The party registration of religious leaders

America’s pastors – the men and women a majority of Americans look to for help in finding meaning and purpose in their lives – are even more politically divided than the rest of us, according to a new data set representing the largest compilation of American religious leaders ever assembled.

Like their congregants, religious leaders have sharply divided themselves along political lines. Leaders and congregants of Unitarian and African Methodist Episcopal churches are overwhelmingly Democratic, as are those of Reform and Conservative Jewish synagogues. Those of several Evangelical and Baptist churches are overwhelmingly Republican. If religious denominations were states, almost all of them would be considered “Safely Democratic” or “Safely Republican,” with relatively few swing states.

Yet pastors are even more politically divided than the congregants in their denomination: Leaders of more liberal denominations tend to be even more likely to be registered as Democrats, and those of more conservative denominations even more likely to be registered as Republicans.

“It's a reflection of the ongoing sorting we have in American life,” said Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology, religion and divinity at Duke University. “Why would we think that religion is immune to that?”

These measures of partisanship include only Democrats and Republicans among denominations with at least 50 responses in the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey . The apparent imbalance between General Baptists and Pentecostal pastors and the public may be because the researchers’ pastors data may be missing a large group of African-American Baptist and Pentecostal pastors.

The researchers, Eitan Hersh, formerly a political scientist at Yale, and Gabrielle Malina, a graduate student at Harvard, identified about 180,000 clergy and were able to match about 130,000 to their voter registration records. The data is not wholly representative of religious leaders in the United States – it is restricted to mostly relatively large Christian and Jewish denominations – but they estimate it covers at least two-thirds of religious congregations in the country. Other groups did not have reliable centralized lists, or kept them private.

It provides a sweeping view of the leadership of the country’s largest religious denominations, their political affiliations and their demographic composition.

Which Way Does the Influence Go?

The data brings fresh evidence to questions that have long been of interest to researchers. Does a religious leader who is significantly more liberal or conservative than his congregation bring their views more in line with his? Or are churches more like markets, where congregants attend a place of worship that best reflects their worldview? The data suggests both can be true: Clergy influence the views of their congregants, but they also represent the communities where they serve.

“They’re like members of Congress,” Mr. Hersh said. “They have constituents, but they’re also expected to lead.”

Historically, researchers have found that churchgoers do not want to hear political messages from the pulpit. “Religious people do not always adopt the political cues given to them in church,” said Gregory Smith, a researcher at the Pew Research Center who specializes in religion. “That's just not how it works.”

Instead, religiosity – how often someone attends church, rather than which church a member is a part of – has been a better measure of party affiliation than denomination. (Frequent churchgoers tend to be Republicans.) But the data on pastors suggests denomination may matter more than previously thought.

Consider Methodists and Episcopalians, two Christian denominations whose congregants have relatively similar political compositions, with 43 percent and 55 percent identifying as Democrats, respectively, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. But their pastors’ politics are quite different. While Methodist pastors are just as split as their congregants, Episcopalian pastors are strongly Democratic, roughly equivalent to Hawaii or Washington, D.C., in terms of partisanship.

This difference extends to the political views of members of the two churches. Episcopalians were much more likely than Methodists to express support for issues like gay marriage, immigration and abortion rights. Across denominations, the researchers found that the political affiliation of a congregation’s leader was a stronger predictor of the congregation’s policy views than the political affiliation of the congregation as a whole.

But there’s also evidence that religious leaders’ politics can simply reflect those of their congregants. Surprisingly, this pattern is particularly strong with Roman Catholics, even though the Catholic Church is a highly centralized organization where individual parishes do not choose their leader.

↑ Pct. Democratic among Catholic clergy

As a group, Catholics and their pastors are a swing state, nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Yet this masks a wide regional variance: Catholics in states like Kansas, South Dakota and Oklahoma are more Republican, while those in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maryland are more Democratic.

The researchers found that Catholic priests’ political affiliations varied just as much, with a nearly linear relationship between the partisanship of priests and congregants across states. That is, congregations that tended to be strongly Republican were, on average, more likely to have Republican-registered priests, and more liberal parishes were more likely to get priests registered as Democrats.

“While, logically, there are other explanations for the match between Catholic priests and their parishioners, the most compelling is that the Catholic hierarchy seeks to place their priests in politically congenial places,” said David Campbell, a co-author of “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” in an email.

Gender and Age Breakdown

Because the researchers matched pastors to their voter registrations, they compiled much more than a list of pastors and their political party registration. In many states, those records include the age, gender and address of the pastors. By compiling these estimates, Mr. Hersh and Ms. Malina effectively created a census of sorts of the nation’s religious leaders.

Pct. women by denomination

The researchers’ data describes a religious leadership that is overwhelmingly male. In all, about 85 percent of the pastors the researchers matched were men, and most of the women were concentrated in a handful of denominations. (There may be a small number of mistakes or misreported genders in voter registrations, which accounts for some of the small numbers for denominations that do not officially allow women to become church leaders.)

The Unitarian Church was the only denomination in which women represented the majority of pastors, and they represented a third or more in only a handful of other denominations, including Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ (U.C.C.), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (E.L.C.A.) and the Presbyterian Church. These groups are all overwhelmingly Democratic; in 2010, the E.L.C.A. became the largest Protestant Church in the United States to allow gay ministers to serve as clergy.

These ratios may not be unexpected, but they represent a sharp contrast to what researchers know about who’s attending services. In the United States and across the world, surveys have found that women – especially Christians – are much more likely to pray, attend services and say religion is important to them.

Religious leaders’ ages

The data also depicts an aging clergy. The median age of all pastors is 57, and one in four were 65 or older. Only about one in eight pastors were 40 or younger.

This reality is most pressing for Catholics. No denomination’s religious leaders are older; the median age of the more than 16,000 priests identified by the researchers was 62. Catholics have long identified an aging priesthood as a challenge.

Where Pastors Live

In most states, party registration information includes voters’ addresses along with their ages and genders. By matching these addresses to the census information associated with their neighborhood, we can compare denominations. While these estimates do not describe the pastors themselves – a pastor could be poor and live in a rich neighborhood, or be nonwhite in an overwhelmingly white one – they provide a useful basis for comparing denominations, particularly because most pastors live close to the congregations they serve.