Nearly all Republicans in the new Congress identify as "Christians," while atheists and agnostics are grossly underrepresented.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
A lot of things changed when Congress met for the first time last week. The Senate majority is now under Republican control, and dozens of new lawmakers were sworn in for the first time. What has remained the same, however, is that self-proclaimed Christians will still be grossly overrepresented in 2025.
It is especially striking that virtually all Republicans identify as Christians. In fact, in the Senate, every single one of them does.
Over in the House, “only” 97.2 percent of them do, since there are also three Jewish Republicans, one “unaffiliated,” and one member who refused to provide that information, according to figures compiled by the Pew Research Center.
Overall, more than two-thirds of GOP lawmakers said they are Protestants, about a quarter listed their faith as Catholic, and nine of them are Mormons.
In comparison, Democrats are a bunch of heathens with a mere three-quarters of them saying that they are Christians.
However, that is a rate that is still well above US adults overall (62 percent).
Not surprisingly, the religious makeup of the Democratic caucus is more diverse. The share of Jewish Democrats is 11 percent (including nearly 20 percent in the Senate), and its ranks also include two Buddhists, four Muslims, four Hindu, three Unitarian Universalists, a Humanist, and two “unaffiliated” lawmakers (meaning that they are atheists, agnostics, or something similar). Sixteen Democrats did not provide an answer.
While most factions of Christians (as well as Jews) are overrepresented compared to Americans in general, the one group that apparently should not bother running for Congress are atheists.
Although “unaffiliateds” make up 28 percent of the adult population, there are just three in total in Congress, i.e., 0.6 percent.
“The religiously unaffiliated are the single largest ‘denomination’ by religious identification, so it’s shocking that we make up less than 1 percent of Congress,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. “It’s to the detriment of secular social policies that our views are not reflected.”
It should be noted that, in this context, Christian does not mean that lawmakers adhere to the teachings of Christ, but rather that this is the faith they proclaim to follow and invoke frequently to score political points.
While the number of Christians in the new Congress is the lowest since the Pew Research Center began compiling these numbers in 2009, the decline is less pronounced than in the population in general. Back then, more than 75 percent of American adults identified as Christian.
Gaylor argues that this rapid change and the overrepresentation of Christians in Congress highlights that the US “desperately need[s] a separation between politics and church.”
Of course, many Republicans want to take things in the other direction (and are actively doing so on the state level).
Just last year, for example, Louisiana became the first state to require the Ten Commandments to be posted in all classrooms (which is, of course, a blatant violation of the Constitution), and Oklahoma wants to purchase 55,000 Bibles to be placed in schools.
Of course, that might have just been a way to put money in the pockets of Donald Trump.
Speaking of the incoming president, he may be the best example of a politician who claims to be a Christian but, if that is the case, is an adherent of a peculiar branch of the faith that requires no knowledge of the Bible, no attendance in church ever, and a disregard of all of Jesus’s teachings.
