IT USED to be a truism of political science that the United States has a well-defined "religious vote"—in the sense that church affiliation is clearly related to political choice—while no such phenomenon exists in comparatively secular Britain. And on the American side, some familiar patterns certainly held up in the presidential election of 2012. Nearly 80% of white evangelical voters preferred the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, over Barack Obama; Mr Romney's fellow Mormons were similarly supportive. Three-quarters of Latino Catholics voted for Mr Obama (a key factor in the president's re-election) while 59% of white Catholics opted for Mr Romney; this left Catholics as a whole evenly divided. What about godless Britain? Theos,a think-tank in London, has just published a report that challenges the secularist trope. Analysing the 2010 general election and all previous ones going back to the 1950s, it observed that self-described Anglicans had almost always been more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, except for a few moments when the whole nation swung left. Practising Anglicans were more likely to vote Tory than nominal ones; so the old jibe about the Church of England being the “Conservative Party at prayer” had some basis in fact, despite the leftish thinking of most bishops on issues like debt and poverty. Meanwhile, self-identifying Catholics were consistently pro-Labour, whether their adherence was active or nominal; non-conformists were marginally more likely than others to vote for Liberal Democrats.

But neither in America or Britain does the evidence support any hard causal link between religious belief and the choices or values that people opt for in other areas of life. The British evidence may tell us more about sociology than politics. Church of England, the default-mode national religion, is a middle-class phenomenon, where it persists. The roots of Catholicism, meanwhile, lie in Irish or east European communities which remember what it was like to be poor. “It’s still not clear whether Britain has a religious constituency which politicians can manipulate—and if there were such a thing, it wouldn’t be desirable,” reckons Simon Barrow from Ekklesia, a liberal-minded religious think-tank. And even in America, religion seems less of an electoral factor than race or ethnicity.

The really interesting question for psephologists and political strategists, is the profile of voters who profess no church affiliation but may still have an interest in the transcendental. As a thoughtful recent commentary in the Atlantic Monthly pointed out, one in five Americans already responds “none” when asked which religion they adhere to, and among voters under 30 the figure rises to a third. But most of these “nones” still believe in God or a universal spirit; nearly 40% call themselves “spiritual”.

In England and Wales, the 2011 census found that 25% of people professed no religion, up from 14.5% in 2001. But belief in the transcendental remains quite strong, and not only among the religiously-defined. An earlier Theos survey found that 30% of Britons believe in God “as a universal life force”, 32% in life after death, 30% in spirits and 25% in angels. Many nominal Christians do not hold these beliefs, while many of the unaffiliated do.

No politician, in either Britain or America, could build a career on appealing to numinous beliefs of the non-aligned. But the burgeoning non-aligned camp does at least suggest a negative point. In Britain or even America a politician who cultivates a particular sectarian constituency may or may not gain votes. But such a tactic will certainly lose votes among the increasing number of people who, despite having at least a vague sense of the spiritual, eschew all such sectarian loyalties.