Abstract

Since the rise of the “religious right” in the 1980s, a large majority of white evangelicals in the United States has aligned with partisan and ideological conservatism. White evangelicals, which by most estimates comprise approximately one-fifth of the US population, have become overwhelmingly Republican, with approximately eight out of ten reliably voting Republican in presidential elections. Public opinion studies of religion and US politics have found that white evangelicals are much more likely than average to be conservative not only on “traditional morality” issues like abortion and gay rights but also broader issues like economic policy, the role of the state, and immigration (Guth 2019; Melkonian-Hoover and Kellstedt 2019).