one political party looks like more of an outlier even compared to independents and the other political party.”
Additional graphs from Robert Jones’ presentation:
Screenshot