The Republican Party’s religion problem, in 2 charts

By Aaron Blake

Religiously unaffiliated Americans are fast becoming a bigger force in American politics, while a not-very-religious senator continues to compete unexpectedly for the Democratic nomination.

 

As The Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote a while back, a Pew study shows those who claim to be religiously “unaffiliated” had increased from 16.1 percent of Americans in 2007 to 22.8 percent today — the fastest-rising group.

And we here on The Fix noted recently that religious unaffiliateds — which includes atheists and agnostics, but also those who might be religious but don’t belong to a specific church — are now actually the biggest religious demographic in the Democratic Party.

(They remain considerably less a force in the GOP, but still have increased from 10 percent to 14 percent since 2007.)

All of this, of course, comes just more than a decade after so-called “values voters” in 2004 were supposed to have tipped the scales in favor of reelecting George W. Bush as president. Since then, social conservatism and religion have remained a driving force in the Republicans Party, in particular, but clearly not like they once did.

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